Relatório de estágio profissionalizante realizado na equipa de Futebol de Juniores C (Sub-15) masculino do Vitória Sport Clube SAD, época desportiva 2025/26

Abstract

This report documents the internship I completed with the male Under-15 football team of Vitória Sport Clube SAD during the 2025/2026 season, in the context of the master's degree in High-Performance Sports Coaching at the Faculty of Sport of the University of Porto. My role combined two functions: assistant coach and match analyst, with a particular focus on bridging the Analysis Department (DAO) with the technical team's day-to-day decision-making. Alongside this, I held responsibilities as assistant coach with the Under-12 squad - a circumstance that shaped much of how I managed time, energy, and professional priorities throughout the season. The central question throughout this report is: what is the real scope of a coach's radius of action in a high-performance context? - it was not chosen because it had an obvious answer. It was chosen precisely because it didn't. The internship became the process through which I built a progressively more informed response to that question. Competitively, the team concluded the first phase of the National Under-15 Championship with 36 points, qualifying for the Championship phase, where we recorded great performances. From a learning standpoint, the season confirmed that a coach's radius of action is broader than any training session reveals, and narrower than any organizational chart guarantees. What determines its actual reach is the coach's capacity to become a credible interlocutor across departments and to integrate perspectives that sometimes contradict their own immediate reading of the game. I learned to adapt my communication to a group that was heterogeneous, to reduce analytically complex content to what was pedagogically usable, and to accept the distance between what analysis produces and what young players can receive. The limitations were there too: squad instability across the season, the cognitive cost of managing two distinct contexts simultaneously, and the difficulty of sustaining critical self-reflection during a run of good results. What I take from this experience is not a set of closed conclusions, but a better set of questions.