ETB Schwarz-Weiß Essen had a bad season. At least as far as the Oberliga club’s young talent is concerned.
While the ETB Schwarz-Weiß Essen first team under head coach Damian Apfeld achieved a strong 5th place in the table in the Oberliga Niederrhein, the 2022/2023 season was one to forget for the U19 and U17 Niederrheinliga team of the fifth division club.
U19 coach Björn Matzel will take over the U17 team after its relegation from the Niederrheinliga. He will be assisted by Marcel Schäfer. The new U19 coach will be Mirko Strassdin, who will be assisted by Patrick Baudry.
Cedric Spielhoff, previously U17 coach, is turning his back on the Uhlenkrug and will return to Rot-Weiss Essen. At RWE, Spielhoff will become co-coach of Michael Delura’s U17 team.
“I am looking forward to meeting many familiar and new faces and personalities, but especially, of course, to the sporting challenge in the competitive area of the club, where I was previously allowed to take my first steps as a coach in an NLZ. Now I’ve come full circle and I want to do everything in my power to repay the trust placed in me with a lot of hard work and passion for the club,” said Spielhoff, explaining his return to Hafenstraße.
The fact is that we are currently in a difficult situation with our U19 and U17 performance teams and of course we have to take responsibility for this because mistakes were also made in the squad composition.
Jürgen Lucas
With both teams, ETB finished the Niederrheinliga season in seventh place out of 16 teams and still have to go down. Those are the rules of the Lower Rhine Football Association.
Jürgen Lucas, sporting director of ETB’s youth team, sums up the disappointing 2022/2023 season: “The fact is that we are currently in a difficult situation with our U19 and U17 performance teams and of course we have to take responsibility for this because mistakes were also made in the squad composition. In addition, there are infrastructural problems that we can’t influence at the moment, but which we hope can be remedied soon. If you fall down, you have to get up again. The positive developments in the U13s and U15s give us hope that ETB will soon achieve a turnaround. “