Richard Foster is a youth team manager and coach at Harrogate Railway FC and also acts as the club's child welfare officer. He writes about the psychological effects of the two lockdowns on the club's youngsters.

Early 2020 seems so long ago now. After travelling to Bedale, Catterick and a few others, we started to see some progress and as a team we were pleased with the performances and the results.

But as the weeks went by we could see and hear the chatter around covid growing. At board level, we were speculating and hypothesising what this meant for football, but generally we were relaxed. Then bang... we thought it might not be all over, but it most certainly was.

Boris signalling the first national lockdown triggered a catastrophic ripple effect through the grassroots football community which we are still suffering from today.

Before we could return we had many Zoom calls, fallings out, healthy debates, changes to policy and insurance, and a huge amount of red tape to negotiate along the way. It's been truly stressful for all involved.

'Social and psychological regression'

When we had the all-clear, we had all the sanitiser a club needed, buckets of disinfectant for the balls and our own apps for track and trace. Three months out, that’s all it was ,and if you’d asked me before “what would happen if you locked children up for three months with their games console?”, I’d have said they would have loved it and been in their element.

What I actually found on a large scale was social and psychological regression. This was massive as the two areas are 50% of a player's game and, if I’m being completely honest, I was stumped. I had spent over a year coaching a team that played up a year and drew little significance from our results: they were more focused on the objectives, communication and improving their game.

What I got back was a team that had interactions limited to a microphone on a headset and a need to win that I’d never seen from them before. Essentially, the result has become emotive, as it is with gaming on a console.

These are challenges I’ve never faced and it has been interesting to coach these things out of them, but I can say that as we enter 2021, the team are back to their best and have been challenging some of the best teams a year above them. So the short-term effects of the lockdown were obvious on the players, but the long term effect of grassroots football is yet to be determined.

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Focusing on the positives

The positives are that as a club we are in a better position financially and asset-wise than we were pre-covid. We have a progressive chairman in James Loundoun who has worked tirelessly, along with our secretary Dave Martin.

The first team have seen an uplift in fortunes too: Mick, Josh and Ryan have been a breath of fresh air and have helped keep the relationship between the juniors and the seniors strong.

I would like to say thanks to all involved in the grassroots community. This has been an extremely difficult year and we have pulled together to keep it going. I wouldn’t be here still if it wasn’t for the parents and players!

I wish them all good luck for 2021.