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In England, more women and girls are playing than ever, but coaching numbers lag behind. Hannah Wright explains her role in helping to redress the balance.
Women’s and girls’ football is on the rise in England – in the Yorkshire area of Sheffield and Hallamshire, for example, there are 7,393 females now playing, which is up 25% from the previous year.
This means there is a greater demand for coaches, especially female ones – but, in England, only 7% of qualified coaches are women.
As an Equal Game Ambassador and Community Champion for both the Football Association and Sheffield & Hallamshire County FA, I go out to local grassroots teams to develop their female structure and mentor women into becoming qualified coaches able to support the next generation.
For it to be sustainable, we need more female coaches to become role models for the younger generation to look up to, to pave the way for the development of the women’s game.
My role is to deliver a variety of workshops to clubs and encourage as many females as possible to take that first step towards getting involved with their local clubs and assisting in the delivery of sessions.
You are more likely to be inspired to become something if you can see it in action – hence the saying: "If you can see it, you can be it."
So, female players need female coaches to be involved and enthusiastic, because if they see women in charge and passionate about the game, they will be, too, and it will have that natural domino effect.
Growing up, I didn’t have any female coaches until I was 16 years old – by which time, I had already started coaching and volunteering.
This showed me just how much I had missed out on growing up, not having a female to look up to.
Unlike today, women’s football was rarely shown on TV in the UK – so, like many girls my age, my role models were male players like David Beckham.
More than 10 years on, I am a Uefa B licensed coach, supporting other women into coaching.
It is a huge privilege and honour, because these opportunities weren’t available to me when I was younger – I would have relished them, if they had been.
It is special to see, and play a small part in, a much clearer pathway and vision for women’s and girls’ football in England.
"It’s a privilege and honour, because these opportunities weren’t available to me..."
Don’t forget, the women’s game was banned here for 50 years (until the early 1970s), so we are still a long way from where we deserve to be.
Being able to deliver these workshops and mentor women is about letting them know that you don’t need to know everything about football. If you love the sport and you turn up, you are halfway there.
At these beginning stages of coaching, it is about being consistent and present at the sessions – showing the children that you care, you listen and that you want them to have fun.
The workshops are about knowing what skills and knowledge these prospective coaches have and what transferable skills can be applied to coaching.
It is important to build their confidence and allow them to make mistakes – no session is ever perfect. What might work for one group might need to be totally different for another, and that is fine.
If you can plan a session and apply the ‘STEP’ principle (Space, Task, Equipment, People), then any session is adaptable to suit the needs of the group or individual.
The more you get involved, the better you will become. With that, comes confidence and further opportunities for everyone.
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