For someone who could call themselves as ‘an accidental football manager’ Swallownest chief Jordan Stocks has done a very outstanding job over three years.
Stocks, thrust into the dugout as a rookie boss in October 2017 because of a status as a senior player, has taken Swallownest who had just jumped out of the Sheffield & Hallamshire County Senior League and established them as a solid Toolstation Northern Counties East League club.
His excellent work is a blueprint for how to do well in the NCEL with limited resources. A crucial part of it has been stability – helped by a no pressure environment and by also keeping the nucleus of the team together.
But managing Swallownest was not exactly the career plan three years ago.
“I’d have hung up (if you said in 2017 that I was still managing in 2020) and thought you were mad because I didn’t think I’d still be managing if I’m honest,” Stocks tells Non League Yorkshire.
“I didn’t think I’d enjoy it. I only did it originally to help out because I have a lot of time for the people at the club and because they have done a lot for me. I still fancied playing because I was still 32 or 33. I still felt I had something to offer which I probably thought wrong about.
“I’m glad the club gave me the chance and towards the backend of the first season I started enjoying it. (Chairman) Mick (Kent) just let me get on with it and he’s never pressured to ‘do this and that’. It has always been quite relaxed. He’s given me the rein to build a side and ask a side to play a certain way.
“I’ve always encouraged us to play football and when it hasn’t been working he’s never said ‘just get results, just get results’. He’s actually backed me to play football and that’s where a lot of our good reviews come from, from playing good football. He’s let me breed that in for three years.
“If he had put pressure on, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it and I wouldn’t have been here now. It is pressure-free, but there’s still targets to aim for. There’s no point in doing three years hard work and then having a shocking year to send us back three years.”
Stocks, an ex-NCEL player who served many South Yorkshire Non League outfits like Hallam, Parkgate, Maltby Main, Dinnington Town and Handsworth, arrived back in the NCEL with Swallownest in 2017 after the club won promotion after winning the Sheffield & Hallamshire Senior League title. That was achieved under the management of Lee Needham and Tom Hague.
The pair were removed from their posts in the early months of Swallownest’s new-found Non League status and Stocks was thrown into dugout – a role he has thrived in.
“I joined five years ago as a player when I was over 30 to just enjoy it,” he says.
“I had played at a decent standard and dropped to the County Senior to help a few lads out. The season we joined the NCEL we started alright, but we were a bit naive and we didn’t really pick wins up when we should have picked wins up.
“We ended up struggling and unfortunately Lee (Needham) and Tom (Hague) got sacked. I got offered the chance to help out as a person above 30. We needed a lot of players in and there were a lot of players I didn’t think were good enough so we got rid of a few.
“We got younger lads in who all felt they had a point to prove. All these players were from around where I live, your Handsworth’s, places like that.
“We built up a spirit of never-say-die and literally just going out fearless. We finished 11th and we surprised a hell of a lot of teams. We finished on 58 points and that’s a big total for someone like us in their first season (in the NCEL).
“So the second season we had everything to build on and with the momentum of the previous season and we did. We’ve always set targets and the first one was stay in the league and we did that comfortably. The next target was can we finish 11th? We did that just by finishing tenth.
“The next target was look to win a place in the FA Cup. Now I know that didn’t happen because of what’s happened, but if we’ve constantly stride to get those targets, you shouldn’t ever put yourself in a position where you’re in danger of failing. As long as your targets are realistic then you’re on the right tracks.”
Many managers speak of games when ‘they know they have arrived in a new Division’. Stocks has several for Swallownest and each highlights a marker of progression and even stability as his players have continually grown stronger and stronger.
“There was a game in our first (2017/18) season (in the NCEL) which we actually lost,” he says.
“We lost 1-0 to Knaresborough away and that season Knaresborough absolutely ran away with it. They got 100 points. We went away and played them off-the-park literally. We hit the bar, post. They scored because our goalkeeper had a back-pass rolled to him and he mis-kicked it and they scored into a empty net.
“We came off and we couldn’t believe we had lost. The lads were gutted. That’s when we said ‘that shows development when you’ve come to a side who should be running away with games against us and you’ve competed’.
“Another one was Campion away when we won and that’s when we started progressing. Even as far as last year we beat Nostell 4-3 away in midweek when we were 3-1 down. Alex Lill got four.
“There’s been games, but there’s been a lot of stuff what has happened in three years which shows how far we’ve come. Respect from teams changing their system to cancel us out rather us cancel them out stands out as a big turning point.
“We’ve gone from a dig in, defend and catch teams on the break side to now having to play football to break other teams down because they know what we’re like. That’s the hard bit, but when you become a better team, you have to step up as a team.
“We have started to switch on and started to be fitter and the club has grown in confidence. No-one comes to Swallownest expecting to beat us. Some sides come and play one upfront which is credit in my eyes.”
Non League Yorkshire, and pundit Jason Dodsworth, have recently pointed out an important factor of Swallownest’s rise from the County Senior League to being an established NCEL club. But keeping a side together with limited resources is quite a feat and Stocks explains why he has been able to.
“It is literally about enjoyment, friendships, getting lads to play for each other,” he says.
