A Journey In & Out of "Full-Time" S&C
I was fortunate to have a really good internship in S&C, in what was soon to become the biggest University S&C staff department in the country, outside of Loughborough. Joel Brannigan, Suzi Newton, and Rich Eaton, all provided me with a fantastic learning experience in which I was very much learning on the job, whilst being exposed to a variety of athletes (both in terms of ability, training age, and sporting discipline). I had a really good relationship with the other interns (Jack Dent, and Sam Bacon) and although I was applying the academic knowledge that I was gaining on my MSc simultaneously, I learnt a lot about coaching, and interacting with the people I was entrusted to work with, and how to create an environment that encouraged development and engagement, as opposed to the x’s and o’s of sets and reps.
After that, I was successful in securing a part-time job within the S&C department at Northumbria University, as well as picking up a role with Sunderland Ladies Development Team. Within a year, that grew to a 0.75FT position at the university, plus a move to working with Sunderland’s first team Women, and giving ~25hrs per week to that role too (despite a 5hr per week contract), and 6months later, a full-time coaching role at the University, that allowed me to give up my bar job, and throw myself in to the 60-70hr working week across 2 jobs, as well as upholding commitments as a Teaching & Research Assistant within the Academic Faculty at Northumbria, when they were required.
At this time, I lived, breathed, ate, slept and drank all things S&C. I had found a career in which I felt I could genuinely help people pursue their sporting goals, I could build genuine relationships, could wear shorts to work, and had finally found my place in the old-saying “find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
Although I loved working at the University within the scholar system, and supporting a wide variety of athletes, my aim, like so many, lied with the “elite”. I wanted to work full-time in elite sport, and I had it in my mind that that was where all the best coaches were – which seems logical, best athletes need the best coaches right?
My only exposure to this environment at the time was with my work at Sunderland. The women’s team were competing in the Women’s Super League, the top flight, and expected to match up against the likes of Arsenal, Chelsea, and Manchester City, despite a considerable disparity in resource, funding, facilities, and staffing. Some of those players had international ambitions, and wanted to go to World Cups and Euro’s, others wanted to get the most they possibly could out of the game they loved, whilst also holding down full-time jobs in Education or Business. I felt that the players at the club deserved more than what they were getting, hence why I went well above and beyond to try and give them that, comfortably working over 500% of my contracted hours (for peanuts too by the way…), trying to build wellness and monitoring tools on Google Sheets, enhancing the programming design and support both in the gym, and on the grass despite no GPS units, and give those athletes the best chance of competing at the weekend, because somehow, that’s what they were expected to do. Which they did, finishing 5th in the WSL Spring Series (before the competition transitioned to a winter league, as it is now, aligned to the men’s calendar). Personally in this time, I hammered home my CPD – shadowing and speaking to other coaches, getting my UKSCA accreditation, seeking further post-graduate study in Performance Nutrition, with a determination to have a meaningful impact wherever I ended up.
I worked this loop for a while, applied to god knows how many jobs, and eventually, got what I wanted. Through a connection at the University, I had been put in contact with Matt Beard, former WSL winner, and coach of Liverpool & Chelsea, who at the time was coaching the Boston Breakers in the NWSL in America. The club were about to have something of an avalanche of investment, and after multiple conversations, Matt asked me to join his coaching staff around Christmas in 2017. After a lot of deliberation, I accepted, and was ready to move to the states, and throw myself into a full-time role at the top end of the sport.
I won’t bore you with the details, but despite handing in the notice on my apartment in Newcastle, and all but having my bags packed, the Boston Breakers folded just days after the draft, and the club, along with my impending opportunity, ceased to exist.
I didn’t quite realise it at the time, but this had a huge impact on me and my mental health and wellbeing. For the following months, I was in a really bad place, I was sleepwalking through days, I pushed people away from me, developed a real self-loathing, and although I continued to do my job, and put on a brave face at work, I found myself skulking back to my short-term flat-share and into an even darker hole than the back bedroom of that cosy student flat represented. Unquestionably the hardest period of my life, and probably the first time I really suffered with identity, with regards to who I am, or what I was, if I wasn’t the S&C coach I’d being pursuing since my third year at university.
Whilst I continued to apply for jobs, I eventually was passed a life line, and again, this time it came from Matt Beard. Although Sunderland were about to fall victim to the new criteria and minimum standards required to compete in the WSL (full-time players, staff, resources, facilities, player care etc), West Ham United were about to benefit from it. Through a successful bid, West Ham were admitted to the WSL, a lofty two-tier promotion on their previous standing, and Matt was due to become their new manager upon his return to England.
He asked me to join him, and with a complete blank slate, oversee the development of the physical performance program for the Women’s set up there. This was what I wanted, or at least what I thought I wanted, and an opportunity to finally go all-in with one job and carve out a programme that I was proud of, and an environment in which I wanted players to feel valued, respected, but also that they enjoyed being a part of.
