You probably won’t be surprised to hear that a lot of us here at Umbro enjoy a game of football every now and then, what will us being fanatical about the sport. We’ve also got a lot of ladies working for us, in every department here at Umbro House. They’ve never been included in the action on the pitch though – until now.

Recently, the ladies here at Umbro have looked into setting up their own football team, and organised a series of training sessions to get themselves up to speed. To celebrate their efforts, and to get some insight into what its like to start off in football from scratch, we’ve signed up one of the squad to write some reports. Mandy Jones, our voice from inside the Umbro’s ladies team, gives us an idea of why she’s chosen to spend her Tuesday evenings running around wet and windy Stockport:

“The e-mail came round asking if anyone was interested, and fitness, fun, competitive spirit and networking motivated me into joining up. As well as getting more involved in football banter with my 8 year old son. He joined his first proper league team this year and comes back filthy every Saturday morning but with a big smile on both his and his Dad’s face.

After the first training session I realised it was fantastic way to keep fit without realising it as we are all too involved in the exercises to worry about being out of breath. With our coach encouraging us to increase our fitness levels the team ethic has spilled into the rest of the week with regular runs with fellow player/work colleagues at lunchtime and after work.

We started well with 18 signing up as interested and 16 attending the first session. Attendance has gradually gone down hill and for the last few weeks have had a core of 8 or 9 players that regularly attend. A cross section of the business have signed up from Product, Marketing, Supply Chain, Finance and Teamwear which means we have met and made friends with people we have rarely bumped into before.

As the weeks have gone on we are learning dribbling skills, dodging tactics – step overs, side moves, pretend kicks with a reverse (sure there a more technical name for some of these moves) but of course forget all of when in a game situation. The coach has a great sense of humour with lots of banter about the maleness of the game with shouts such as ‘Man on’. We did wonder whether to change it to ‘lady on’ but just decided to stick with standard ‘man on’. I think he finds our girly giggles and cowardliness towards the ball (especially at the penalty shoot outs) amusing.

He did despair when a ‘goalie’ covered their eyes with fear as the ball hurtled towards them. Think that was in Week 1 and we have got a bit braver since!

We have just 4 more training sessions to fine tune these skills before we look for a league to join up to – scary!!

Every week I come home my 8 year old son is very keen to hear what I have learnt and it is total role reversal from him coming home from school telling what he has learnt! For once he has the upper hand with more experience, skill and speed than me. Well he has a 4 year head start!”

Thanks to Mandy for giving us an insight into the team – we’ll be following the ladies’ team as they aim for their first competitive match.