I have previously mentioned Imposter Syndrome as it applies to my work as a physicist. On that happy occasion, I was revelling, slightly, at discovering that I perhaps wasn't as shit as I'd always thought I was. Since I'm a glutton for punishment, it was not enough to finally feel confident and secure in my abilities, so I have found new and interesting ways to feel useless.
It is unlikely to have escaped anyone's notice that I am reasonably firmly embedded in LittleBear's grassroots football club. I have not gone into a great deal of depth here about the degree to which I am embedded, or how and why. As with many things in my life, the full story is too much someone else's story for me to be entirely comfortable writing about, so it remains just "one of those things". However, suffice to say that, while I started out four years ago helping with the administrative side of running LittleBear's team, I'm now the manager. I'm a qualified FA Level One coach. I run training sessions, with the original manager assisting me*. I run match days, planning team-sheets and line-ups, making substitutions, encouraging, coaching and supporting the boys**. I'm the First Aider. I'm the administrator. I'm the accountant.
Some of those roles I take in my stride. Managing a bank account is not beyond the wit of PhysicsBear. Applying an occasional ice-pack is quite do-able. And despite a certain amount of swearing, I even survive the vagaries of fighting with the tentacles of the FA websites to undertake the arcane aspects of team management. But the training, the teaching, the coaching, the football?
I am lost.
I am at sea.
I have less than no idea how to maintain any semblance of control, or convey any teaching points, to a rabble to 9 and 10 year olds. Occasionally a training session has the air of running smoothly. This largely occurs when the stars align and I happen to ask the boys to do something they wanted to do anyway. When I try and get them to do something new or, heaven forfend, something involving applying brains or concentration, the chances are that I will spend 50% of the session telling them to stop interrupting and to listen.
I am not a teacher. I have never wanted to be a teacher. I have never thought I'd be a good teacher. And yet, here I am, teaching. If I were teaching something that I felt secure in, like physics or chemistry, I would find it stressful (as indeed I did) but at least I'd be sure I knew what I was talking about. Instead, here I am teaching something about which I know almost nothing.
We have all seen, over the course of the past two years, how rapidly people assume a mantle of expertise on subjects about which, quite frankly, they know bugger all. Everyone's an epidemiologist these days aren't they? Football has always had this feature, well before it was fashionable. Football is populated by the kinds of people who have no qualms at all about phoning national radio stations to explain what exactly Pep Guardiola has done wrong in his tactics this week. Football is also an immensely popular sport in this country. Which means across a squad of seventeen boys that I train, at least fifty percent of them are in possession of parents who have firm opinions about football. Parents who will express strong views about Klopp's choice of starting 11, how to play against a high-press, and (ad nauseam) the impact of VAR on the Beautiful Game. Parents who certainly appear to know an awful lot more about football than I do. Most of them have the advantage of having played the blasted game, which is more than I've ever achieved.
I watch football. I enjoy football. But I have a guilty secret. I always end up watching the ball. For those non-football-afficionados here, this may not seem such a stupid thing to do. It is football after all. But for those who actually want to understand what's happening on the pitch, watching what the players without the ball are doing is key. And I don't. I try, but I'm very easily distracted by the ball.
So I know, deep in my soul, that I am not an expert. And without an expert's level of understanding and knowledge of how to play, I have absolutely no idea how or what to teach my boys. I try. I really do. I watch YouTube videos. I read FA training plans. I study books of training ideas. I want to know what to do. I want to get it right. I want to be good at it. But I'm not. I know I'm not. And I know that it's only a matter of time before the boys, and their parents, realise that I don't have the faintest idea what I'm doing. If they haven't already.
I'm just about keeping my head above water this season, coaching 7-aside football with an under-10 side. But I find it hard to imagine being able to offer any technical or tactical insight as we progress through to full-blown, competitive 11-aside football.
I don't want to give up. I don't want to abandon my boys. I don't want to fail.
But I don't know how to be better. I don't know how to learn the huge amount that I don't know. There aren't enough hours in the day to be physicist, mother, wife, daughter, football coach, friend and me. I can keep going, being a bit shit, hoping nobody notices that I'm a bit shit. Hoping the boys learn something by magical osmosis from somewhere else. Hoping they don't see through me too soon. Hoping the parents don't think their boys would be better off elsewhere. Or I can walk away. With my head down and tears in my eyes, betraying my son's faith in me, and his team's need for someone to run things for them.
My name is PhysicsBear, and I don't know what I'm doing.
*Yes. I find this as toe-curlingly awkward and difficult as it probably sounds
** I do have a lovely assistant for this, and she is supportive, kind and helpful, and does everything I ask of her, and more. But my own over-developed sense of responsibility means that as the one with "Manager" written next to my name, I take emotional ownership of it all.
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