So I moved to London in June 2018. The rest of the staff, and myself, all but two of which were new to the club, had the job of trying to build and set-up a full-time professional club, whilst simultaneously running one. So 7 new full-time members of staff, and 19 new players, spanning 10 different nationalities came together, in temporary facilities in the first instance, as we waited for our purpose built ones to be pulled together. We trained across two sites, used by the boys’ academy, for the first 5 weeks, before then moving in to the Rush Green Training Ground, shared by the Men’s Premier League Side.
The good thing about building a program like that from scratch, is that there is nothing before you, everything could be pieced together how I wanted it. The bad thing, is that there is nothing before you, and you literally have everything to do! I definitely enjoyed it though, and loved working with Matt, and the rest of the staff (two of which weirdly enough came from the same small secluded sea-side town as me), and most importantly, that group of players (which funnily enough, included my soon to be sister-in-law).
There was something really special about that first year in my mind, I was happy with how I was doing my job, the team found success, and made its way to the FA Cup Final at Wembley, in its first year in it’s professional existence. A final in which we fell short to Manchester City, but not without giving an excellent account of ourselves, but ultimately, with depth and quality showing. I often wonder that if more of that group had stayed together, would the club have had more success than what followed, as there was a unity and camaraderie within that group which I haven’t seen since, nor had I seen prior (but we’ll never know!). That said, there were definitely short-falls in that first year. The club had grossly overlooked fundamental parts of providing a professional structure to a squad, and we found ourselves really scraping together certain elements, and I found myself responsible for things that were well outside of my job description. I also slipped into old habits in some respects, gathering together things I felt were needed of my own accord to skip the delay of jumping through certain procedural hoops that often led to dead ends anyway – some of which even meant a dent to my own pocket at times.
At the end of that first season, I went away to Spain with my girlfriend (now Fiance) and for the first time in 4-5 years, I had a ten-day period in which I didn’t need to check my phone, or my e-mails (Matt demanded we all have “off-grid” weeks in the off-season to get some mental rest, which was nice as it doesn’t happen everywhere!). I laid on a beach, and specifically remember the moment in which the penny dropped for me. I’d had a great year in the job, it had its challenges but I loved being on the grass and in the gym, I loved the staff, but if I wanted another ten days to myself with a complete break, I’d need to wait til next June (obviously didn’t forsee Covid which would’ve robbed me even of that!). It was in that moment I realised I needed to change something, although I wasn’t exactly sure what, or how.
After my return, everything took off again. A big turnaround in players meant chasing former clubs for information, plus planning and executing an effective pre-season program, and again, emerging myself back into a minimum 6-day working week. Again, I enjoyed the work for the most part, but after the penny had dropped just months before, it remained in my thinking prominently.
It started to bother me more that I wasn’t really held accountable to anything, and although I always did everything to my absolute best, I reported in to no one, and if I’d just start programming german volume training two-times per week, despite some rough conversations with the medical staff, there was nothing to stop me doing so. We had recruited an excellent intern in Amy Pownall, who at the time was doing a working placement between her 2nd and 3rd year at undergraduate level, and I encouraged her to be critical and open-minded in equal measure, and that was as close as I got to someone picking my thinking apart. I tried to push for an expansion to the department, and even tried to sculpt more of a hands-off management role for myself, but to no avail as the club still seemed to be coming to terms with the oversight it had fallen victim of before that. My frustration started to build at the “other” jobs I found myself doing, rocking up at 7am to collect a Sainsbury’s order, to stock our kitchenette in the clubhouse really started to lose it’s glamour. I fell into a trap, I felt like I was sleep-walking through work. As I said, I still gave it my all, but felt myself asking “what’s the point” on an almost daily basis. I feared that professional stagnation was inevitable and decided that I needed to change something, and that having got to where I always wanted to get to, perhaps it wasn’t what I wanted, nor needed at all. From a financial stand-point, I’d say I was fairly well remunerated for the role, given the industry standard – but when I broke it down to the hours I was giving to the job, it worked out a little under £12.50 per hour. This cut even deeper when I’d train at my local gym and see some cowboy personal trainers charging £60 per hour, to wing sessions and eat their meal prep, whilst mis-counting burpees for paying customers. I sought the help of John Noonan, someone that had moved away from Everton FC himself to work for himself, and his guidance, support and friendship is something I’ll always be incredibly grateful for. Felt like mentorship could really help me - give me clarity, and external opinion, and give me an honest soundboard to help me path a way forward.
