Ten young men from Jamaica’s Special Olympics football team joined the coaches from the Chelsea FC Foundation, David Monk and Max Fouracre, for a quick super-session at the Digicel Kickstart Clinic last Tuesday.

The two-hour session saw the young men engaging in various drills and receiving tips about teamwork and other key sporting techniques.

“It’s really important for us at the Chelsea Football Club that we try to engage with the wider community and offer some sort of grassroots activation or development,” said Monk, senior international development officer at the Chelsea FC Foundation. “We’ve essentially designed a bespoke session from players with special needs, and what we try to do is develop them in terms of their technical ability and team skills. We also look at making it fun and interactive, and we coach them some of our philosophy points at Chelsea and just helped them to better understand their roles and responsibilities within the team at a very basic level.”

Executive Director of Special Olympics Jamaica, Lorna Bell, commended Digicel for including Special Olympics as part of the Kickstart Clinic, saying: “I want to thank Digicel for always including Special Olympics in their sports training programmes. This kind of inclusion is vital to the development of Special Olympics and it’s good for the younger athletes to start getting this kind of exposure to the sports from early.”

The two-day Digicel Kickstart Clinic started last week Monday and will conclude with three boys being selected to attend the international Kickstart Academy in October.

Members of the Special Olympics football team are taken through drills with Chelsea FC Foundation coach Max Fouracre at the recent Digicel Kickstart Clinic held at the JFF Training Facility at UWI.