Teenager becomes the youngest-ever freestyle world champion

SWNS

A Brit teen has become the youngest-ever football freestyle world champion - but she's not allowed to use it for her PE exams.  Super-talented Isabel Wilkins, 17, was able to control a ball not long after she could walk - and is now is a master at 'keepy-uppies'.  Midfielder Isabel played for several local clubs at town and regional level in her home county of Wiltshire.  But when Covid lockdowns meant she had to stop playing football matches she started freestyling.  Isabel, of Bradford-on-Avon, has now won a second freestyle football world championship in Liberec, Czech Republic.  A panel of judges marked scores points based on difficulty, execution, control, originality and variety.

Transcript

00:00I'm Isabel and I'm a freestyle footballer.

00:12I discovered it through lockdown, I used to play football a lot and then obviously we

00:15couldn't play so I just went out into my garden, discovered a few tricks.

00:19I still didn't realise that it was a sport and then I soon found out and just started

00:23training it more and more every day.

00:25So I do about six times a week training, three hours a day.

00:30There's a lot of learning tricks that you see from other people but also as you kind

00:34of do freestyle more, you start to develop your own style and come up with your own new

00:39tricks so that's something I really like to do is create my own tricks and master them

00:43for competitions.

00:44It was amazing to be able to defend my title, it was quite a lot of pressure as last year

00:50I was able to win it for the first time and become the youngest ever world champion so

00:54then to defend that title was quite hard but I was really happy to do it, I had a lot

00:59of people supporting me so it was an amazing feeling.

01:01Everyone's friends in the community really, you get along really, really well.

01:05Obviously when it comes to battles you are facing the person so you do want to win but

01:09it's great friendship, great community so it's a really nice vibe.

01:13In the past few years we've had a record number of female participants so we want to keep

01:17growing that, inspire more younger people so I want to do some shows and just show people

01:22what freestyle is about and grow the sport as a whole.

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