Former goalkeeper helps children read with the Excelsior Reading Club

Former goalkeeper helps children read with the Excelsior Reading Club

Maarten de Fockert was the goalkeeper of Excelsior Rotterdam last season. Last summer he quit professional football and now, besides his study and his podcast, he focuses on social projects. Together with the Excelsior Foundation, he started the Excelsior Reading Club, with which they want to help children to learn to read well.

On Wednesday 6 October the Excelsior Foundation not only presented the first picture book about mascot Woutje Stein, that day was also the start of a new project: the Excelsior Reading Club. From that moment on Maarten de Fockert started working weekly with ten children of primary school De Bavokring to help them with reading.

“I am here one hour a week. We all read a certain book together. Everyone reads a bit and we talk about it. I try to help them look at texts differently, to pay attention to difficult words, and how they can read something faster or easier. […] There are children in the group who can read easily, but others find it more difficult. It is nice to see that the latter group is making progress in this. You can see that it is important to create a safe atmosphere. That way you see that they pick up reading and really get better at it. It is encouraging if you give them compliments. They also learn from children with whom it is easier.”

The idea to start this project came from an episode of the Cor Potcast, which Maarten makes every week with Thomas Verhaar and Bart Vriends. “We were talking about social involvement of players. We also talked about foundations of clubs. We came to the conclusion that players are not always interested in it, but that you can improve that by giving them more ownership. What do they find interesting? And build something around that.”

Following this, De Fockert and Verhaar soon sat down with Iris de Iongh, Andrean Loizides and Niels Redert of the Excelsior Foundation. “Then we talked about the fact that I am very much into reading and that I like it. We came up with a concept around that and it eventually became the Excelsior Reading Club.”

As a child, Maarten was a fanatical reader, but as with many children, this disappeared completely during puberty. Only when he was 22 and played football for Go Ahead Eagles in Deventer did he start reading books again: ,,I had the urge to develop myself off the pitch again and started reading more and more. I like gaining new insights, for example by reading about cultures or people I am far removed from. Reading gives you a broader view of the world and often goes deeper than what you see on television.’ […] Being able to read well is important in everything you do. In your adult life, you will benefit from being able to read well, because you will be confronted with texts everywhere. Reading sometimes has the stigma of being boring and dry, but that doesn’t have to be the case. I can understand that when you are fifteen and you have to read a Harry Mulisch book, you think: let me just play Playstation. But reading can be a lot of fun”.

This is what he now tries to convey via the Excelsior Reading Club: “We started with ten children with whom I will work for ten weeks.” The Excelsior Reading Club is a new project and still relatively small: “But we do want to expand. There are people with expertise and Iris de Iongh and I regularly talk about how we can improve things and who we can involve. It would be nice if other clubs would also get involved, so that we can help even more children. I hope that the project can grow and become a real concept.”