110 Simon Millington:Can sport prevent or reduce offending?

Can sport prevent young people from offending? Do elite footballing academies exploit children? Simon is the founder of Delamill Tutoring which offers Mental Health 1st Aid training and training in Mental Health Awareness & Sports Leadership. He is a UEFA A licence football coach who has worked for Portsmouth FC, Fulham FC and more recently for The FA as a Coach Developer and has worked as a Youth worker for Portsmouth City Council.

 

Simon Millington is a football coach educator and coach developer for The FA who is passionate about utilising sport as a vehicle for social change.

Simon was born in Birmingham but moved to Portsmouth after his parents separated and his father then took his own life.

Simon has used these challenges in his formative years to drive himself to be the best that he can be. However, it wasn’t all was like this and Simon was in trouble with the police for petty crime during his late adolescents.

It was these experiences that drove Simon to change his lifestyle and peer group and get into football as a part-time coach.

Simon worked within social inclusion projects within Portsmouth where he grew up because he wanted to try and support young people to not stray into criminality and to take more positive steps to gain employment.

Simon gained all the necessary football coaching qualifications and moved to the borough of Lambeth in London where he followed his passion for supporting young people and coaches from disadvantaged backgrounds. He also completed an Open University Foundation degree in Sports coaching to formalise his knowledge and to deepen his understanding of sports coaching and the different elements.

He then went back to Portsmouth to work for the local authority overseeing their sports provision in the local youth clubs and housing estates across the city. This youth work role provided Simon with invaluable knowledge and skills for supporting adolescents through their teens, and helped him to further understand the challenges teenagers face.

Simon then returned to London to take a role with The FA that was created to target teenage boys and girls who had dropped out of football. It was at this time that Simon first started delivering coaching courses to grassroots football clubs. This developed into Simon’s dream role because he could influence greater numbers of people to embed a player centred approach to coaching and player development. Simon also completed a PGCE with Worcester Uni in sports coaching and he developed an even deeper understanding of learning and development. This confirmed to Simon that he his experience of coach education wasn’t best practice, and it helped him further refine how he started to develop the coaches he worked with.

1n 2019 Simon close friend died from suicide and this really affected Simon and inspired him to utilise hid tutoring skills to teach Mental Health 1^st aid courses. Simon completed his training with MHFA England and started tutoring youth mental health first aid courses straight away.

Simon was made redundant by The FA during the pandemic and had to find another course of income because no one was hiring in his niche field in Kent at this time. He started to deliver more mental health courses online during the pandemic and he also started to assess professional football scholars for their Sport in Excellence course.

Simon and his family returned to Broadstairs in Kent from Spain in February 2022 and he and a colleague have designed an NCFE Cache Level 1 in mental health awareness and sports leadership. This course is for anyone aged 14+ years of age, and it combines everything that Simon is passionate about, mental health, sports and supporting young people to improve their mental health and wellbeing and their lifeskills.  If you're interested in connecting, you can find Simon here:

https://www.delamillwellbeingcoachingandtrainingsolutions.com