On the 7th September the Prague Raptors made history by debuting our first youth team ever. The U12 players faced the SK Junior
Praha 1960 at home and made us proud with a 9-4 win, with an overall possession close to 70%.
Coached by Jan Veselý, the team consists of boys and girls from Britain, Croatia, France, Slovakia, India, Japanese and Czech nationality. With no chance of pre-season games due to summer holidays, the academy still worked hard to maintain the players fit and prepared for their first game and season ever.
The Academy Raptors had a shaky start, conceding their goal at the fifth minute, but quickly gained rhythm and dominated the rest of the match and gave us two hat-tricks.
Veselý, who first joined the club as a technical director and is thrilled with the result, says the priority for this season is another: “It’s more of a learning experience, especially for myself but we’ll see how far we can go. Obviously we always want to be winning but it’s not the priority this season. It’s more about getting the kids active, having fun and making sure we can start up like three or four more teams next season and just see how it goes. I’ve coached in the czech system before but I’ve never done it myself. This is just like being alone, which is daunting sometimes.”
The next game of the U12 Raptors will be on 18th September against FK Loko Vltavín at 13:00.