Mid-30s player retrains with coach to improve at football after 15 years

Poppy Noor, who says she has played football for 15 years but remains "comically awful", hired coach Wayne Phillips to try to change her game in her mid-30s because she loves playing and wanted to improve.

Phillips broke ability into physicality, technical skill, social attributes and psychology and set a schedule of weekly one-on-one coaching, group training and matches. Early sessions focused on drills such as the Cruyff turn, step-overs, receiving the ball on the back foot and the reverse pass; Noor describes initially failing at many of these basics and feeling that training had made her seem worse in matches.

Phillips framed setbacks as part of the process: "You're reinventing yourself," and "The process of improving requires setbacks." He also warned about negative self-talk: "The way you talk to yourself, it’s invasive." After adjusting fundamentals and practicing, Noor says she began to improve, scoring a header in a group session and stringing together tricks in one-on-one work, prompting Phillips to tell her, "Every action you made today was clean."

Noor notes time was a constraint—"I was seven months out from giving birth to my second child when I contacted him, still breastfeeding"—but after Phillips watched her final supervised match she felt accomplished. She leaves the experiment with some improvement but, as she writes, only a tentative sense that "maybe – just maybe! – I did it."

Key Topics

Sports, Poppy Noor, Wayne Phillips, Somers Town, Cruyff Turn, Women's Football