League Two side Forest Green Rovers have named Hannah Dingley as their new caretaker boss, making her the first woman to manage a professional men’s team on English turf.
The club sacked Duncan Ferguson on Tuesday after six months in charge and announced that academy manager Dingley would step up and be put in caretaker charge of the team.
The 39-year-old started her career as a senior lecturer in sports coaching practice upon graduation from Loughborough College in Course Leader HND Sport and exercise science, whilst also working as an academy coach at Notts County in 2011, a men’s Under-19 team and a local non-league club.
She told the Athletic: “I got into a position where I was working with Notts County’s under-nine boys and then doing the women’s team at Lincoln Ladies. The County academy gave me a choice and said I couldn’t do both — I had to choose. I thought, ‘I’m working with England internationals like Casey Stoney and Rachel Daly or the under-nines at Notts County’. I went with Lincoln Ladies."
Continuing to lecture, she moved clubs to Burton Albion FC as their academy coach. She then left the classroom to head the academy programme from 2016-2019. Since then, Dingley has spent four years as Forest Green Rovers academy manager - which made history again as the first female manager of a professional men's academy in the country. While there in 2021, she also initiated the girl's academy.
An initiative perhaps driven by her younger years growing up in Carmarthenshire, where there was no school girl's football team. So it was at the age of 16 when she started playing in organised football but this didn't hinder the fire she had inside for the sport.
To progress her career she wrote countless letters to clubs merely asking if she could volunteer a few hours a week. Dingley told the i: “When I left school I did a BTEC in a college in Llanelli, I was the only girl on a course full of boys.
“I did work experience at Swansea City. This was when they were still playing at the Vetch Field, and I worked there all week. I was watching training under the manager, who was Jan Molby at the time, and then came back on a matchday on a Saturday.
“That buzz of walking into the stadium, of how different it was from working the nine to five on a weekday, completely took my breath away. - I just thought, ‘This is unbelievable. This is what I want to do.’ It got under my skin."
A holder of a UEFA Pro Licence, she took the reins of training the men’s side ahead of Forest Green's friendly against Melksham Town on Wednesday, as interim head coach.
“There were times when I was thinking ‘I have a UEFA A licence and I’m getting knocked back and knocked back – how is that happening?’,”
“You bang on lots of doors. And I’ve been very lucky to find two clubs who understood my value, firstly at Burton and now at Forest Green Rovers.
“At Forest Green, you hear a lot about the sustainability and veganism elements, but actually it’s just a values-led organisation and here it’s not about the gender, the race or the disability. I was the best person for the job and I got it.”
While Dingley has gone through her career thus far unscathed from direct issues with other coaches, players and staff she worked with, she has been mistaken for the physio a few times too many in what she coins as 'unconscious sexism' - innocently offending purely based on gender.
It has been assumed that as a female she occupies a less-senior role and was even refused entry to a club on the assumption she was a spectator over an actual member of staff.
She said: “The progress of women’s football has been spectacular and it’s fantastic, but it’s a slightly different development to what we might term “women in football”, i.e. the progress of women in the men’s game.
“That has had slower progress. We have seen a big change in the media in terms of visibility, but if you look in the clubs – the makeup of boards, senior staffing roles, coaching positions – that’s the bit where progress hasn’t been as quick as we would like.
“You can’t be it if you can’t see it and someone had to be the first. I hope that me being in this position inspires more women to try and make their own journey in men’s football, whichever route that is. We are seen as different, but we shouldn’t be different! And that creates a responsibility to work and work to make it easier for those who follow us.
"It frustrates me that female coaches might think that the female game might be their only opportunities in the game. There are lots of opportunities in the men’s game, academy football is massive. Rich, the director of football here, always said that I got the job because I was the best person for it.”
The road leading to Forest Green Rovers’ New Lawn Stadium is named “Another Way” and it truly reflects the commitment of owner Dale Vince to running this club, appointing Dingley as interim head coach.
