Ireland native and Middle Georgia College head men’s and women’s soccer coach, Vinny Gill, and three other college coaches have spearheaded two soccer camps the past two weeks that were heavily attended by Bainbridge High School Bearcat and Lady Cats players and many other younger kids.

Gill, who has conducted summer soccer camps in Bainbridge on a regular basis through the years, headed up a camp at Thomas University last week and is heading up one at the Bainbridge-Decatur County YMCA this week.

Coaching with him at the Thomas University camp were Adam Pearce, Spring Hill College men’s and women’s head soccer coach; Bart Sasnett, head men’s soccer coach and assistant woman’s soccer coach at Darton College in Albany; Heriberto Aguilar, Warner University assistant men’s and women’s soccer coach, and Ricky Zambrano, men’s and women’s head soccer coach at Thomas University.

Lady Cats players attending the Thomasville camp included rising freshmen Erin Zirkus, Ansley Phillips, Meredith Conder and Savannah Chason, and rising sophomores Savannah Cook, Ashten Oldaker, MacKenzie Conder, Michael Jones, Anye’ Miller, Anissa Jackson and Charlton Reynolds.

Also attending from Bainbridge were rising juniors Lindsay Unfricht, Allison Kelly and Bailey Wells, and rising seniors Leanna Flowers, Whitney Thomas, Ashley Edwards and Aubrie Provence.

Bearcats participating in the Thomasville camp were Louis Mejia, Alex Bejarano, Carlos Beccerra, Jonathan Warren, Kyle Harris, Daniel Provence, Donte Wilson, Hal Clement, Hayden Guy, Avery Chestnutt, David Golladay, Zach Denham, Clayton Terry, Chris Jackson and Tray Torres.

This week, Gill and coach Jamie Ard conducted a camp for under-10-year-old soccer players at the YMCA soccer field.

In all of his camps, Gill strives to achieve a very special goal.

”My goal is to strengthen teams and develop a sense of tactical understanding of both the individual and team, along with the opportunity of being trained and evaluated by current college coaches,” Gill said. “In Thomasville, each team was assigned a college coach, who they trained with three hours a day for four days.”

Campers also had their film broken down, attended a recruiting similar and had individual evaluations of their team play.

During the seminar, the campers had an opportunity to talk with college coaches about recruiting in a classroom setting.

In the younger kid sessions this week at the YMCA field, campers learned dribbling, ball control and other fundamentals of the game.

“When we get campers at a very young age, we can instill in them the love of the game of soccer,” Gill said.