I’m incredibly fortunate and very grateful that I get to work with my friends on a daily basis. At FFF HQ the vast majority of us have known each other for many years and worked together before. We really are like a family, of course there’s the odd disagreement but that’s normal for any family and so important that we challenge each other to develop and improve.
The guy I want to talk about today is my mate Daz (Darryl Coakley). He is our launch specialist at the FFF, now I think you’ll agree that’s a pretty cool job title? In fact I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard that job title before which if I’m right makes Daz the best in the world at his job by default! But even if I’m wrong (it does happen quite often!) I think he’d still be the best at what he does. The reason for this is he cares, and always goes above and beyond to help people.
That’s always been the case with Daz ever since I first met him many years ago now when we worked together at Cambridge United, he was the Academy Psychologist having just completed a degree in sports psychology and I’d just started my first job in the ‘real world’ away from being a footballer player. In our early conversations it was obvious Daz was an incredibly intelligent guy but what stuck out most about him was how invested he was in every conversation and how much he cared and listened to what was being said to him.
He went on to become the mental health officer at the club along with his role in the Academy, this entailed delivering workshops at local schools to support the children learning about their mental health. This is a subject that interests me greatly and led me to go along with Daz on a number of occasions to see the work he was doing. You won’t be surprised to hear it was fantastic and the positive impact he was having with the young people of Cambridge was immense.
A few years later the Football Fun Factory franchise was born and Daz was one of our early adopters coming onboard as a Head Coach running programmes in his local community. Whilst doing this he was also working with olympic athletes as a lead psychologist at the British Institute of Sport. After building his community and making a huge impact on the lives of children in his local area the opportunity to come and work at Head Office came about with Daz taking up a role to support our newest recruits through the planning and launch of their business.
Daz’s skill set was exactly what was needed! Now nearly two years into the role the impact he has made has been incredible and the feedback we’ve received from those he has worked with has been glowing to say the least! But that’s not surprising in the slightest because above all else Daz is a great person who cares so much about helping them achieve amazing results!
Last July we held our inaugural franchise conference, this event saw us bring together a number of our FFF Head Coaches for a day of
What’s all this about football introducing a new Blue Card that will see players sin-binned for ten minutes if they receive one? At the FFF
