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“Every job I’ve done has been about building something from scratch, starting a new franchise, turning something professional or trying to get someone up the table, where we were the underdog and we gave ourselves a big challenge and sent a statement to someone.”
Tracey Neville’s latest role as the managing director of the women’s football team at Stockport County may be in an entirely different sport, but her mission is no different from her days coaching England’s netball team to their historic Commonwealth Games gold medal in 2018.
It would certainly be a “statement” should she help turn Stockport from a volunteer-run, community-level club into a “superpower for women’s sport”.
The former netball international was hired by Stockport in February as they build towards a new era. It begins next season with a summer rebrand, and the first steps towards going professional. She jokes that she is still “getting used to” football terminology but is certainly no stranger to the game.
The 49-year-old, whose famous footballing brothers Gary and Phil played for England, and Manchester United and Everton. With Phil managing the Lionesses at the 2019 Women’s World Cup, the first conversations began with Stockport after speaking at a panel event at the club last November. The club were so impressed by the former Manchester Thunder head coach that they offered her a job.
“At first it was [going to be] a part-time part [but] I just thought: I know what women’s sport is like. If you commit 20 days, you might as well commit 50, you might as well commit 365, you might as well commit it all!” Neville says. “We had some great conversationsand it sparked something in me. It just felt right.”
Stockport are seventh in the FA Women’s National League Division One North, in the fourth tier, before their final league game of this season, at home against third-placed Leeds on Sunday. The club have invited anybody who is a former player, coach or volunteer of the club to attend the game at Edgeley Park for free to acknowledge the contributions of so many people who have helped the team since it was founded in 1989. It marks the final league fixture under the club’s current guise of Stockport County Ladies, before this summer’s name change to Stockport County Women.
“The aspiration for us is to get to WSL2 in three years’ time,” Neville says. “It’s going to be a tough task. [Winning promotion from] tier four and tier three is really, really difficult. We’re going to take over the pathway here as well, so we have now 12 months to really start to build the academy structure around girls’ sport in Stockport.
“My job here is also to make Stockport the place where people want to play football and women want to play football and that’s what I want to get out of this job, that you know in a few years’ time we’re actually bringing through Stockfordians.”
In many ways her position at Stockport feels a world away from Neville’s last jobas head coach at the Melbourne Mavericks netball team. “When I got back from Australia in September, I was a bit low on where to go. I felt that there was nothing in my sporting world at that moment, in netball, that really drove that challenge, really created something that I wanted to move into.
“[Here] I’m absolutely loving it. It’s just a huge role, but a really exciting one as well. I think the real challenge for me was getting on top of all the logistics and administration, the governance. You want to know what’s happening. You don’t want to make mistakes.
“So surrounding myself with people who can give me great advice is really important as well. I’m getting sort of on top. I’m definitely not there yet, but there’s so much for me to learn. But I also feel that I’ve had so much support from the other clubs in the area as well.”
Neville has visited clubs all the way down to tier five, to observe and learn best practices. She hopes Stockport will transition from training once or twice a week to – in a few years – being fully professional. “You can’t build a mountain in one day,” she adds.
“To create careers, and a future for women’s sport, I have a part to play in that. Now, obviously it’s not in netball at the moment, but why can’t that be in any sport? I feel that is my role of this club, is to create a future in sport. To give someone an opportunity or a future to aspire to is something that is really, really important to me.
“I feel as though, if I had grown up now, I probably would have gone into football [rather than netball]. I used to go to every home and away game for Manchester United; It was the only exposure I ever had to sport. And it was only randomly I used to go to an international for netball, I never ever went and watched it apart from if my mum was playing.
“I still wind people up with the terminology of what I use but now I try to explain stuff but I feel that my job is not to coach – my job is to bring in the best person to be able to do that. But what I can do is I can put around them the best performance environments.
“I probably couldn’t coach the game, but I do know a good player. And there’s different things about them, their behaviours, the way they hold themselves, how they go on the pitch. I don’t need to know how to coach football, but I need to have a good understanding of the conversations that are going to happen around that. And I think that is something that I will challenge myself to be able to do better.”
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