Whether you are a volunteer coach giving up a few hours a week to coach, or if you are a full time coach working with academy standard players - then you are playing an important part in the future of football!

I started coaching back in 2004 when my daughter came to me and said "Dad, I want to join a football team". "Football"?? I asked! I found my local club on the Internet, and took my daughter along to the training session. The coach there said, she is more than welcome to come along training each week but she won't get any games as there are too many girls. But.................. if you would like to put yourself forward, then you can become a manager as there are enough girls to make up an U10 team. The next thing I knew, I was on the FA Level 1 course, and had joined the player development committee of the club.

I really enjoyed coaching the girls, we won 2 league titles and reached 3 league cup finals in consecutive years. 3 of my players went on to play for Chelsea Centre of Excellence, and 2 to Reading. I fell in love with coaching and progressed my way through the FA Coaching badges, I ended up being head of Player Development at my local club, and wrote some rather radical development plans. We ran a scheme for 4-6 year old's in 10 week blocks, I wrote the training plans for the 10 weeks. We started with 14 kids, the scheme is now running at 50+ kids each week!

I started really looking into development as a whole, not only developing our players, but developing the club coaches too!  I organised Coach the coaches day, where I had Coach educators come in and give the coaches new ideas. The club then paid out for a new website, with a forum - I actively encouraged our coaches to share their session idea's and session plans. There were regular debates around coaching - this was great! All the coaches were engaging swapping ideas, talking about the pro's and con's of SSGs. As a whole the standard of coaching improved at the club.

I will be writing regular blogs around Coach development and Player development, and welcome any of your comments or articles.

Coach Justin