Vocation, vocation, vocation

By IAIN KING, Toronto, July 29, 2019

GOT smashed one Sunday and never slept a wink.

Not a drop of alcohol had passed my lips.

Any coach out there reading this knows the feeling that haunts you after a heavy defeat.

A week of solitary session planning, poring through video analysis, reading heart rate monitor data after training, washing bibs, searching for balls in the gathering gloom.

All the glamour.

You still relish every day but your process has to build towards a purpose, to game day.

To the moment when your players cross that white line and at times you feel like a hostage to fortune.

And in youth football, even at provincial level in the Ontario Player Development League here in Canada, you are at the mercy of so many unexpected variables.

Vacations, injuries, suspensions, a player who was flying in practice on Friday night but turns up on Sunday morning moody and sullen with their teenage head all over the place.

And a team who can beat some of the best teams this country has to offer goes out and gets smashed 6-0.

That happened to me this season and it set me thinking that Sunday night.

UMBRO CUP WINNERS...our U15 Boys have been through ups and downs in a rollercoaster season but I learn every day I go to work with them - even in low times

I tried to bury the memory of an abject performance and enjoy some down time on the Danforth where we live having dinner in Greektown with my wife Lorna.

Only she would be able to tell you how successful I was. My bet is that I failed miserably.

I came to a conclusion that weekend about the second career of my life after I walked away from sports journalism when the going was still good.

Coaching, like teaching, is not a job it’s a VOCATION.

Learning to take the peaks with the troughs is one of the toughest lessons to absorb.

Luckily, at my club the coaches are protected by a 24-hour rule which means parents can’t approach you in the aftermath of a match to demand answers on game time or just voice an opinion about the events that have unfolded.

Thankfully, it’s a rule most people adhere to unless you engage them in a conversation yourself.

Every now and then, though, I would love players and parents to catch a glimpse into how much the coach hurts when game day turns sour.

These days I am far older and wiser than I was when I started coaching my son Bruce’s Under-8 team at East Kilbride Burgh United back in Scotland.

There’s a puzzling dichotomy here, though, I abhor win at all costs coaches yet the sting of losing still lingers with me for a week until we have the chance to put things right.

I care about the performance, about how each individual played, about their pathway to development. I care about all of those things. Deeply.

Yet God knows I have tried to change since I started on this journey but every defeat still hurts like hell.

And when we lose and we don’t play well? Soul-searching, self-doubt, questioning the whole week of training you designed, second-guessing every team selection made.

That’s why this is a vocation. In a job - even in this workaholic, addicted to your phone, social-media obsessed world - you can still choose to flick the light switch and walk out of the office.

In a vocation, it’s always there. Even walking to Rooster’s coffee shop at 8am on my day off with a knockout view of the CN Tower to my right hand side I’m tossing around new formations in my head.

In my former life as a football reporter I was fortunate to build a lasting friendship with former Kilmarnock, Hibernian and Plymouth Argyle manager Bobby Williamson.

Something he said to me has always stuck with me: “You can learn something from every match you watch or coach, no matter what level it is.”

BACK IN THE DAY...watching a reserve match at Plymouth Argyle with Bobby Williamson

I live by that now, always asking myself at the end: “What did you learn?” Searching for nuggets to educate, desperate to make myself a better coach.

These days I smile wryly when I think back to the size of my ego towards the end of my career as a sports writer in Scotland. It would have filled a house.

I was so sure of myself, I’d written six books, won a few awards and I was so confident in my ability to break scoops and stay at the top of my game.

I’ve NEVER felt like that as a coach, I’ve learned that just when you feel you have cracked this Beautiful Game that’s when it kicks you in the teeth.

And when you are truly down then only a fellow coach understands how you feel.

A few weeks back my Under-15 North Toronto Nitros boys lost an epic Ontario Cup quarter-final to an excellent Vaughan side on penalty-kicks.

The lottery of the shootout came after a thrilling 3-3 draw that saw us fight back from two goals down to almost clinch it in the dying seconds.

Players were in tears at the end and I comforted them, told the team how proud I was of their efforts. I was gutted for them.

My OPDL coaching colleagues at Nitros - Marc Maunder, Marko Milanovic and Ian Skitch - were class acts that night.

They rallied round, took me for a pint and some nachos. We had a few laughs and the hurt of the defeat seeped away a little. They understood.

From the Lowland League with East Kilbride and BSC Glasgow to learning so much in the Scottish pro Academy system at Motherwell and Airdrieonians to this dream adventure in Canada.

Realisation of how all-consuming my second career truly is came last week as I looked out across the water in a quiet moment in Chester, Nova Scotia.

The holiday visiting my daughter Caitlin and her husband Mike was a week to treasure. Loved it.

Yet in that minute of calm, in that picturesque place I could easily retire to one day my mind started to drift as it always does to its default setting. Football.

Ideas of how to tweak a playing out of the back session I’d run with our U13 Girls OPDL squad the week before started to swirl around my brain.

That’s when I knew it for sure as I stared out over the eye-popping coastline to the Atlantic Ocean.

There’s no vacation from a vocation.