McCarthy spent 12 years as the Irish National Team’s High Performance Manager and has worked with world-famous clubs including Real Madrid and hoped to teach the young participants some of the drills and skills professional players use to improve their game. 

"What we are doing is bringing a lot of good possession and attacking skill games, technical games from around the world and just seeing how the boys and girls adapt to them,” he said.

"They are all very short games, three minutes long, and then we repeat them and see if the boys and girls learn from the game so our approach would be we like to give them a little taste of the game, give them basic instructions, see how much they can learn from themselves and then if we need to help them, we help them.”

The camp ran for four days and was filled with plenty of training and activities for the kids in attendance. 

McCarthy said he was impressed by the talent and dedication he had seen.

"We came here not knowing what the overall standard might be but we have been very pleased with the standard from both the young players up to the older players,” he said.

"What we really enjoy is, leaving Sydney for a start is one thing, seeing what football is like in more rural areas as we know there is a great appetite for football in rural areas and sometimes the real gems and diamonds are actually sitting far away from the big cities. We have been really enthused by the technical standard. We feel the standard is so good here that the boys and girls must be doing practice at home.”

It is the first year the Academy has run the camp at SportUNE and Chief Executive Officer James Cooper said the kids came from far and wide to learn from McCarthy. 

"We had a good web to start on the back of our primary school games,” he said.

“[They came from] the Queensland border without going into Queensland, coastal-Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie, Kempsey, down to in between Newcastle and the Central Coast and out to Dubbo so there is a good web and strong representation within our region we are hopeful in years to come that web can grow and the numbers can grow with it.

"With Brian here it is a unique opportunity in that it is an inclusive camp and you get access to someone like that.

“Just over 100 kids in our first go is something that is pretty humbling in that many people thought it was a worthwhile investment.”