Limitless Football. A new Tasmanian football academy and a name within itself. But the braintrust behind this believe that this new academy has no limits.
Former Socceroo Alex Cisak and NPL TAS Assistant Coach for Kingborough Lions, Garry Upton are the two men at the helm of this new endeavour.
NPL player Keenan Douce (Lions) is also a part of the team incorporating his own development program KFD Performance which is a significant boost to LF in it’s own right.
I was invited out on Monday night to check out a training session the three were running at KGV Park.
“Garry and I met up about 10 months ago and we just realised there is a big gap in the market for Tasmanian footballers, boys and girls” Cisak said.
“We just want to make it more professional over here and create real pathways for young players. Living in Tasmania we feel like young players are missing out on professional environment to make them become better players, which in turn lead to better opportunities be it in the Hyundai A-League or abroad”
“I got involved through Jez (NPL TAS Coach at Lions) and he mentioned that Alex was interested in starting Limitless Football” Upton said.
“It’s pretty exciting because Alex is a fresh face for Tassie. Being Tasmanian is good and his experience playing at professional level helps that”.
Polish born, Cisak made the jump from South Hobart FC at 15 years old and signed for 15-16 EPL champions Leicester City. In Cisak was a member of the Foxes that won the 2006โ07 FA Premier Academy League.
With 200+ professional games, Cisak had various spells at English clubs; Accrington Stanley, Oldham Athletic, Portsmouth on loan, Burnley, Leyton Orient and finally 18-19 Hyundai A-League champions Sydney FC.
Perhaps Cisak’s career highlight was being called up for the Socceroos on five seperate occasions for the FIFA World Cup Qualifiers.
Cisak retired in 2019 to return home to Tasmania to be with his family.
Upton is no stranger to Tasmanian football. He played locally for South Hobart FC and Kingborough Lions. Since then he has coached at both clubs and holds a current “C” License.
Upton spoke about how he has has adjusted coming back into the football scene again.
“Last year I really got back into the game and it’s really good for me to have Cisak to learn off and to have contacts as well”.
Limitless have a range of age group training they want to help young footballers develop.
“Our age brackets being with 5-8 year olds where the aim is to get each player to have the maximum amount of touches of the football a session.”
“We then move the focus to 9-12 year olds where we will be fine tuning their skills that they have already developed. We work on their own talents individually and how to we can work that into what a team based environment would consist of”.
“We then push the focus to 13-17 year olds where we aim to push their potential to the limit and challenging them every session with new ideas, and alternate ways to improve their game and take that step to the next level ie training like the professionals do in Europe.”
Douce believes this could be the next step for future development going forward.
“With Limitless and my work with KFD, our main aim is maximising athletes performance. Focusing on football specific strength work and match like conditioning will allow Tasmanian players to step to the next level” Douce said.
“Working in with Limitless will help achieve this at a very high The way i look at things is imagine improving performance without stepping on the field!”
“What we want is to be accessible to all players in Tasmania and can hopefully be a great way to branch into different clubs.”
Cisak added that he feels that are already on the right track. and noted they still have brighter things on the horizon.
“We thought it would be a long struggle but we are a lot more further than what we could have been”.
“We are hoping to get more young budding footballers who want to add onto their skills and join Limitless”.
He finished our chat with a open invite to already established NPL players to come on board.
“If any NPL players who want some training outside of club training, contact us and we will be more than happy to chat and work something out”
Limitless have also partnered with Kingborough Lions in the school holidays for some extra clinics.
For more information on how you can be involved contact Limitless Football on Facebook or for further enquires contact the below list.
Garry Upton – 0409 701 922
Keenan Douce – 0407 688 634 or on Instagram/FB
