As soon as I lost my job at Luton I knew I wanted to get back into professional football at my earliest opportunity. Time though ticked on and it didn’t happen as quickly as I would have liked so not wanting to sit around, I decided to set-up a soccer school to tide me over. I had planned to run it as an after schools class and then look at doing something in the holidays however after doing a bit of research I realised that it was going to be best to just focus on the school holidays as schools had already established relationships for sessions after school and that would be a hard market to get into as I would have to break down loyalties, this also was a good way to test the water.

I had good contacts at Vauxhall and went to see them for a chat, they told me about their events for other sports like tennis and cricket but said there wasn’t really anything out there in the area for football and with the strength of my name in the area, they thought I could be quite successful.

It probably took me three to four months to put on the first event having decided this was what I wanted to do. I spoke to a friend of mine down in London who ran his own classes and he invited me down to have a closer look, I saw how he did things and mixed that together with my own thoughts of how it could work – first and foremost it had to be something kids would enjoy.

The not so exciting but very important aspects of dealing with the insurance, the legal side, buying the right equipment then took precedence and once it was all in order, away we went.

The first session at Vauxhall was in February last year, which is always a quiet time and I was really pleased to get 20 kids down for it, it was nice to get the first one out of the way.

There were problems and things we needed to deal with but I felt it was a good starting point and something we could improve on, having had good feedback I began to plan the next one.

I came at it from a different angle to how I used to plan professional youth training sessions – they were all young boys looking to make a living from the game and I was now working with kids of all different abilities, aged between 7 – 14 and it had to be fun but competitive. The coaching itself is similar but the organising of the sessions is quite different, whatever level of football you are coaching at I am a great believer that it has to be fun.