It is up to you to make sure that your players have the best experience possible playing football and that they enjoy coming to training and playing for the team. Especially with girls football, if a girl doesn’t enjoy her time at your club, they may not play for another team, or play football again. So, as a coach, you have a crucial role to play in the development of each of your players.

At Liskeard, myself and Ian Woodhouse are always thinking of ways we can improve as a club and improve the experience we give the players. One key thing this year has been to show the players what they can achieve in football if they are serious about pursuing the sport in to their adult life.

Being in Cornwall, we have no Women’s Premier League or Super League teams near us, so we spent a year communicating with the FA and thanks to their support we were able to get England Internationals Sue Smith and Corinne Yorston to come all the way down to Liskeard, to do some training sessions with our girls and inspire them to aim high in the game.

It takes a lot of hard work and perseverance to pull off huge things like this but seeing the effect these events had on the girls made it all worthwhile. Our main concern is always making the week to week training as fun and as enriching as possible for the girls but at the same time we always have big plans we are working on.

I think the state of a team, the players attitude and their development is a reflection on the coaching staff and not the players. Regardless of where you are in the country, or the problems your team faces, if you put your heart and soul into your team, as a coach you can build an amazing team and an amazing environment for your players to play football in. It may not happen overnight but eventually your hard work will pay off.