Q&A with Scotland Under-19s Women's Head Coach
Tell us about your coaching journey and how you have developed since you first started?
I was a player for a long time, playing for Scotland for 18 years and collecting 141 caps.
During that time my coaching journey started, as I was really keen on learning how I could become a coach.
As I came towards the end of my career I started to be involved in coaching with the youth national teams.
I took up the post at the National Performance Academy in 2009, coaching some of our talented under-19 players and national team players for five years.
In that time I also gained my ‘A’ Licence and coached the under-17s. I was mentored in that role for the first year by Neil MacKintosh who I absolutely loved working with.
He’s a good guy and I learned a lot from him in that short spell.
After that I was offered the chance to be the under-15/16 and 17s national coach.
In the last three months I’ve taken on the role of under-19s head coach and I’m also going through my Pro Licence with the Scottish FA Coach Education department.
What does your job entail and where are you based?
I’m mainly based at Oriam but I come to Hampden regularly as well.
My job is two-fold because as well as being under-19s national coach I’m also the manager of the Performance Pathway.
We have regional squads across the country with 240 players and my job is to manage that programme.
Right now I am writing a curriculum for that programme so that we can have something that is rolled out to all our players every week.
I am also doing an evaluation of the programme to see where we can take it in 2018.
It’s an exciting time.
What is the average yearly schedule with the Scotland Women’s Under-19s?
At the start of the year we have a training camp in January where we will decide which players we take to another camp in La Manga, where we have the chance to play other nations.
We have qualified for the Elite Round and we’ll be hosting that tournament.
If we qualify we’d be playing in the finals which is always our aim.
The age group then changes so we would start again with a training camp and have a double header of friendlies before beginning the qualification journey again.