Over 40 past and current players participated in Football Australia (FA) Coaching Courses to earn their coaching badges over in Sydney earlier this month.
Through the PFA’s partnership with FA, centralised and condensed coaching accreditation courses are hosted for PFA members each year, providing professional players with the opportunity to receive their badges – either during or after their career has come to an end.
After a successful event last year in Melbourne, the 2026 iteration was held at Christie Park in Sydney’s northwest, with players from across many generations of the game coming together to take part in one or both of the available B and C License courses.
Socceroos Trent Sainsbury, Josh Risdon, Chris Ikonomidis, Adrian Leijer, Terry Antonis and Mitch Langerak were among the participants, along with PFA Chair and former National Soccer League player Francis Awaritefe, current Matilda and reigning Julie Dolan medallist Isabel Gomez, fellow capped Matilda Sarah Hunter and New Zealand full-back Storm Roux.
“It’s different obviously learning the coaching side of things and how you explain [a coaching exercise],” Risdon said.
“We’re all obviously professional players so we know how to do it but it’s a different story to explain it [to younger players] so we’ve had a good mix of in the classroom and out on the field so that balance has been good as well.”
Hunter added: “It’s been really good. We’re all players so we have a lot of knowledge about football but our knowledge on how to actually teach it is probably a bit limited.
“It’s been really good for us to be able to strip it back and learn the skills of how to teach what we already know so I think that’s been a really good thing that they’ve focused on for us.”
The C License was held first from June 10-12, before the B License took place the following week over five days between June 15-19.
Players were put through a mixture of theory and practical activities throughout the courses, transferring their knowledge gained from the classroom to the pitch where the players would design and then conduct sessions with the participants in the course.
“It’s really exciting to see a mix of ex and current pros and all of the knowledge that they have,” Football Australia Coach Educator and Developer, Chris Adams said.
“And it’s really exciting for us as to how they can start to actually give that back to future players which is for us super important.
“There’s been a real mixture of the theory sessions, where we start to cover what the session should actually look like, what the things they need to plan as a coach, how they plan a session and strip it right back because players have so much knowledge and it’s now how we help them to pass that knowledge onto players.
“We’re certainly not trying to tell them what to teach, we’re actually trying to guide them into how to teach that.
“Then we’ve gone from how we can take that from the paper and the classroom and onto the turf. They’ve had a go at actually starting to coach the players but the focus for us is how they coach the individual player and some of the techniques of the game which they’ve got a huge amount of knowledge.
“If they can pass just a little bit of that onto the some of the future players then that will ultimately going to help us in Australia.”
