Over the finishing line

Tonight has seen my completion of my FA level one training course, and I am now a fully qualified level-one football coach. Given that I've still never played a game of football in my life, there is a large part of me that feels that this is an utterly fraudulent claim, but I am determined to make up in enthusiasm what I lack in footballing talent.

Having been through the doldrums of questioning my ability and suitability for the role, I was overwhelmed by the number of friends who reached out to me, not just with words of comfort, but with practical and sensible advice. I am enormously grateful to have the kind of friends who know both when to be the shoulder to cry on and when to provide solid foundations for me. That advice, and support, has let me step back and think again about how best to be me in my new role, not how best to become the role, and it has lifted a weight from my shoulders. Knowing me as well as I do, that weight will return at times, as will the self-doubt, and the uncertainty and the stress, but I will be a little bit better prepared to handle it now than I was a week ago.

Among the things that I took away from the advice you lovely people gave me was the fact that Coach is just as new to having an assistant as I am to being an assistant, and that we will need to spend a while working together to find out how to make the best use of our abilities. That thought alone has made me stop and think about how I'm viewing our interactions and how much blame I'm shouldering for every occasion where things don't go smoothly.

The second significant point that I am absorbing is that I need to be me more than I need to be anything else. Raw football skills are not my key strength. Physical fitness is not my best area (LittleBear and I ran in a 3km together on Monday. He finished 1min40s ahead of me...) But, in the FA's "Four Corner" model of developing a player, technical skills and physical fitness are only two of the corners. Equally important are the psychological and social development of that player. So at LittleBear's match on Saturday, I made sure I got chatting to my boys when they were on the bench. I found out little bits here and there about their lives. I discovered which school the new boy goes to, and which subject Coach's son enjoys most at school. I discovered that one of my boys doesn't like maths; but he doesn't like it because it's boring and too easy. In increments I am getting to know the little people that they are, not the footballers.

During the match, I found individual things to praise in each boy, and when training came around this week, I tried to reinforce the praise when I saw them doing the same thing well again. I gave two of my boys individual challenges to try to achieve during the match, and was delighted when one of them really worked hard to manage his.

I may not be able to do a bicycle kick or a Cruyff turn, but I can make a reasonable fist of being a caring, interested human being, and I think there's probably a place for that in under-7s football.

Meanwhile I will leave you with some facts and figures.

There are over 70,000 qualified football coaches in England. The ratio of men to women is 91:9 (in September 2018). There are about six and a half thousand female football coaches in England.

There are approximately 2,200 Fellows of the Institute of Physics. The ratio of men to women is 10:1. There are about 200 female Fellows of the Institute of Physics.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the uptake of football coaching among female Fellows of the IOP may be relatively low. In fact, in the Venn diagram of life, I suspect I may be on my own in the middle...

All by myself?