There were lots of times, growing up, when Shelley Kerr was told football wasn’t for girls. She never listened, and her achievements say it all: former player, former Scotland captain, and the first female coach to manage a senior men’s team. Not that she’s keen on being referred to as a female coach, nor a female footballer.
“I think I’m just a footballer,” she says. “I’ve worked in the women’s and the men’s game and I just see myself as a coach.”
The youngest of four, Kerr and her two brothers and sister were all sporty, but football was her passion. “I think I was four or five when I began kicking a ball. I was brought up in a small village and a girl playing football wasn’t the done thing back then. At that time, there was no infrastructure or pathway for girls to play football.”
She played in her primary school team, but when she got to secondary school she wasn’t allowed to. Instead, she had to join a women’s team, Edinburgh Dynamo, where most of the players were twice her age. “It was a real challenge,” she says. “But I’ve always had that character, to define my own kind of thing.”
That determination has often come in useful – she worked full time for an electronics company during her playing career, while bringing up her daughter. She must have looked at the men’s game, with its millionaire stars, and felt frustrated. “You can only control what you can do yourself,” she says. “There were times when it would have been nice to get more financial support, but I’m a great believer in making the best of your situation.”
The women’s game is changing, and becoming more popular. England’s friendly against Germany last season drew record crowds. Kerr’s daughter Christie is also a footballer and plays for her mother’s former club, Spartans. Kerr, who now manages the men’s team at Stirling University, says she didn’t push Christie into football; she wanted her to play tennis, but when her daughter was growing up, the courts were too far away. “I guess she was around football so much, she developed a passion for it, too.”
How do you instil a love of sport in a child? “As a parent, you want them to be physically active. If you, as a parent, have a passion for sport then your kids tend to feed off that.” It has to be a positive experience, she says, with praise for effort, not one rife with pressure. “I think you can be overpowering as a parent and hopefully I wasn’t like that,” she says. “Christie grew up watching me play so she would see how competitive I was. The focus should be on fun and trying to develop yourself to whatever level you want to reach.”
Are they competitive with each other? “Yes,” she laughs. And not just in sport: it’s there when they play board games, or watch TV quiz shows. The one thing, perhaps strangely, this former Scotland international and her footballing daughter don’t do much together is play football.
“We have the odd kickabout in the back garden,” she says, “but it’s for fun rather than anything serious.”
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