During the UK lockdowns, I went live at 7:30am every morning with ball mastery sessions. Two fears drove that: losing income, honestly, but more than that, the fear of kids falling out of love with football during a period when nobody could train together or play a match.
I didn’t know if anyone would watch a coach doing ball mastery drills alone on a laptop camera at half seven in the morning. Some mornings it was a handful of views. But parents started sending photos back: kids doing the same session in their garden, in a bedroom, wherever they had room for a ball. That was the actual reward. Not the view count. The proof that a kid somewhere was still doing keepy-ups in a small room because a session gave them a reason to.
The Rewards That Don’t Show Up Anywhere
Coaching gets measured, when it gets measured at all, in results and league tables. Those aren’t nothing. But they’re not what makes coaches keep doing this for years, often unpaid, often on a Tuesday night in the rain.
Jamie, one of the coaches in our community, put words to something a lot of us feel but rarely say out loud: players still call him “gaffer” whenever they bump into him years after he last managed them. He’s still close to a lot of his former players. Mark, another coach in the FCA, said something similar: the biggest achievement in his coaching life is simply that every player he’s trained still greets him when they see him.
That’s the actual currency of coaching. Not medals. Being remembered, years later, as someone who mattered to a kid during a period of their life.
What FCA Became Because Of That
The Football Coaching Academy exists partly because of that lockdown experience. I built it because social media posts disappear, and I wanted one place that would still be there for coaches later. It was quiet at first, and I gave a lot away before anyone trusted it enough to pay for it. People were understandably sceptical, the space is full of noise.
It’s grown to nearly 1,600 coaches now, with roughly 400 wins posted by members in a single month at one point, and it sits inside the top 15 sports communities on Skool out of more than 200,000. None of that happened because of a clever launch. It happened because coaches kept showing up, the way those parents kept sending photos back during lockdown mornings that felt, at the time, like they might be going nowhere.
What I’d Actually Say
If you coach, the thing worth noticing this time of year isn’t the season’s results. It’s whichever version you have of the lockdown photos: the small, unprompted evidence that something you did mattered to a kid who isn’t yours, sent by a parent who didn’t have to bother sending it.
That’s the gift in this. Not the trophies. The gaffer nickname that still gets used a decade later, or the video of a kid in a garden trying to do keepy-ups the same way you showed them on a laptop screen during a lockdown morning.
If you’re one of the coaches carrying that same quiet weight through a hard season, the Football Coaching Academy is nearly 1,600 coaches doing the same thing, most weeks without any of it showing up on a scoreboard.