There is a reason Forest Green Rovers’ home, in Nailsworth, a market town in the Cotswolds, is on Another Way. The League Two club do things differently, whether wearing kits made of bamboo and coffee grounds, having a bee hive on the roof of their main stand to encourage pollination or travelling by zero-emissions vehicles. They even use away fans’ urine to fertilise their organic pitch. But on Wednesday evening they took another unprecedented step, as Hannah Dingley took caretaker charge of their first pre-season friendly, becoming the first woman to lead a professional English men’s team and, inadvertently, a trailblazer for countless girls and women.
“I am the first and it’s great but I don’t want to be the first and the only,” Dingley said afterwards. A groundbreaking night, but it is still far from a level playing field. But Dingley, who became the first academy manager in men’s football with Forest Green in 2019, has long known that. As a child her gender meant she was unable to play the game she loved for a team for about five years.
Dingley grew up in Llansteffan, a village in Carmarthenshire, south Wales, and began kicking a football about with her older brother and other boys in the park at the age of five. She played in school teams but had to stop aged 11 because girls were prohibited from being in boys’ teams. She recalls girls at secondary school being made to play netball and hockey instead. There were no girls’ football teams in the area until joining Carmarthen Town aged 16. At college in Llanelli, she was the only girl to enrol on a BTEC in football studies.
But it was at the age of 14, while on work experience with Swansea City, that she realised she wanted to pursue a career in the sport. At the time John Hollins, the former Chelsea captain who died last month, was the manager, Swansea played at the Vetch Field, their old stadium adjacent to a prison, and even the most menial tasks, sticking envelopes and making tea, stirred excitement for Dingley. “When Match of the Day was on, it was the one day of the week that we were allowed to stay up late,” she said when recently describing her childhood. “When the World Cup was on, we’d get good food in and little snacks and could sit around and watch the football.”
Dale Vince, the Forest Green owner, stressed that Dingley was the best-qualified coach at the club to take over on an interim basis after the sacking of Duncan Ferguson. Dingley has a Uefa pro licence, the highest coaching qualification, a League Managers Association diploma, various Football Association youth awards and is a qualified teacher. She was a course leader at Loughborough University, where she completed a degree and a master’s, and later a senior lecturer in sports coaching practice at the University of Wolverhampton.
At that point she was juggling teaching with leading on the sidelines at the non-league men’s sides Leicester Nirvana FC, Gresley Rovers and Shepshed Dynamo, working alongside Damion Beckford-Quailey on a voluntary basis across six years. She also travelled to Uganda to help run a project that used football as a way of teaching youngsters about HIV and Aids.
“As soon as she came in I loved her ideas and I could see that she would go far,” Beckford-Quailey says. “We were a very diverse club at Leicester Nirvana, a multicultural club; we didn’t look at whether you’re female, Asian, black or white. She came in, earned the respect from the lads and that was it. I promoted her to assistant manager.”
It is fair to say Dingley has faced numerous challenges. In 2013, a former opposition manager, Lee Ashcroft, was given a 10-match ban by the FA for abusing Dingley during a match while she was at Gresley. There was the time she was almost turned away from a non-league game because the club thought she could not possibly be part of the visiting team. Then there are the toe-curling stories of Dingley being mistaken for a physio or sports scientist.
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“That was standard procedure, even with the referees and the officials,” Beckford-Quailey says. “‘Can you tell your physio to sit down?’ It was unheard of for a female to be an assistant manager or even involved in men’s football, especially in non-league. She started from the bottom, at step five, and has worked her way up. Her journey is fantastic.”
Dingley also coached part-time at Burton Albion and was later appointed head of coaching at the Football League club’s academy in a full-time role in 2016. “She would always be really respectful, empathetic and understanding to people who would say: ‘Are you the physio?’” says Dingley’s former academy manager at Burton, Dan Robinson. “She wouldn’t snap at them and would be quite skilful about the way she steered the conversation. She never let that get to her. She’s quite a calm and relaxed person – she’s not a shouter or someone that would be quite reactive.”
Dingley is adamant that, regardless of gender, the Forest Green players, relegated last season, merely want direction, good coaching and to feel prepared for the start of the league season at home to Salford City in less than a month. “I 100% agree,” Beckford-Quailey says, rowing back to their days together in inner-city Leicester. “She wasn’t nervous, she was very positive in the sessions. You would understand if she was a bit fragile or tentative, but she wasn’t. I think when she would have first rocked up the players would have been a bit sceptical. But the way she came across in the sessions demanded respect. She earned the right to be there. They loved her.”
On Wednesday Dingley’s partner, Mike Whitlow, the former Leicester City defender, strolled around the terraces pre-match with their dog, understandably reluctant to get caught up in the fuss. Dingley, who declined to apply for the manager’s job last year, skirted around whether she wants the role on a permanent basis, insisting these are early days. Her first training session in charge was on Thursday.
“I am really glad for her and hopefully it sets an example for a lot more females and diverse people in the game that they can break barriers,” Beckford-Quailey says. The appointment last month of Lydia Bedford as the first female Under-18s men’s head coach, at Brentford, was another positive step.
Even Vince, a hippie entrepreneur au fait with the intrigue and attention that comes with being the mouthpiece of the only certified vegan club in the world, expressed surprise at the level of interest in what, he insists, was an accidental media storm. “We have to make it the norm, we have to make it not this,” Dingley said on Tuesday, looking back at 30 thirsty reporters – Forest Green decided to cap numbers such was the interest – in a packed presidential suite at the Oakfield Stadium, home to eighth-tier Melksham Town. “And this is the start of that,” Vince added.
