By Neto Baptiste
Coach of the winning Empire Tendsetters female football team Karen Warner believes mandating that clubs taking part in the domestic football competition should have a grassroots programme targeting females, could be the catalyst needed to grow interest amongst younger players.
Following her team’s triumph in the Calvin Ayre Foundation Women’s Premier League which climaxed over the weekend Warner, who is also coach of the Antigua and Barbuda senior national women’s team, said a majority of the young players who compete at the schools level, fail to make the transition into the domestic programme for various reasons.
“We know we don’t have the number of players in the country. Our player-pool is not that big even when we look at the national programme; you have a tryout and you can count the amount of females that are going to show up. So what we need to do is, as I said more grassroots. If we tell them [clubs] about a grassroots then that can start [something] but having a team is not going to be that easy because of the fact that we don’t have that big number of females in Antigua playing like that,” she said.
Trendsetters were crowned champions of the Women’s Premier League on Sunday, following a scoreless draw with rivals Wadadli United on Sunday. The draw carried Trendsetters to 18 points from their quota of eight matches, one more than United who moved to 17 points after the same number of showings in the round-robin formatted league.
Warner, though thankful for her team’s triumph, expressed concerns over the competitiveness of the tournament, suggesting a return to a recently-used format that saw the better players in the senior national team set-up being seeded across teams competing in the league.
“I think that was one of the things that worked for us because when we had that format we had eight teams. Let’s look at the national programme because we played like four tournaments with the under-15s so far, so we generated at least 11 players over the past three years per year so if we invited these players now to join a team, then we can expand. I think we can reach 12 [teams] if we invite these younger players but a lot of teams [are] not interested in the younger players. They are more for the experience. They’re more for the older and to me I think the only process that can get us where we want to go right now is the youth,” the coach said.
Former coach of the Antigua and Barbuda women’s team and former US women’s coach, Lisa Cole back in 2020, implemented a seeding format for senior national players competing in the domestic league. This format saw the top players spread evenly across the competing teams which allowed for the league to be more competitive and balanced.
Cole however, tendered her resignation on 2021 before taking up a coaching role in Fiji.
