HT to Jason M for goading me into this.
I forget the year that I started to coach the Mustangs, somewhere around 2014. It was one of those situations where I was the person that put their hand up and so got the job because I was cheap (free) and seemingly available.
I started to coach them because Callum (my son who is now 14) wanted to play football and although I never played football, am no good at football and know nothing about football, I thought it was only boys football so how hard could it be.
The journey through the last 7 years has been incredible with this group of lads and with the ones who have subsequently left and the ones who have subsequently joined.
I felt it was about time that I shared the journey to date on the basis of the fact that it is the purest of metaphors for everything that goes on in the rest of your life.
When we started back in 2000 and whenever, we were a true ‘mixed ability’ team.
We were in division 8 (of 8) and we had some boys who were clearly there because their Mums or Dads felt it would give them good social skills to play football, even though they were the furthest away from being footballers that it was possible to be.
We took our fair share of battering’s but managed to win here or there and were introduced to the foul and horrible nature of what football can be like when people live their lives through their children in the worst of ways.
By hook and by crook but mostly by complete luck, we started to climb the divisions which in one sense is wonderful and in another is terrible.
The mixed ability nature of the team starts to pull apart as the boys at the bottom of the pyramid don’t move and the boys at the top of the pyramid race away and then you encounter the difficult problem that becomes the greatest learning experience of coaching a boys football team, which is ‘who do you serve”?
That becomes the first metaphor, that becomes the first lesson.
And so, when this blog is published I will post it (probably against my better judgement) for our football crew in the hope that it’s possible to understand that looking after a mixed ability team is almost impossible.
You either look after the members of the team at the lowest end of the group in terms of skill and commitment and attitude and fitness or you look after those at the top.
If you look after both, you look after none.
The sad truth is that the boys all know who’s at the top and who’s at the bottom and they begin to sort things out for themselves.
If you only look after those at the bottom, then the ones at the top will leave and you’ll be left with a team of the boys who are less committed and you will have no team.
If you look after those at the top, the boys at the bottom, but particularly the parents of the boys at the bottom will get upset and disgruntled and they will leave and you will have to attract other players closer to those at the top to continue to have a team.
Through all of this, you’re doing this because your own son is in the team and you’re trying to look after him whilst looking after everyone in the team including those at the top and those at the bottom.
For the avoidance of doubt, in my experience of teams through the years in work and other places, there are always tops and bottoms.
And so, to try to create a team through recruitment and coaching and training and practice which is as close in ability as possible, is the most likely way to secure the future of the team.
The bottom line is that the coaches job is to look after the team and not actually look after the individuals.
The coach cannot look after an individual over the well-being of the team otherwise the coach will not have a team, which is the purpose of having a coach in the first place.
And so, as we started to move up the divisions it became harder to look after some of the boys who were getting caught up in the net in the middle of games as they used it as a climbing frame when the ball was up the other end of the pitch.
When it came time to have conversations with those parents about where might be the best place to play football for those boys (or to not play football at all) the volunteer coach has to field discussions that centre around ‘I thought you were different’.
In spite of this and all the challenges that come with coaching, like the rushing from work with no session planned on a freezing cold night in the middle of December, after a terrible and stressful day to try to motivate 15 or 16 young boys who don’t want to pay attention and who are freezing in the rain.
Carrying a full kit bag and a bag of balls and a tactics board half a mile from the car park, only to find that little Jonny has cannonballed a Mitre off the face of little Charlie in the goal while you thought you might replicate one of Barcelonas training plans. With visions of all your boys signing for Manchester United evaporating into the freezing cold, soaking wet Nottingham sky.
You field after the game discussions about ‘game-time’ or people stressed about the psychological wellbeing of their children or full and frank discussions with your wife who is running the admin side of the team and dealing with coaches that are horrible and referees who won’t turn up and pitch allocations which are ridiculous.
Turning up to games where the pitch is already frozen and has been frozen for days when there was never any opportunity to play.
Amongst all of this, trying to coach your son in the middle of a team whilst you’re also trying to parent him and also trying to be friends with him and also trying to develop him as a footballer, even though you know next to nothing about football and are still struggling to understand the offside rule which seems to change every 25 minutes, together with variations on the handball rule and crazy formations. Combined with the fact that every boy wants to play centre forward all the time and nobody ever wants to be a goal keeper.
And in spite of all of this the Mustangs found themselves in the cup final in 2019.
We’d lost some boys along the way and gained some others and at that stage we were at our zenith on a sunny and beautiful afternoon in May on an Astroturf pitch with all the trappings of a proper cup final.
We were a better football team than the team that they played against but they were solid and after an unbelievable goalless game and an even more unbelievable goalless extra time, we found ourselves 3-0 down in a penalty shootout having missed our first two penalties with our opposition having scored their first three.
We won and for our young men it will be an unforgettable day that they will be able to look back on with huge pride for the rest of their lives.
And then the team deconstructed again as we lost our major goal scorer who moved up the chain in pursuit of better things and we took a season of being thrashed 8 & 10 nil every single game.
The mighty mustangs now find themselves at the start of a new journey.
We’ve recruited new players to have a squad of 17 for the last hurrah in the boys football league before we join the new (and allegedly more poorly organised) youth league.
But we begin the process again of deciding whether our abilities are close enough or whether they are too mixed.
We ask the boys for commitment and attitude and fitness and skill and to invest outside of the 1 hour training we have a week and the game on a Sunday.
In the best possible way, it feels like work.
At our place, we went from 4 people to 50 and we gained some people and lost some people and gained and lost again until we distilled down to a group who pretty much all want to be here and are all pulling in the same direction.
I think it’s truthful to say that football coaching for me over the last 7 years has brought me some of the best and most joyful memories of my life but also some emotional low points and stress which you would never imagine boys football coaching would bring.
I hope they’ll let me do it until these boys are finished, which in reality is about 4 more years.
I’m not sure now which ones will be there and which ones won’t but that will be up to them as they grow up now and decide whether they played football for football or for reasons other than that.
It’s probably an apprenticeship worth doing for anybody who has aspiration to look after a group of people in any part of their life.
It’s certainly taught me a lot more than I’ve taught it and given me much more than I have given back.
Blog Post Number - 2960
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