​MONKTON MOVERS 4 - NEIL HARVEY

By Paul Wade

I thought my new editor had gone all Mystic Meg when she suggested I interview a professional football coach who was about to leave on a mission to Sub-Saharan Africa. How did she know it was the perfect assignment for a West African born football addict? Turns out she didn’t know - we just both got lucky! 

So with H2 pencil and anticipation both keenly sharpened and reporter’s notebook in hand, I press the magic button and the coffee machine gurgles into life….

Neil Harvey is a professional football coach who is about to exchange the delights of tropical Bishop Monkton for a summer of football as a volunteer coach in rural Zambia. The trip is not about unearthing the next generation of star footballers, it is much more interesting than that. 

I think everyone knows that sport often talks of hope-hoping to win, hoping to do your best-but  what I am about to fully realise is that the sporting language of hope can be much more subtle and important. 

For a football coach, Neil’s back story surprises me. ‘Basketball was my first serious sport and as a Worthing lad I was offered a contract with the Brighton Bears but even English professional basketball is dominated by the Americans and I thought that securing a place at University was a better long term bet’.

‘I was offered a place at St Mary’s Twickenham for a course called ‘Human Movement Studies’’. He then laughs because he knows that I will never have heard of ‘Human Movement Studies’ and I did begin to wonder what this course might actually involve. 

‘Basically it gave me the basis of being a sports coach and once I added a PGCE qualification later, it meant I could be a sports teacher’. 

Amongst other ruses to pay his way through University, he sold programmes pre-match at a number of London football clubs, including Chelsea. Straight forward enough, unless Leeds Utd. were in town. ‘If you sell programmes at Chelsea, selling spots are allocated on a first come first served basis. The earlier you got there the better the spot. The last ones to arrive had to sell programmes to the visiting fans. When Leeds were playing Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, all the programme sellers arrived at the stadium at the crack of dawn, because absolutely no one wanted to be in the away end. You needed a West Yorkshire accent to say anything, even ‘that will be 20p please’.  It was pretty scary stuff’. He still looks slightly haunted by the experience, so I assure him that Leeds fans are much more genteel these days. Or so I hear.

In his first year at University Neil also completed the FA Preliminary Coaching Course and learnt the basic language of football. This meant he could coach at grass roots level and in his first long summer holiday embarked on the first of what were to be seven tours of the US to do just that. ‘Every week the organisation I worked for used to send us to a different part of the US to run skills and coaching courses for youngsters. My first assignment was in Atlanta and the following week was a 12 hour drive away in Pennsylvania! We drove those long distances every week, but it was a great way of seeing the States, especially if you are in your early 20’s’.

What did he learn? ‘Boys and girls of that age just enjoy the basic processes of football. Warm up, skills practice and a game. So I learnt about communication, improvisation and organisation, but most importantly that if you can get the students to engage, they love it’. This, I imagine is a universal truth for all teachers.

After University and post PGCE, Neil and his wife Liz, (herself an artist and art tutor who now runs a successful studio in Grewelthorpe) then worked in international schools all around the world including spells in Cairo and Kuala Lumpur.

But it was the community football programmes, often sponsored by major clubs as part of their outreach programmes, that really grabbed his imagination. By now a freelance football coach, in 2007 he was asked to open a soccer school in Toulouse, South West France on behalf of Arsenal, who then suggested further opportunities, abroad in Bahrain and in the UK in Berkshire.

It is this conversation that leads us into talking about his upcoming Zambia trip. The charity he will be working with is called ‘Play it Forward’ where Neil will be building on previous assignments he undertook for other organisations in Ethiopia and Uganda. ’’Football’ has done some terrible things in Africa. So called agents have recruited young boys to Europe for ‘trials’ with major clubs, so they get on a plane to a strange country and frequently end up with no trial and a very dubious future. Many have been trapped and some finish up sleeping on the streets of cities like Paris.’ 

So what is the aim of the trip?

 ‘Half of the population of Zambia is aged 15 or under and the gap between the rich and poor is huge. If the country is to have a viable future, those young people need to be empowered. The great thing about running a community football programme is that it is less about improving skills and more about teaching the language of sport. Players learn the practicalities of teamwork, organisation and application - all are key life skills. For many, acquiring them represents a way forward in a very tough world. This is what makes running these programmes so worthwhile. Sport really does talk to them in a language they understand.

’It is giving both students and future coaches the tools so that they can generate their own confidence and self- belief, giving them real hope in life.’

Neatly put and as someone with both roots in Africa and a lifelong love of football, I wish him well.

For more on the organisation Neil is working with click

Neil’s trip is entirely self- funded and voluntary. If you would like to support the charity he will be working with please click