“I always base it on 22 players, but if your core of them, 13 or 14, are there every week and they have a drink together and go out together, you get an extra ten or 15% out of them every week.
“Over the course of a season you’re probably picking up 15 or 20 extra points than you usually get. If we changed the team every year we’d struggle and if I lost the core of the players and some of them are good enough to step up, I feel we’d be in relegation fights every season.
“For us, keeping the side together is a key to success. We can’t go out and say ‘we’ll give you x amount of money to come and play for us’ because we simply haven’t got it.
“The best way we can get by as a small well-organised club is by making sure the players are also friends and by getting them to enjoy coming to play football.”
The club’s great progress over the last three years is not just confined to the pitch. The ground has been transformed since their County Senior League days with the installation of floodlights being followed by extensive work gone into the pitch and the new stands.
“The pitch has improved massively,” Stocks says.
“Richard Lill puts in hours and hours on it, cutting and feeding it. They do spend a lot of hours maintaining it and it is good.
“They have built the stand and it will continue to get better. Five years ago it was a pitch, dugouts and changing facilities and now there is floodlights, a seated stand and a standing area. The ground has improved each year certainly. It just takes time. From speaking to (chairman) Mick (Kent) and Wayne (Coyle) they want to build it a little further.”
For now, like at nearly organisation in the world, long-term plans are on hold. Stocks is one of thousands of football managers having to do a crash course in ‘how to manage a football team during a global pandemic’.
With the prime minister Boris Johnson due to deliver a new speech today (Tuesday) to re-introduce some restrictions on daily life. It is unclear if that will include restrictions on competitive sport, but the new NCEL season is up in the air days after its official start on Saturday.
The tone of Stocks’ voice notes one of inevitably of a stoppage at some stage soon, but he is clinging to hope it is not this week.
“I don’t want to think about all that, stop-start-stop-start,” he says.
“All the way through the lockdown we were still trying to speak to each as a management team and squad to make sure everyone was going to stick around. We managed to convince everyone. Lockdown lasted longer than what we wanted it to, but once as we got back to training and playing again, we’ve been flying.
“We have a good solid base and our pre-season was brilliant and some of the results and performances were good. The reviews we got were good. We’ve had a good FA Vase result and hopefully we’ll get a good result against Dronfield. We then have Selby away and we don’t want it to stop.
“It is out of our control. (If it is stop-start) the season is going to have to be took past May because if not you’ll have teams having to do ridiculous distances in midweek.”
Unless there is some dramatic late intervention by the Government or FA, Swallownest should kick off their Division One campaign at Dronfield Town tonight.
Swallownest are on a high following the FA Vase beating of Ashton Town. But if ‘Nest are on Cloud Nine, where are Dronfield? Possibly the moon or Jupiter as they stunned the league by beating favourites Skegness Town on their own patch on Saturday in the league.
“They (Dronfield) are not far away so it is sort of a local derby,” he says.
“I think there is only 17 mile between us, if that. I know some of their players and they know some of ours. It is going to be hard and they’re going to be flying and itching to play again after beating Skeggy. It is something we’re looking forward to because we’ll be probably back to full strength as we had a couple missing on Saturday. We should be strong.
“But we’ll have to be on it from the start. We generally are because we are a young side as the average age has to be 21. We should be full of energy, but I don’t know what it was Saturday. We seemed to be slow and lethargic. We had chances, but if we’re not on it (against Dronfield), they’ll put us to the sword because they are quick and direct.”
Time will tell if Swallownest’s fourth campaign in the NCEL will see further progress.
If you have enjoyed reading Non League Yorkshire over the past few months, please consider making a donation to the not-for-profit organisation NLY Community Sport which provides sport for children and adults with disabilities and learning difficulties. CLICK HERE to visit the JustGiving page. There is a video at the bottom of the page showing our work.
NLY Community Sport, run by James Grayson and Connor Rollinson, has always had combatting social isolation at the top of our objectives when running our Disability Football teams. As we slowly return to ‘action’, our work will play an important role in reintroducing our players, who have disabilities and learning difficulties, back into society.
We have six teams, a mixture of Junior and Adult teams – Nostell MW DFC, Pontefract Pirates, Selby Disability Football Club and the South Yorkshire Superheroes (Barnsley) – across Yorkshire.
We have enjoyed great success over the past three years. Several of our players have represented Mencap GB in Geneva, including Billy Hobson from Selby and Greg Smith, whose story is quite inspiring.
Like most organisations, we have been affected financially by the Coronavirus and because of the cancelled Lucille Rollinson Memorial Tournament, we are down on projected income for the year and we have incurred losses in the last few months.
We have not been hit as badly as other organisations, but we do need raise £2000 to put us back at the level we were at in mid-March and enable us to make a difference once again to our players’ lives in the future, without having financial worries. Several of our players are suffering from effects of the lockdown and we are determined to be in the strongest position possible to provide services for them.
Any amount raised above £2000 will be put towards new projects (when the world returns to normal) designed to further benefit people with disabilities and learning difficulties. You can learn more about the organisation HERE and on our Facebook page.
Watch the video below to see highlights from our three years as an organisation. The video was produced for our players at the end of March to remind them of good memories from the last three years.