get into volunteering

Football Futures

Devon's next generation

The FA Football Futures Leadership and Volunteering programme aims to recruit, retain, develop, reward and provide a progressive pathway for young leaders in order to develop a skilled football workforce. The young leader is placed at the heart of the FA Football Futures programme choosing what, where and how they wish to volunteer in football across six football themes.

Who is the programme for?

Any young person aged between 14 and 25 who have an interest in getting involved in football leadership and volunteering. They can be from a range of environments: a school, college or university, attached to an FA Charter Standard Club, or even within the County FA, supporting large events in the community. Young Leaders can choose from a range of activities, from assisting with the coaching or running of a team, acting as the press officer for a junior league, developing a film to promote a new activity for young people to play to refereeing or being a Respect Ambassador.

What are the benefits?

Through the programme a young leader will gain valuable experience and develop skills that can be applied outside the sport. Once registered on the programme, young leaders will be offered support to gain football related qualifications such as the Level 1 in Coaching Football or refereeing qualifications. All interested young leaders will be enrolled at the County Football Futures Camp, with introductory workshops based around the key themes.

Young Leaders can track their volunteer hours and gain FA certification for anything between 10-200 hours.
Any young leader who reaches more than 200 hours can be nominated for additional rewards.
All young leaders who enrol at County Camp will receive FREE kit!

what are the FA football futures themes?

Students can get involved in as many of the following themes as they wish;

areas of a football future...

Opportunities could include coaching or working with a team in a school, college, university, FA Charter Standard Club or The FA Club Links Programme. This can be as simple as assisting an experienced coach, to running one-off coaching sessions and/or working with a team on a regular basis in training an also on a matchday.

Young leaders can get involved in refereeing small-sided games, intra-school football or chose to focus on 11-aside football and become part of the National Referee Development Programme.

Assisting in the coordination and organisation of an event. It can be any kind of event from intra-school football to regional/national tournaments.

Assisting in the running of an FA Charter Standard Club or League or an intra-school league. This can involve supporting the fixtures secretary, taking minutes at committee meetings or writing development plans to increase participation.

Many young leaders will probably have already been involved in promoting the game through volunteering activities and not even realised! This could be creating a Facebook group for your club, team or league, running a website, writing match reports, or photography. The promoting the Game strand of the FA Football Futures Programme is designed to cater for these activities.

Ensuring that all players have signed up to the Respect Codes of Conduct, putting up Respect barriers and ensuring that teams all understand the competition rules and regulations. This works to ensure that the club, league, school, college or university's Respect practices are adhered to and is rewarded through the programme.

Nothing! The only cost is your voluntary time, which you may already be giving but not receiving recognition and reward for.

To get involved with Football Futures please contact our Football Development Officer, Howard Shaddick, on 01626 325913 or email howard.shaddick@devonfa.com or simply fill in our quick survey here

Get In Touch

Football development officer

Howard Shaddick

By Phone: 01626 325913
(9am - 5pm Monday - Friday)

By Email: howard.shaddick@devonfa.com