Melbourne Victory made its first visit to the Border region as part of its new talent identification program and was blown away by the quality of the players.
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While the primary focus was the A-League outfit's pre-academy centre (eight to 12 years of age), a number of female players also impressed in the older age group.
Melbourne Victory's player development head coach Jamie Monteith was very impressed with the standard of the female players.
"For us, it’s definitely an untapped resource," Monteith said.
"The pleasing thing is we’re here for the long haul - this is a program we envisage being here forever.
"It allows us to go into great detail with the club (Murray United) and surrounding clubs and it’s clear to see they’ve been doing a really good job.
"They’ve survived without us, but the good thing is we’re here now to hopefully lend some support to their (Murray United and AWFA) coaches and give the females the same pathway and same opportunity as the boys."
Related:
Murray United will have 10 girls playing alongside the boys in junior teams - up from seven last year.
Monteith is a big believer in having girls playing and training with boys.
"If you look across the board and you look at the Matildas and W-League, I would say 90 per cent of the girls, if you had a conversation with them when they were younger who did they play with? It would have been the boys," he said.
"We'd love to get to the point where we've got enough girls playing and enough female role models at a really good standard that we could actually have a standalone group.
"The landscape doesn't allow that for the minute, so certainly them playing with the boys, from a physical capacity, allows them to be better on the ball in terms of their strength and also moving the ball on better.
"Naturally the boys are a bit quicker and a bit stronger, but it ups their game and the girls don't look out of sorts which is really pleasing."
Melbourne Victory returns to the region with its pre-academy centre in the second week of Victorian school holidays.
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