On Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th January, the sports hall PalaFacchetti in Treviglio, Italy hosted two successful days dedicated to Improve Your Club, organised by the regional judo committee of the Lombardy region.
Improve Your Club has become an important event for club coaches and is continuously growing with recognition. This project was created in 2013 by the European Judo Union to give club coaches the same opportunities as that given to national coaches who are responsible for elite athletes. In its basic idea “local judo clubs are the starting point for national teams in each federation. Quality basic teaching is essential to enable athletes to eventually reach their full potential.”
The sessions organized by the Lombardy regional committee have once again been various and interesting because, regardless the palmarès of the experts, the themes discussed and the way in which the sessions have been conducted attracted the attention of 160 coaches from Lombardy, but also from other Italian regions like Veneto, Piedmont and Sardinia.
The experts who succeeded each other on the mat were Stefano Frassinelli; Leandro Gulheiro; Kamal Khan Magomedov; Vitaly Makarov; Ivan Nifontov; Sergei Samoilovich and Gregorii Sulemin. Even some members of the Italian National Commission of Coaches, such as Angelo Beltracchini or Riccardo Caldarelli and Maurizio Innella, who are engaged in educating Italian coaches, came to listen and then put into practice.
Moreover, it was fascinating to catch dialogue frames between two experts, discussing the sessions delivered by others and then putting aside to try their personal interpretation.
This aspect deserves to be underlined, because it identifies precious values such as humility and respect, in addition to the enormous passion shared by sixty thousand judokas in Italy and over two million worldwide.
The project focuses on teaching young judoka aged 8 to 12 years old and then, how to continue training and competing in judo. Over the past 7 years these seminars have spread among national judo federations, 110 seminars carried out in total at present with more than 10,200 participants in 20 countries.
Cinzia Cavazzuti gathered in Treviglio the Lombardy judo team to offer this great opportunity again, and it was worth it.