Grice puts family first as he departs USP role
Tom Grice knew his time as US Portsmouth manager was coming to an end when he wasn’t feeling a buzz for next season.
The 38-year-old has stepped down after just one year in the Victory Stadium hot-seat.
Grice said he had no intentions of quitting when the 2021/22 Wessex League Premier Division campaign ended last month, but a period of ‘deep reflection’ has seen him change his mind.
Primarily, he wants to spend more time with his 20-month-old daughter Sienna rather than being immersed in the weekly regime of training and matches.
‘When we played our last game at Bournemouth (in mid-April) I was completely fine, thinking ahead to next season,’ Grice told The News.
‘But I’ve had a month now with no football and I’ve cherished the time I’ve spent with my daughter. Now I’m thinking ‘there’s only a month left and then pre-season starts’ and I don’t want that month to end. I shouldn’t be feeling like that, it should be ‘football’s back - happy days!’.
‘But I wasn’t getting that feeling and that’s when I knew I had to make this decision. I should have made it at the end of last season, but I wasn’t feeling like I do now.
‘I can always come back to football; I can’t rewind the time I’ve missed with my daughter. I feel like I’m going to blink and she’ll be fully grown up, and I don’t want to miss that time.
‘I know I’ve only done a season, but I don’t care what other people think - it’s important for me to spend time with my daughter. I’m going to put her first for once.’
Grice said the weekly toll on his time during last season wasn’t helped by a lack of bodies at US. ‘On the management side, it was just me, Steve Weston and Tom Jeffes, who was still playing. At other clubs there’s two/ three/four other backroom people helping. At US it’s not like that.
‘I’m going to stay at the club in some role. Perhaps I can give the support to the next manager that I didn’t get.
‘Perhaps I can go and watch some forthcoming opposition play in midweek and provide a dossier.
‘Perhaps I could be some kind of conduit between the reserves and the first team, to make sure there’s a clear pathway between the two.’
US ended their first ever season at step 5 of the nonleague pyramid fifth from bottom, though they would have been finished a place higher had they not had three points deducted for fielding an ineligible player.
Tipped for relegation by many before a ball had been kicked, due to the mass exodus of players following former boss Glenn Turnbull to Moneyfields, US were never dragged into a battle to stay up.
‘Everyone wrote us off in pre-season, there was talk among some managers of us 100 per cent getting relegated,’ said Grice.
‘But by Christmas it was fairly obvious we wouldn’t be relegated. Ultimately, at the start of the season we set out to stay up and we did that. With the resources we had, it’s got to go down as a success.
‘There were high points, there were low points. Losing 6-1 at Fareham was a particular low point.’