Covid-19 pandemic forced Ross County academy to ‘think differently’ as Gordon Duff looks back on lockdown innovation with pride
Five years ago this weekend, life in the UK changed immeasurably as the country was plunged into lockdown due to the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It was a time of uncertainty, with nobody sure exactly how long restrictions would last, or how bad things would get.
One of the first major societal changes was the cancellation of all sport, with some matches being called off even before lockdown was officially implemented.
With competitions falling by the wayside and all training cancelled for months, thoughts would begin to turn to the long-term impact of the pandemic on sport.
For senior players and club staff, there were fears that jobs would be lost and the financial impact could lead to further difficulties down the road.
At youth level, the concern was that youngsters were losing out on training at a vital stage of their development, and could lead to something of a black hole of talent coming through the ranks.
“When Covid hit, everyone was furloughed, and then we had to think about what we were going to do for 100-odd academy players when they couldn’t come and train,” Gordon Duff, Ross County’s current under-18’s lead coach and then looking after the community side of the club, recalled.
“We had to figure out how to keep them engaged, so we had to be innovative in what we did.
“We basically created the ‘lockdown 11’, which was 11 different things that we wanted to do for the boys.
“It was a range of stuff on an app-based training platform, so we developed homework programmes where it didn’t matter if you were in a flat or if you had a garden, you could still do all your technical drills within a 1x1m box.
“That was quite successful, and we got recipes from chefs and nutritional information from personal trainers delivered. We created a habit-building programme with a company called Sport and Pursuit focusing on dealing with the mental aspect of performance, and the change they had in lockdown.
“We did loads and loads of Zoom sessions, and people would video their activity and submit it.
“In the mix of all that, me and Ryan Farquhar were still doing things in the community department, like providing meals to old folks and providing content and homework for the community kids on our database.
“When I look back, I see it as a really good time with what we delivered, and how that shaped us coming back.
“We never had a situation where we didn’t know what we were going to do for a kid, and no parents came back and said we didn’t do anything, and that started a culture of buy-in that has taken us to where we are now.”
That is not to say there were no challenges. The crop of under-18s trying to break into first team football with the Staggies had that opportunity taken away, and the vast majority of those would end up leaving the club to find pastures new.
However, Duff and the County coaching staff saw that as an opportunity to do things differently. While pre-Covid the under-18s group were full time players, since the pandemic that has been changed to a hybrid model where youngsters balance their football training with education at the University of the Highlands and Islands and local schools.
At younger age groups, almost everyone returned to the club when outdoor sessions were allowed to resume, and with a newfound determination to make the most of it.
That has told in results since. County’s under-12s and under-14s, for example, have been considerably more competitive in matches since Covid.
As for fears of a lost generation, this season’s surge of teenagers into the first team picture is evidence there has been no such thing – considering the likes of Dylan Smith, Andrew Macleod and George Robesten would have been 13 or 14 when lockdown took effect.
“It probably gave them more of an appetite when they came back,” Duff explained.
“It wasn’t like they were straight into proper sessions either. We could only have a certain amount of players on the pitch, and so many groups were allowed in a certain area. That put parents more at ease.
“With us having a road all the way around the stadium, the parents didn’t even need to get out of the car to drop kids off and pick kids up, it was essentially a convoy system, which helped us as well.
“Looking back on it, I came in blind because I was head of children’s coaching before and looking after the community programme. I was thrown in at the deep end, and I needed to think on my feet, but that’s football.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen, but for me I think what we did was a positive for both the kids and our programme, and that has helped shape where we are today.
“For all the bad that Covid brought, for us as an academy it helped us shape things a bit differently and helped us think differently going forward about what we had to deliver.
“All those kids needed something, and we had a duty of care for the boys who were signed players at the start. Nobody knew how anything would look, but looking back on it there was definitely a lot of positives that came out of it for us.”
Of course, away from the training pitch, there were job losses at the club as costs were cut where possible to ease the financial impact of no football.
Duff personally felt the impact of that, but he also has perhaps rare positive memories of those early days in lockdown due to a family arrival not long beforehand.
“There have been a lot of staffing changes, but that’s football as well – that was probably always going to happen,” he added.
“For me, I was lucky enough to still have a job. If I’m being honest, my whole Covid experience was as positive as it could have been.
“I had a wee girl two weeks before we went into lockdown, so I got to spend a lot more time with my wee girl when she was growing up because I was there everyday during lockdown.
“In the football world, it’s long days and working nights, so you miss that at times, but I got to see a lot of her in lockdown.
“I was lucky enough to still have a job and do different things. We’re talking about the community and academy stuff, but I was even helping the girls in the shop because I was lucky enough to still be here.
“Unfortunately for some people in the club, including my mum who was part of the shop team, they were made redundant. I was really lucky, and I look back on that time from a personal point of view as a time where we had to adapt and be different, and nobody knew where it was going to go, but how the plan looked at the end was really good compared to how it looked at the start.”
