Tom has a thirst for learning
Ambitious Elmes seeks highest UEFA coaching badge
WHEN THE list of participants in the UEFA Pro Licence 2020’22 were announced recently, a number of familiar names were included.
Most sports fans in this country will know who John O’Shea is, and those who follow football a little closer will know of Andy Keogh and Carlo Cudicini, but for people in Wexford one name stands out: Tom Elmes.
The Birmingham native was always a bit of a cult hero around Ferrycarrig Park for the four goals he scored for Wexford Youths in the 2012 season-opening 6-0 win against Waterford, but times change.
Nowadays more people are familiar with Elmes as manager of Wexford Youths Women. In two seasons the I.T. Carlow graduate has helped the club earn four pieces of silverware, including the 2018 league title, plus the FAI Senior Cup in the last two campaigns.
Given his experience and success, Elmes is the type of candidate that will be amongst the front runners for the Irish job whenever the current national team manager, Vera Pauw, steps aside, but to eventually move on Elmes will need that Pro Licence.
When trying to achieve a Pro Licence, the hard work doesn’t start now, it has been going on for quite some time. There was a rigorous selection process just to get to this point, with a lot of effort involved just to make the chosen 20.
‘It’s a three-tier process,’ Elmes outlined. ‘So, the first part is you complete assignments. You complete four assignments that have to be submitted by a certain date, and a lot of work goes into them.
‘Then you have to attend an interview, you sit in an interview with three members of the high performance department. Then you attend a third day and complete an exam, it’s quite a detailed, specific exam, and then obviously you await the news.
‘There was 90 that applied for this Pro Licence and I was fortunate enough to be selected in the 20 that are going forward for it.’
It has taken over a decade for Elmes to get from the starting point of his coaching career to the stage where, if successful, he will become a member of an exclusive club of around one hundred in the country that hold the highest coaching badge UEFA offers.
Great journeys often start from humble beginnings, and Elmes is no different. ‘It was actually when I was taking a break from Wexford Youths,’ he explained.
‘My plan was to move back to the U.K., and John Flood asked me would I come out and play with Duncannon while I was waiting and getting everything organised. I said “yeah, no problem”.
‘I went back and signed with them for that season, and I think it was midway through the season and he just came into the dressing-room after one of the games and said, “lads, we need someone to give a dig out with our Under-12’s”.
‘I just thought at the time it might be something I was interested in. I said I’ll give a dig out and I just started doing sessions that I had remembered I’d done at clubs with previous coaches, and the lads really enjoyed them.
‘I was very young and naive still but they were enjoyable sessions and I was enjoying delivering them as well.
‘There was a senior intro you could do at the time, I think it was Kickstart 1 and 2 course over a longer period. The club put us on a senior intro, I did that and again that kind of kept the fire burning, I really enjoyed that.
‘There’s a lot more to this than I realised at the start, there’s a lot more thought goes behind it and a lot more planning and organising. That kind of changed my approach towards it for a while, I think that was probably in 2008.’
Elmes completed that and ended up going to I.T. Carlow to do a new course that would aid his coaching progression. However, a stroke of luck never hurts, and Tom got it with the application process.
‘I had applied for courses in Waterford and missed the C.A.O., only for Carlow being a new course, there was no C.A.O. entries, it was only application and assessment.
‘I was fortunate to get on the course. Had I not got on that course would I have advanced as quick as I had or would I have even advanced at all?’
Having completed his Youth Cert., Elmes started his UEFA B early in I.T. Carlow, and this provided a big coaching eye-opener for him, as he explained. ‘The UEFA B for me was the first time I really started looking at the game from a bigger picture.
‘More players involved, more information, I completed that in Johnstown House in Enfield, that was really, really enjoyable. There was a couple of ex-League of Ireland players involved and a lot of different personalties and people from different backgrounds.
‘It was a really good learning environment, I think that was in 2011 I would have completed that. From then on I was back playing for a while and coaching, I felt like I kind of had the tools I wanted at the time, I felt I had enough at the time.
‘I was playing and coaching on the side. The UEFA A at the time felt like it would have needed a lot of investment and a lot of time. I probably wasn’t ready for that, I just carried on coaching.
‘I was working with the League of Ireland Under-19s in Wexford Youths. I started up my own academy at weekends and got coaching with that, again that was very grassroots based, I think I was well equipped for that at the time.’
The transformation from outof-work builder to a career within education of a sport he loved was finalised when Elmes was employed by I.T. Carlow in 2015. He began work on his UEFA A licence the following year and completed it in 2017.
‘The A licence then opens up more doors and broadens up your thought process a little bit,’ Tom said. ‘How you think about the game, other areas that might be involved as a coach and a manager. You can start to prepare yourself a little more with a little bit more detail.
‘Again lots of different personalities [were] on the course, you network and build relationships. In 2018, I started with Wexford Youths Women and [applied] everything I learned on the UEFA A. You’re obviously encouraged to always be learning, and I continued down that way.
‘I completed my MSc in Belfast as well, in sports development coaching, that’s really good in terms of, they always encouraged us to think critically, obviously look at things and ask why and how. I think as a coach that’s a big thing as well, so that helped me.
‘I just found all the tools I had, I had gained from the UEFA A, helped me with the women in terms of what we were trying to do. I was just thinking to myself how can I advance my career and my profession.
‘I just got to a stage, a position now, where I wanted to do more and know more. I said I’d throw my hat in the ring for the Pro Licence.’
Expectations from the course may centre around the end results, but to get there it helps that the group can gel. To get the best out of the experience, Elmes believes it’s best when everyone is open to others’ experiences and influences.
‘I think sometimes you go into these courses and a lot of people want to give you their opinion on things,’ he said.
‘I think the best environment is when it’s shared. Some of these guys like Carlo Cudicini and Andy Keogh and people like that, they will be coming and bringing real-life experiences to the table from working in the elite game.
‘But again, someone like myself will be able to bring experiences to the table that neither of those would ever have came across as well, just because of the environment that I work in. Some of what I’ll bring to it, they’ll benefit from, and no doubt some of what they bring to the table, I’ll benefit from.
‘The first thing you do is, you always look down the list and look for a good group of guys and girls on it. You want to have that tight-knit group where everyone is happy to share that information, share their learning, share their experiences.
‘I think a lot of what the Pro Licence is about is that, it’s about exposing you to environments and exposing you to other people who are coming from a different environment and have had different learnings and experience, and I think that’s what’s important about it.’
Planning for it is a little difficult at the moment given that, as Elmes said, ‘the competencies do cover the coaching of elite players in eleven v. eleven games, working with background staff in and around training sessions’.
With his own team, like everyone else, currently out of action, all he can do at the moment is work towards the potential return date of the Women’s National League in late June.
‘The players, they just completed a six-week pre-season, that was contact time and prior to that they have been completing programmes. They had done fitness testing, a number of weeks had gone into it.
‘The week prior to the season starting you hear things are closing down, and I think you start to realise how serious this is. You understand it and everyone understands it, but there is a disappointment to it.
‘To be fair, the players have been great and we have a great link with I.T. Carlow and their sports science up there. The girls are all on the apps and the programmes are all uploaded and updated for them regularly.
‘We use Zoom, we do a lot of team meetings on zoom, whether that’s physical or that’s tactical meetings, so it’s all about staying in contact, make sure everyone’s okay.
‘First of all we are promoting that mentally they stay healthy in terms of getting exercise in, keeping good.
‘Then we try keep it relative to what we want to achieve with them, so when we do come back into training they are ready to go and we start off from a good position and on the front foot really, which is what we are looking for at the minute, to keep them all motivated.’