When I moved to London I looked forward to reconnecting with friends I’d made at Uni that lived down here, and spending more time with my Brother who lived in West London, but I could count on one hand the amount of times I saw them in that first 16months or so. When your social life is confined to a Monday afternoon, the odd short-notice weekend break, and 3 weeks in June, it illuminates the mystery of why so many in this profession burn-out. Work:Life balance was merely a unattainable concept for me.
Around this time, I read The Passion Paradox, by Steve Magness and Brad Stuhlberg, and a book has never resonated with me more profoundly. It taught me to self-distance, and gather some perspective via self-awareness, and to actually assess what I wanted, who I was, and what would actually fulfil me. It also helped me realise that S&C and sport, was a passion of mine, but nothing more than that.
I am Paul Parker and I am…. A task that I first came across thanks to Sam Portland. For years, I’d have finished that sentence with “a strength and conditioning coach”. But I’d have been right swatted away. That is not who I am at all, it is merely what I do. I am a person that is infinitely curious, compassionate, and connected to trying to help other people. Sport is simply a passion of mine in which I am able to attach my character to. Once I realised that, I suddenly became open to so much more. I would be happy so long as I was able to apply my character and my personality, to whatever it is I’m doing, sport, business, charity, hospitality – I don’t think it would matter so long as those elements were satisfied. If your identity is your profession, then what happens when you’re sacked, or made redundant? It is no wonder so many ex-athletes suffer with mental health difficulties upon retiring, as they’ve spent so long living, and being treated, as nothing more than a pawn in the sport they participate in. Once removed from that, just the shell remains, unless you can get a grip and a handle on the who. It’s also why I think so many S&C coaches are so attached to their programmes. They attach their self-worth to the success of their training blocks and the improvements in MAS and CMJ scores, and it leads to a vicious internal cycle in which they measure personal success on these factors that whether you like it or not, are far more influenced by other elements often out of our control. I see coaches arguing about training methodologies as if someone has berated their family members, and I actually understand why. They take it as a personal attack because their entire being is their role and therefore they see the exercises they choose, the training week they build, the drills they design, as a direct representation of themselves, because they’ve lost touch of everything else they are (deep right?)
That said, I decided to stay in sport, and at the end of 2019, handed in my notice, to launch my own business in early 2020. Despite doing so just 6 weeks before the first lockdown (terrible timing to go self-employed… no proof of income meant no government support) I was able to build a successful business in my first year, and surpass my income from my final year at West Ham, despite working roughly half the hours.
The satisfaction working for myself has given me is enormous, and although I am not oblivious to the fact that my success to date probably wouldn’t have happened without the years of graft that preceded it, it’s hard not to wish I had done it sooner. I am so incredibly grateful for everyone I’m entrusted with working with. Even more so now, as they are making the choice to work with me. Working at a club almost guarantees you’re going to have at least a couple in the squad that just don’t want to be there when it comes to “S&C”, and you spend your time trying to drive autonomy and pull some buy-in where you can. I am so grateful to the people that part with their earned income to seek my service, and it drives me even more to offer the very best version of myself I can. I’m undoubtedly a better practitioner now, even though the service I offer has changed massively. Now I work with a really wide spread variety of people, from the elite international competitor, to the general population – and I would’ve once turned my nose up at “PT” with the general public, I would slap that version of myself now. Working with anyone that is invested in improving is a privilege I don’t take for granted, and forming working relationships with those I work for that just want to improve their park-run time, or rid their lower back pain, gives me an equal amount of satisfaction to those competing for gold medals, and 3 points to top the table at the weekend.
Working in football. I do miss it, working in football is great. Being out on the grass with the players every day, being in the gym, building those relationships and getting to know the people behind each player, is something I’ll always miss. I certainly would never say never, as although I have intentions for where I want to take PRPerformance in the next five years, I am by no means attached to them – but the likelihood of me returning to full-time football seems slim at this stage, unless it was a role which I was very much able to sculpt and carve out for myself. This is obviously unlikely, as in such a heavily saturated market, unfortunately there is always going to be an enormous influx of applications for any role that offers a tracksuit with your initials on, and day-to-day working, that does genuinely bring a lot of satisfaction at times!
I’m so fortunate to have had the ‘career’ I’ve had to date. I’ve made friends for life, and many of those I now consider my best friends, are people I met as either a colleague, or as their coach (I don’t completely buy in to the “you can’t be friends with athletes narrative”). I’ve been able to travel to places I wouldn’t have otherwise, and as I said, I’ve been able to positively influence people’s experiences in sport and life, which is pretty cool. In the mean time, I’ll continue to work with whoever wants my support, as well as continuing to nurture the consultancy relationships I’ve forged in the last 12 months, whilst remaining open to whatever may or may not come next! So long as I keep a handle on the who I am, and can continue to put my, and my families happiness at the forefront (a concept I once thought was selfish!), then I’ll be just fine.
Thanks for reading.
Paul
