Summary: Joining for his fifth extensive episode on the show is grassroots and youth development superstar Tom Byer direct from Beijing where he has been busy linking up with Chinese Super League club Beijing Guoan FC in a new initiative to deliver a new technology driven message to a part of the world where the challenges to increase participation have never been more daunting and the potential this staggering. This is, after all, a work in progress and as the Head Technical Advisor for the Chinese School Football Program Office and its Official CFA Grassroots Ambassador, on goes the remarkable story of an American player once shut out of the US system who went abroad to the Far East to become perhaps the top US youth coach in the world, reaching a whole generation of Japanese players via television and now expanding his influence all across Asia and into a part of the world where sport was once thought counter-intuitive to education. As one of the most influential youth coaches in the industry today, not only did the Chinese FA reach out for his unique services, but also he has been profiled numerous times by FIFA Futbol Mundial and continues to redefine what will become the best practices and truly most accepted ideas in the global grassroots marketplace as he continues to merge technical training with technology in ways never imagined. In this episode you will discover a few new wrinkles in the Tomsan story including new paradigms for development, more focus on technology and how he has begun to reshape and even reconsider how and when young players should be exposed to ball manipulation skills, the building blocks of technical development for players and of all shapes and sizes and all walks of life. Over the past 20 years, Tom Byer has been conducting events in more than 2,000 locations with a total of 500,000 children participating. Adidas honored him with its Golden Boot award, which he accepted after the 1998 World Cup draw in France for his many contributions to grassroots and youth development in Asia and he remains as the only such coach to have received this prestigious award.
