Female FC Shakhtar footballers participate in special training

Female FC Shakhtar footballers participate in special training

For the second time, female FC Shakhtar players took part in a joint training session with girls with disabilities as part of the Special Olympics project.

The event took place in Kharkiv where Shakhtar had founded a girls team in partnership with the United Nations Population Fund in Ukraine (UNFPA Ukraine) back in 2018. The team consists of 15 girls who dream of becoming professional football players. The FC Shakhtar girls team were helping the children with special needs – the girls with Down syndrome and autism – to perform football drills and ball exercises.

Serhii Lytvynov, the father of an FC Shakhtar footballer said: “I talked to my daughter after the first training session – she really liked it. She already understands that at such a big club like Shakhtar, part of the players’ work is CSR-related activity. This cannot but please me.”

Joint training sessions are important for both parties, therefore they are conducted on a regular basis. With each meeting, the children get to know each other better and better, and now they notice that they have many common interests and hobbies.

Olena Shmorhun, the mother of a Special Olympics footballer feels: “The fact that ordinary children exercise with our kids is valuable and unique for us. For a mother this is enough to make her cry. When our children get out of the sandbox and move on through life, their peers pay little attention to them, so they lose interest in things at some point. But here they are held by the hand and shown how and what to do, plus it’s probably even easier for them to repeat after children than after a coach. This gives them both a developmental and emotional boost. I want to say to both mothers and the girls themselves many thanks for the attention paid to our children. Just simply holding hands and smiling gives them a lot.”

The training sessions for girls with mental disabilities are held by the Shakhtar Social Foundation jointly with the United Nations Population Fund and the Special Olymipcs Ukraine in four cities of Ukraine – Kyiv, Mariupol, Kharkiv and Ivano-Frankivsk. Four Come On, Let’s Play coaches and eight volunteers work with the girls based on the adapted training method developed specifically for Disability Football.