On Thursday (3 February 2022) there was an electric, infectious buzz around Hunslet Carr Primary School due to the imminent arrival of Leeds United’s captain, Liam Cooper.
All classes were prepared for the amazing experience having had lessons about Liam Cooper where they watched clips of him playing, clips of the team celebrating their promotion to the Premier League and let’s not forget how they learnt the Leeds United anthem, ‘Marching on Together’.
Liam’s visit was organised by his LC6, Liam Cooper Academy. We were offered the chance for Liam to not only visit our children, but for his coaches to deliver sessions for our children. To say we were over the moon with this is an understatement. We knew we had to seize this chance to give our children the life-long memory of meeting Liam and hearing about his journey.
All children were challenged to think carefully about what they’d like to find out about Liam Cooper. Teachers explained that although finding out what he has for breakfast would be interesting, we wanted children to think about the skills, resilience, ambition and perseverance it took Liam to become not only a professional footballer, but also the captain of a football team.
Our goal was for our children to meet someone who proves our ethos – ‘Impossible is Nothing’.
Cooper certainly did that with the most inspiring and motivational assemblies that will last in our children’s memories. When Liam was asked, “What advice can you give us to motivate us to achieve our dreams like you have?” he happily told our children:
“I always had a dream, from probably your age and for as long as I can remember to play football. It took a lot of sacrifice, perseverance and I managed to do it. I gave my dream everything I had. It took a lot of practice and taking advice. I always set new goals because you’ll be surprised about how focused you are and how much more you concentrate.”
The inspirational visit will also be remembered for the passionate and heartfelt way the children sang Marching on Together. Our video showing Year 1 and 2 singing along with Liam reached over 100,000 views on Twitter and gained interest from a range of media outlets who congratulated us on such a special video and reported the visit on their various platforms.
https://twitter.com/hcpsleeds/status/1489321437814996992
It was a whirlwind experience for the children and the community. Having an inspirational visit from Liam was like winning our own Premier League and has made us more determined to give our children the belief that ‘Impossible is Nothing’.
This post was written by Joanna Roberts and Martin Lumb
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