The struggle of being a Hong Kong sports coach during the Covid-19 pandemic – ‘it’s not about money, but passion to teach kids’
- Benavides and sons outline dwindling numbers and finances while running their Barcelona Experience Soccer Academy HK
- ‘Covid-19 really hit us big time, as I’m sure it did other businesses, but football and outdoors were hit so hard’
Chilean-Bolivian football and fitness coach Oscar Benavides is considered a seasoned veteran given his near two decades’ experience coaching in Hong Kong – not to mention his several years playing professionally in the city’s top leagues.
But even he, a Uefa A and Spanish football methodology (Madrid-Barcelona) licensed trainer, was badly affected by the extreme struggle the Covid-19 pandemic wrought over the last two years. His prized Barcelona Experience Soccer Academy HK, based in Tung Chung, and its previous iterations are evidence of this.
“We had quite a good amount of kids since we started – around 40 to 50 – then we partnered up with an Australian education company to build the Sparrow Soccer School – up to 220 kids in 2018-19. When Covid-19 started to appear [at the end of] 2019, we thought it would last two or three months,” recalled Benavides, a former Kowloon Tsai, Double Flower, Kwai Tsing and Kwun Tong player.
“But no – it’s lasted until now. Cases rose, the government came out with new rules, and we had to cancel training at different times. Most parents didn’t want to send their kids for precautionary reasons, which was understandable. So from 220 kids, we were left with only 20 to 30 per cent by the mid-year.”
