2019 Competitions

Mens and Womens Football

• Pre-season – 9^th March – 30^th March
• Winter Season: 6^th April kick off

Womens football – aiming to grow and engage more women in the game, and after community consultation, Southland Football has decided to move womens football to Saturdays. With this change we believe we will make the transition from youth to senior much more fluent, and the biggest benefit of all is that females will have an opportunity to become a more active part of the club. This is critical for the development of the game, working relationships with the clubs and for ensuring the female voice is heard at club level.

Junior Football

• Winter Season: dates will be confirmed on 29^th January after our Junior Committee meeting. At this stage we are aiming to start on 6^th April and finish the season on 17^th August.
• First Kicks will go from 29^th April till 1^st July.

Club & Coach Support 2019

Administrators and Managers Support

Southland football will continue to offer support to the clubs in different areas like:

Admin support: we will run a Comet workshop in February to support administrators to have a better understanding of the system.

To reduce the admin work of volunteers Southland Football is moving to a digital era and will run one-on-one workshops for clubs’ managers and coaches to allow them to enter team sheets online. The date of these workshops will be communicated by the end of January.

Coach Support

In 2018 Southland Football staff supported over 20 junior teams by attending to trainings and working alongside their coaches. In 2019, Southland Football would like to increase the support toward coaches and we are aiming to visit every coach who wants our support at least once during the year.

This information will be ready the first week in February and the clubs will be able to book these session during the year.

Coach Education

Southland Football would like to support the coaches to ensure every coach in Southland can provide positive football experiences to participants regardless their age, level and/or location.

We believe that, if coaches increase their knowledge, skill and confidence, they will provide positive experiences at all levels of the game. For this reason we developed a strategy to provide more opportunities to more coaches by:

• Provide Formal Coach Development opportunities (NZF Coach Education pathway)
  • Intro to Junior Football
  • Junior Level 1 / Date: 29^th March 5:30pm to 8:30pm
  • Junior Level 2 / Dates: 25^th March Part 1 & 1^st April Part 2 (5:30pm to 9pm)
  • Senior Level 1 / Dates: 2^nd March 9am to 5pm

• Provide Informal Coach Development opportunities
  • Coordinate club visits with coach development purposes (Development Officers to attend to a club training and support coaches on the field: observation, conversations, questioning, tips/ideas, relationship building…)

• Provide Non-Formal Coach Development opportunities
  • Facilitate development sessions focused on different topics (as per identified on survey) across the region
  • Establish and implement a mentoring programme with a targeted group of willing coaches

More information will be sent to the clubs and coaches the first week in February.

Southland football is looking forward to continue the development of our top players this season. 

Senior Team

We are happy to confirm that the senior team will be playing the ODT Premiere League and we would like to use this opportunity to congratulate Greig Evans who has been appointed as a head coach.

Southland Football continues to develop capability within Southland and is very proud of having Greig Evans who has an extensive background representing Southland teams in the past. Well done Greig!

Other coaching and management appointments will be publish in the next couple of week as well as the player squad.

Youth Teams

After a successful 2018 season Southland Utd will continue the development of our top youth players by offering an ongoing and stable pathway for them. We are happy to inform that we will have 2 boys teams:

• U14 Team
  • the team will compete in the Otago U15 competition.
  • We would like to congratulate Mark Ford who was appointed a head coach. Mark did a fantastic job coaching the U18 team last year and we trust he will be great to work with this squad.

• U16 Team
  • the team will compete in the Otago Youth competition.
  • We would like to congratulate Stephen Black who was appointed a head coach. Stephen did an amazing job in 2018 and all the Southland community is looking forward to seeing thriving on this role.

• Girls Development – Southland Football through Southland Utd would like to offer the possibility to our top girls to be part of a development programme through the year. A survey will be send to the potential players and we will organize a meeting with parents and Clubs to discuss it.

To align with Football South and New Zealand Football, we change the format of our summer competitions and introduce Summer Futsal during Term 4 and 1. The new format of the game was very well received and participation continue to grow. We had 69 junior teams and 30 senior teams playing Futsal in 2018 term 4.