Amy Merricks: Ambitions aligned

“You are leading a ship, and your job is to make sure you inspire, you motivate, and you develop people every day.”

 

Amy Merricks is one of the brightest coaching prospects in women’s football. The Women’s Super League’s youngest-ever head coach during her interim spells in charge at Brighton and Hove Albion, and previously head coach of England under-19s, she is now fully focused on the target of leading Birmingham City back to the top tier.

 

February’s international break gave her the chance to reset and refresh ahead of an intense run-in to the end of the season – a stretch of matches that includes a Women’s FA Cup quarter-final against WSL giants Manchester City.

 

“When you’re going game after game, it’s nice to just pause, breathe, see your family, see your friends that you maybe tend not to see as much,” she says.

 

Amy describes herself as a perfectionist – and admits that it’s “an ongoing juggle” to carve out time to take care of herself during a hectic season, so these periods to ‘breathe’ are important.

 

“I recognise if you don’t balance it, then you become more subjective in your decisions and emotionally driven when actually you need to be really objective, you need to be calm and composed,” she says.

 

“That’s why we’re in the roles, because we strive for excellence all the time. And I think it’s something that we need to keep discussing. 

 

“We talk a lot about well-being for players, but maybe we don’t so much for coaches, and I think it’s a really important space to delve into more and make sure people have the balance, the care, the time that they need to take so that they can be high performing all the time.”

 

And once she’s taken a breath, it’s time for review.

 

“The next stage for me is to reflect. So we tend to look at block reviews, where we look at the most recent run of games, and we do a comparison in terms of our game model and our KPIs and where are we? 

 

“Where are we maybe falling short? Where are we really striving? What can we build on and what might we need for the next run? So then we’re looking at planning. You’re planning for what’s coming next, which is a really busy and important period for us.”