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I wanted to share a little bit of my Why today and how to find and define yours…if you haven’t already.
Firstly, I was a good youth player. In training, in the playground, in the park I’d be brilliant (if I’m allowed to say so myself!). But in games I wasn’t. It took me until about 14 years old to start to figure out why.
In those less structured environments I’d put myself exactly where I wanted to be – in central midfield, running all day long, dribbling, passing, tackling and constantly being in the middle of the action. In matches from 8-14 years old, I was played every single position on the pitch, including Goalkeeper…except for central midfield!
I eventually realised exactly why this was. And it was because I was smaller – both in height and width! – than other players and the view was you needed to be big and robust to play in central midfield. A typical late August birthday – a victim of Relative Age Effect and a late developer!
All through childhood I never had a good coach who recognised the qualities in me and was brave enough to put me in central midfield. I dragged myself from being deemed not worthy of playing central midfield at 13-14 to captain of an England Schoolboys team at U19 – as a central midfielder.
Then I went playing semi-professionally in England. I was 18 years old and 9 stone (126lbs for the Americans in the room…57kg for the Europeans!) going from playing against boys to playing against men. It wasn’t an easy transition going from the sheltered life of schoolboy football to men’s First Team and coaches were quick to cast you aside. It didn’t help that I’d show to receive from the backline and then watch the ball sail over my head and then have to chase up-field to go and win second balls!
After breaking my jaw and knee-cap in the same season, at 20, my playing career was pretty much done as I decided I wanted to be a coach where I could:
1. Dictate the style of play that I’d grown up on – Hard Work. Brave and assertive on the Ball. Possession based.
2. Give players the positive coach, mentor and coaching that I’d never had
That is my WHY as a coach.
My WHY as a Coaching Mentor & Educator is because of the following:
In January I was watching a couple of coaches take a session. It was an U10 boys team with about 12 kids split into 2 lines. The boys would do a quick-feet slalom through the 5 cones, 2 foot hop over the next 2 and then receive the ball thrown from the coach, to control and pass back into his hands.
Aside from the aerial control and volleyed pass being a little outside of their ability level, the activity levels were painfully low. So I decided to time it. The cycle, ie when each boy would enter the slalom, get his 2 touches, wait in line and then re-enter the slalom, took about 3 minutes.
I cringed a little at that and really wanted to go over and show the coach how playing 9 Lives combined with Foundation Moves, Hospital Tag, Marbles, Body Brakes, 1v1 games etc would absolutely blow this out of the water, but I didn’t feel it was really my place, and even then, it still wasn’t enough to motivate me to set up my Coach Mentoring Programme. What happened next was though.
One boy, who was a big boy and clearly bored – and rightly so! – slalomed through the cones, arrived at the coach and thought ‘I’m going to spice this up a bit’ and duly proceeded to volley the ball as far away as he could, not even bothering with his second touch.
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