The Player Journey

Saddleworth 3Ds is an FA Charter Standard football club run by qualified and experienced volunteers. We offer quality coaching for players of all abilities. The purpose of The Player Journey is to give parents a clear understanding of how players can develop at the club’s junior academy/Soccer School, join teams and grow with the club from reception to seniors.

4-7s Football Academy Soccer School

Based at Saddleworth School on Mondays, the Academy Soccer School is the hub of the whole club. With players of all abilities overseen by experienced coach Mark Aston. This coaching is for many children their first experience with football and an excellent starting point for their journey.

8-11s Football Academy Soccer School

Also Based at Saddleworth School on Mondays and overseen by experienced coach Mark Aston. Many of our children in this academy age group are already playing for teams (either our own 3Ds teams or other teams) and are looking to improve their game. Other are not yet playing for a team and are instead building essential skills to enable them to join one.

Forming Teams

There are multiple leagues and divisions to ensure every player, whatever their ability, is challenged and games are evenly balanced. This means players will have as much time on the ball as possible and be playing against players of a similar ability to themselves. Saddleworth 3Ds is a completely volunteer-run club, every team needs a volunteer coach and someone to help with the team’s admin. Volunteers most often come from parents in that age group and the sooner they decide to help out the longer they can work alongside our FA qualified coaches with years of experience to develop their coaching skills. It is always the club’s intention to create enough teams for every child to join a team at under 7s but this is reliant on there being enough volunteers.

Joining an existing team

The majority of teams after under 7s are already established, have existing squads and are already playing in leagues. For primary school age children the 8-11s Football Academy soccer school is where team managers might look to find new players when spaces arise, either when a player leaves or the team move from 5v5 to 7v7 and so on as they get older. It is also worth contacting the team manager direct for your age group to see if there are any spaces available or if they are currently looking for players. This is also the case for players of secondary school age and open age players looking to join the club.

The open age Journey

We encourage all our players when their junior journey ends to continue with the club into senior football, all of our open age squads have at some stage been added to from the juniors. We understand that things like college and university may mean some players are unable to continue, but the door is forever open to players returning and we hope to see many of our juniors playing in the seniors at some stage when they are older.

The Vets

To complete the journey we offer the opportunity to carry on playing indefinitely. We know It can be difficult when you stop playing and even though you might not have the pace or the fitness of your youth stopping playing might feel like that last thing you want to do. Saddleworth 3Ds have both male and female vets teams and we encourage anyone wanting to continue playing after the age of 35 to come and join.