When Abigail Ingram interviewed to coach at Girls United, she walked in with an iPad and a slightly ridiculous idea.
The girls could earn parts of an emoji by completing challenges on the pitch. Make these passes in this zone. Don't let the defender get it. Right, now you get to pick the hair. They were hooked, racing to unlock the next piece, shouting instructions at each other.
She knew it was a gamble. That was the point.
"I was working at Fulham, so if I didn't get the role I wouldn't have been too upset," Abigail told Jordan Elgott and Rohan Anand on the latest episode of The Grassroots Hotline. "But also, this is kind of exciting. I was like, let me just try something. And if they get on board with it, I know it's the right kind of place for me, because they're going to let me go try things."
They did. She got the job. And the whole story of how she coaches, and why, is hiding in that one risk.
"I never want to hear that again"
The emoji session traces back to a verdict Abigail received years earlier, when she was coaching a group of children at Crystal Palace and they told her, to her face, that her sessions were boring.
"I was like, wow, I've never been told I was boring," she says. "And I was like, yeah, fair, probably is. I never want to hear that again."
She has not forgotten it. The honesty of children, she found, was a useful kind of brutal, and the verdict reset something. Now it sits at the front of her mind every time she plans. Don't be boring. It is no coincidence that the things she is proudest of are the ones where she took a creative gamble rather than reaching for the drill everyone else runs.
That instinct earned her recognition she did not see coming. Abigail won the London FA Grassroots Female Pathway Coach of the Year award, with a nomination she had no idea was in motion. She grew suspicious only when London FA kept turning up at Girls United events, and when the Lioness-themed award was announced she assumed it was for someone else. Her first instinct on receiving it was to message the coaches and volunteers who had helped build Girls United, because without them, she felt, the moment would never have happened.
The only girl on the team
To understand why Abigail builds things, it helps to know she grew up almost always being the only girl on the pitch.
She played in the streets and alleyways of South Croydon, one-touch against a wall, trying to stitch her mates up by knocking a size-one ball under a parked car. When two coaches put her in the primary school team, it became a local newspaper story before she understood why. It took her parents pointing it out for the penny to drop.
"They said, well, yeah, you are the only girl on the team," she says. "And I was like, oh, okay. But like, we're in a final."
It sailed over her head. She was, in her own words, a player, and it did not faze her. What she noticed as she got older were the differences in opportunity. The boys went on tour to Spain or Italy without a second thought. For the girls, getting there meant Abigail going round and rallying people herself, cobbling a mismatched side together so the trip could happen at all. It did, and it became one of the first girls' football teams her school had fielded.
The lesson stuck, and she states it plainly. "If you want something, you're going to have to make something happen. Some of that will come through luck and good timing, and some of it maybe just isn't meant to be. But if you don't try it and explore it, then you can't just expect things to happen."
Her own father had modelled exactly that, setting up a team at Crystal Palace so his daughter had somewhere to play, then going to find other girls when she turned out to be too young for the side that already existed. The pattern she now runs at scale was first drawn for her at home.
From feral year fours to a thousand girls a season
Abigail is refreshingly unsentimental about how she got into coaching. At sixteen, her college sent her into a primary school to complete her Level One, where she met a class of year fours she cheerfully describes as feral and wondered how she would survive ten weeks.
She survived. She also discovered she could earn a bit of money coaching without having to do pre-season, which, for a teenager who loved playing but had no illusions about turning professional, was close to perfect.
What followed was an unusually broad apprenticeship. After-school clubs, Crystal Palace under-tens, a string of adult teams, and then a role at Fulham's foundation that she describes as game-changing for the sheer hours it put her on the pitch. There she was handed real freedom to experiment, learning from coaches who ran the full range from old-school technical work to people designing sessions around video-game logic, power-ups and level-ups and all. Later she moved into Fulham's boys' performance centre and completed her UEFA B, a sharp shift from helping more girls fall in love with the game to carrying the weight of expectation on boys convinced they were going to make it pro.
Then, in 2019, came Girls United, founded by Romina, whom Abigail describes with obvious affection as relentlessly driven. When Abigail started, there were around seven sessions and roughly forty girls, run by her, Romina, their marketing lead Camila, and a handful of volunteers. Today it runs something like sixty groups a week and well over a thousand girls a season, with a structure that lets girls choose their own way in: schools work for those not already in sporty after-school clubs, open community sessions where fifty girls might simply turn up and play on a Sunday morning, and more traditional grassroots teams competing in leagues. They have since added a pan-disability session, prompted by a pointed question the team put to themselves about whether they were actually representing the whole community or just part of it.
"Don't kick it like a girl"
One moment from her time coaching boys has stayed with her. An under-15s session, a bad kick, and one boy turning to another with the old insult.
"One of them kicked it and the other one said, don't kick it like a girl," she recalls. "And I was like, wait a second. And they literally melted. Because it was clearly the first time they've ever had a female coach."
What happened next is the part she is proud of. The boy caught himself. "They were like, oh no, because Abi kicks it better than that. And I was like, this is great." She never heard anything like it again the rest of the season. "It was literally like flipping a switch."
Building the thing that lets you step back
The most telling shift in Abigail's story is what success now looks like to her.
She is candid that six or seven years ago, the impact would have been hers directly. Her sessions, her girls, her boots on the ground. One player she coached early on went on to trial at Chelsea and play for England youth, and she is proud of that without claiming it. But what moves her now is watching other coaches and volunteers produce that same effect.
"It might not be me directly all the time now," she says. "Now I'm like, okay, how do I help that snowball?"
It is why, asked about her future, she was lukewarm about chasing the next badge or a particular job title. The pull for her is not coaching at the highest possible level, it is finding new ways to keep the community sustainable, so that no girl is priced out or left behind. Find the environment that lets you do that, she reasons, rather than chasing something set in stone. Though, she adds with a grin, if one of her players makes it, she will absolutely be posting about it on LinkedIn.
There is one detail that captures the whole arc. Some of the girls Abigail coaches walked out as mascots at a major final, an experience she reckons will never leave them. The girl who once cried behind her parent, too overwhelmed to try, and the girl walking out at a packed stadium are not, in Abigail's telling, a hierarchy of outcomes. They are just different parts of the same thing she has spent her life building. Somewhere for girls to turn up, be part of a team, and discover what they are capable of.
She would tell you she was just lucky with the people around her. The truth running underneath every chapter is that she kept being the one who made sure those people showed up.
Listen to Abigail's full conversation with Jordan Elgott and Rohan Anand on The Grassroots Hotline: https://youtu.be/b5OJRZh5tXY
