Welcome back!  We hope your Easter break has you fully recharged for this Summer term. This is the first Regent's Park FC newsletter after the third lockdown. Our intention is to keep you up to date about all our plans and activities for the coming term both on and off the pitch. A number of parents have asked us to start doing these newletters again. So here we go!

We’ve already had three Saturday sessions and just to confirm that these sessions were free to all our existing members to help refund the sessions missed in the Winter.

The Regent’s team will do its best to get a newsletter out every term to keep all our children, team-members, Parents, Supporters and sponsors up to date. If you would like to contribute an article or have an idea for an article, please let us know!

TOURNAMENTS

As you will have read in the papers the Gothia Youth Cup has been cancelled and we are all disappointed but not surprised. Our aim is to take five to six of our squads to play in the 2022 Gothia World Cup of youth Football. We almost won the Cup back in 2019 and our aim is to get our teams challenging again to win the Gothia. 

The Gothia Cup is the biggest youth football tournament in the world held annually in Gothenburg, Sweden. Each year around 1600 teams from around 80 nations take part and they play 4500 games on 110 fields.  This is an amazing opportunity for our players to participate in a truly amazing tournament, with top class talent and an opening ceremony in front of 40,000 spectators in the Ullevi stadium.  http://www.gothiacup.se/eng/

NEW TEAM PLAYERS

The Summer term is always our busiest term as we run trials for our existing teams from U7 to U18’s. Our girl’s teams are growing and we are running trials now for the u7 to U16 age groups. 

PLAYER ACHIEVEMENTS 

We want to say a big congratulations to Louis, who has been with the club for 5 years and who has now signed with Arsenal FC in the Academy. Louis and his team mates almost won the Gothia Cup back in 2019! We cannot wait to see how he develops…

COACHING NEWS

All our coaches are back for the new term and we are now planning for the 2020/21 season. We, like many football clubs can at times struggle to find talented and reliable coaching staff but we are delighted with our amazing group.

Over the Covid lockdowns we had some amazing zoom calls from the amazing Joe Aribo, Glasgow Rangers and our fitness sessions by a few of our teams. We are delighted that some of our older players are playing in our Mens team, in particular our Harrow U18 players are involved in playing in the Market Road Men’s league.

GOTHIA CUP 2022 AND 2021 PROJECT 

For those new to the club, one of our targets since we set up in 2005/6 was to get our teams competing in the Gothia Youth World Cup. 2022, will be the tenth year that we have taken teams to Gothia,  which is amazing. Again though, we have taken feedback from many players and they love it but they would love to win it. The challenge though is we play against the European age bands which see us compete against older players every year. 

So we have devised a new Gothia Project with the aim to get us into the finals in 2021/22 and we will work with one of the UK’s outstanding youth coaches in Colin Reid who has coached with West Ham, Charlton and has developed over 50 Premership players. Colin is an incredible coach and we are aiming with his help to take six squads together for the 2022 Gothia Cup.

The coaches will be running trials over the coming weeks to look at these possible squads and we will be sitting down with many parents to discuss next steps.

Here is the link to give you a taster of what to expect http://www.gothiacup.se/eng/

GIRLS SQUADS & WOMEN’S TEAM

Back in 2016, we had a couple of girls in our teams. Today, we have over 60 girls and a Womens. The club is now looking to create more girls squads and we need your help in putting these together. Email or contact John for info on this. We ideally are looking to create more players for our Under 7 to Under 16 girls teams.

Our Women’s team are playing in the Greater London Womens League 2 and we are doing well. Last week, we beat Actonian Womens team 2 – 0 and we had some of the U15 girls team watching us play. If, you know or have any girls or Women wanting to play, then please get in contact.  

IMPROVING OUR COMMUNICATION AS A CLUB

Thanks to many of our Regents family letting me know about the value of our coaching team and your feedback is vital. With your help and suggestions we’ve improved parent view on our Website Regents Park FC. This, we believe will dramatically improve the club’s communications with parents and children.

Our App has been developed by Players Elite, who  supply many Premiership and Championship Academy communications and development systems for players. Lots of work is going on behind the scenes with the development of our own Curriculum and a tracker for this.

As a club we think it is vital that we stay up to date with current affairs. 

LIKE us on FACEBOOK : www.facebook.com/TheRegents

FOLLOW us on INSTAGRAM : @Regentsparkfc

TERM DATES FOR YOUR DIARIES

Tuesday Acland Burghley

Tuesday 20th April - Tuesday 20th July

Wednesday Acland Burghley 

21st April - 21st July

Regent's Park Saturday

24th April - 24th July

Enjoy the season! Let’s make it a cracker!

John McCulloch

Regents Park FC Chairman