Fundamentally, this blog is about a stream of consciousness based on what happens to me in the job that I do, and the life that I lead.
Trying to balance being a husband and dad with the stuff that I do at work and then a little bit left for myself.(when things are good)
I was always likely to talk about the cup final.
If you’ve read this blog regularly, you’ll know that I coach a boy’s football team they are under 11. Fundamentally I do this for Callum (my son) but over the past 3 or 4 years, we have become a very close-knit little group and I will say, time and time again, that football is the best part of my week.
It’s worth referencing here, that I have no idea, even about the rules of football, and I never played football as a boy, because I simply wasn’t good enough.
I have been coached though, an awful lot, both to international level at basketball as a boy, by some incredible teachers both at school and university and by some incredible clinicians, business coaches and sports coaches from that time onwards.
I tried to use some of the lessons that I’ve learnt to be a VT trainer and I try to use them almost every week, to be a would-be educator, trying my best to help other people navigate the world they find themselves in, from the experiences that I have had.
When I was asked to be the football coach for the Mustangs (the name of our football team) it was pretty much only because nobody else would do it and it goes back to what I spoke about before about being cheap and available.
It didn’t cost any money from me to be the coach of the club and I was prepared to give up the time.
I only recently this year got around to doing the FA level 1 which an embarrassment, because it should have been done 3 years ago.
The Mustangs started out as an 8 year old playing 5 a-side football in the lowest league YEL (The large Nottinghamshire league which is one of the largest in the country with 12,000 kids in it) we were in division 8, battling against the lowest team in the league for second bottom spot.
It’s not been easy at times to coach the mustangs because I’ve learned a lot of thing about looking after people, stretched my emotional intelligence and my negotiation ability and made some tough choices.
Its also worth noting here that there are plenty of kids here achieving enormously high than Callum achieves at football (Andy Legg for one of his son’s rugby career) so I appreciate that everybody has their successes and failures with their children in these areas in many different disciplines.
For me though, sport gave me so much, so many experiences and so many friends and I did definitely grow as a person through the successes and failures I learned in school, and so as we progress through the divisions and ultimately got promoted to division 2, at Christmas last year we were extremely proud as a group and have had some wonderful times.
On the way through that trip, we’ve had to let some boy’s go to other teams to encourage them to play at other levels, because they simply were too distinct from the team that we had to benefit them or benefit themselves.
This is one of the most difficult things about building a team, in any part of life as far as I can see it.
People who are not interested or who are not performing at the level of everybody else, either have to step up or they have to step out, the reason for that is that you start concentrating all of your resources on a minority, who are either not interested or simply not prepared to put the time in at the detriment of others.
If you select that route, what will happen is that other’s leave and you’re left with a team of disinterested people.
For me that can’t work.
Two years ago, we had to go through a process with several of the boys to ask them and their parents what they wanted to do, and it was quite painful, despite the fact that we were just trying to do the best for everybody.
Other teams didn’t do that, (we have 105 teams in our club, it’s the biggest in England) we sorted that out two years ago, and the other teams are now just encountering the huge problems that they’ve got from mixed ability boys at 9 a-side moving to 11 a-side, where they just cannot manage the teams, and so it was, that after that rough period of trying to build a team of boy’s who were like-minded views of what they wanted to do and achieve (and it’s fine if that’s low and it’s fine if it’s high, you just have to get it right) we move from division 8 to division 2.
Short note here to let you know that, I really don’t want us to get to division 1, because division 1 football is absolutely vile! And the parents are vile, but we have the most extraordinary parent-group, who are supportive and helpful and wonderful as a team too.
What we never done though, was make it in the cup and so this season, after 4 rounds and 4 victories, we found ourselves in the cup final, last Sunday, and that’s the story of this 3 part blogs, its what we learned as a team, it’s what I learned as a coach, in all aspects of my life and its how it went in the cup final.
Read part 2 if you’re interested, if you’re not…. Delete it as it comes in your inbox.
Blog Post Number - 2011
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