Justus has spent the past 16 days in camp at the OFC Academy in Auckland where she and 17 other participants from around Oceania have been undertaking the coaching course led by UEFA technical instructor Steve Rutter and OFC head of coach education Didier Chambaron.
She says the course has proven challenging and is a significant step up from the C Licence, in which the participants had to achieve an advanced pass in order to qualify for the B Licence.
“It’s good that we are being faced with this challenge because it is the objective of the course – to get a feel for it, think about it, then improve from where we are to the level the instructors expect us to reach,” she says.
“My participation here will really help with organising training sessions and programmes for our identified players.”
Justus says in all the material covered during the course what has stood out for her personally is identifying that coaching is a step-by-step process.
“Often we jump from one step to the next but bypass the middle steps,” she says.
“It’s like a ladder, to go up it we need to take each step at a time, and in coaching it’s the same. When you talk about a particular topic that you want to coach your team on you have to look at it, categorise it, break it down and decide where you want to start, and then move through each stage from simple to hard.”
She adds that bringing together development officers and technical directors from around the region is an opportunity for them all to share and discuss ideas.
“We have the chance to talk, collaborate and compare and while I think in general we all have a lot of similarities in our knowledge it’s also a learning curve to compare what we know with other participants.”
While taking part in the course will be a huge benefit to Justus in her role as women’s development officer, she says that is not the only area in which she believes she can make a difference.
“Coming here, what I have learnt is just football – not men’s, not women’s,” she says.
“So being here as women’s development officer doesn’t mean that I will go and only give back to women’s football. Whenever I get the opportunity it will be to develop football in general in my country.
“My participation means a lot in terms of the development and performance of our coaches. It means not just running a course and saying, ‘there you go’, but also doing follow up assessments and that’s exactly what we are learning here.”
As well as developing better coaches and players, Justus says one of her goals is to get a women’s league up and running in Solomon Islands.
“Currently, there is no structured competition that links grassroots to youth and then senior competition, and once we get that competition structure in place I believe we will begin to see a difference in our performance on an international level.”

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