PSV Women

PSV Women

‘We want to get girls excited about football’

Visiting a match at De Herdgang and training with the real playersof PSV – that is the fortunate lot of PSV Women’s Club of the Month. Starting in the autumn of 2015, PSV Women picks an amateur girls’ and women’s football club as their Club of the Month every month. The goal is simple: to bring as many girls as possible into contact with football. ‘We want to get young girls excited about football.’

Fastest growing sport
Football has long since ceased being a man’s game. The NOS’s live report of the 2015 World Championship from Canada is ample proof of that. The KNVB’s increased focus on female players and
clubs such as PSV have also contributed to this cause. To continue that growth, PSV Women has set up an initiative to bring girls into contact with the sport even more: The PSV Women’s Club of the Month.

When an amateur club is chosen as Club of the Month, this leads to a variety of fun benefits for the female members. For example, all female players are invited to visit a PSV Women match and the Club of the Month will get a football clinic on location. During that clinic, the female club members are all invited and they even get to bring their girlfriends along. National team member Kika van Es came up with the concept of the Club of the Month together with her PSV teammate Nadia Coolen and she is also present for the clinics. ‘We were asked to come up
with a plan to get more girls interested in playing football,’ Van Es explains. She did not need long to consider before accepting. ‘For a social standpoint, we want to share our knowledge and experience with clubs in Eindhoven and the surrounding area. We all started out by playing for amateur clubs in our own towns and we want to get young girls excited about playing football and possibly even joining a club.’

Young audience
Van Es is explicitly talking about young girls. ‘That is our main target audience,’ she clarifies. ‘Girls who are just starting to go to elementary school often take their friends, who are not members of a club yet, to the clinics. We want to show these new girls how fun football can be, to get them to join a club as well. The ultimate goal is bolster the youngest categories of girls’ football in Eindhoven and the surrounding area as well.’

The approach has proven to be successful, as became evident in October during the first edition held at the satellite club FC Eindhoven AV. ‘Over a hundred girls
signed up for the clinic we hosted there,’ Coolen says. ‘Many of them had never played for a club before. By offering them a fun and educational afternoon, they became truly interested in football and wanted to sign up, just like their girlfriends. Eindhoven AV instantly got some new members,’ Coolen explains.
Both women can tell that the Club of the Month concept is gaining ground. Coolen: ‘You can tell during our games, for example. Many of the girls in the Club of the Month come to watch us play at De Herdgang. The youngest girls walk along with the player line-up and they get to shoot penalties during half-time. Afterwards, we naturally sign a lot of autographs.’

‘What’s more, all clubs want to be Club of the Month,’ Van Es adds. She hints at the next step for the project, which they are currently working on. Particularly in Eindhoven, there are still too many clubs that put girls of various ages together in a team. ‘There is no good division yet,’ Van Es believes. ‘Many girls have to move from the C teams straight to women’s football for adults. We want to change that by getting clubs to cooperate more. One solution is to bring two clubs in the same area together and having them form one team made up of girls of the same age. We are currently in talks with clubs and the municipality. If we pull this off, we can get even more girls to play football,
I am sure of it.’