The Fair Play Award — what taking it seriously actually means

This is the trophy I'm proudest of from last season. Springhead Spartans U12. Hull and District Youth Football League. Fair Play Award winners, 2025/26.

And the reason it matters more than the league table or the cup runs is how the award is judged. It's the opposing coaches. Every team we played, their coach scored us after the match — on the players' conduct, on the bench, on the sideline. Across the whole age group, those scores added up across the season. And Springhead Spartans came out top.

The bit that took a while to register

I've written a few posts in this playbook about taking it seriously. About picking the team on form, not rotation. About backing the lads who put the work in. About not apologising for trying to win.

The risk with all that — the thing the well-meaning grassroots crowd will throw at you — is that being competitive somehow comes at the cost of being respectful. That if you take it seriously, you're the kind of touchline shouter who's lost the plot, the coach the other teams dread playing.

The Fair Play Award is the answer to that. Properly judged. Properly objective. Every team we beat 4-0 or 5-1 still went home and gave us a high rating. They didn't enjoy losing. But they enjoyed the way they lost.

How we ended up there

I'd love to tell you we have some sophisticated programme for this. We don't. The truth is it's a handful of habits, baked in since the lads were eight.

Shake hands after every match. Win or lose, hammered or hammering. The lads don't even think about it any more, it's just what we do.

Pick lads off the floor. Theirs as well as ours. Especially theirs. Nobody at U12 wants to be the lad on the ground while everyone's celebrating the goal.

One voice from the bench. Mine and Craig's. Not a chorus of parents shouting tactics from the touchline at twelve-year-olds. That's a thing we worked on with the families across all four years, gently, repeatedly. The lads can't hear the game properly if there's noise from twenty different directions.

And — this is the one nobody talks about — accept the result. If we lose to a better team, we lost to a better team. We go home, we have the chat, we train better next Tuesday. We don't blame the ref, we don't blame the surface, we don't blame each other.

The one principle I've drilled into the lads

Nobody is ever more to blame for something going wrong than yourself. The only person on the pitch you can control is you. Not the ref. Not the opposition. Not the lad next to you having a bad game. You.

So you get snapped — and you will, at this age, plenty of times — you get up. You shake it off. You give them a wry smile and you get on with the game. They can't beat you that way. That's the whole thing.

If we're 2-0 down at half-time, it's not the ref's fault. It's not the pitch. It's us. What are we doing about it. Lads who think like that don't end up arguing decisions. They don't end up retaliating. They don't end up needing a coach to drag them away from a flashpoint. They just get on with it, and the Fair Play score takes care of itself.

Credit where it's due — Craig

Craig, my assistant, has been on this with me since the start. He's not the quiet one. He's the one who gets the lads fired up — properly fired up — but he does it in a way that keeps their dignity and their respect intact. There's a difference between firing a kid up and winding him up, and Craig knows exactly where the line is.

If I'm picking the team and shaping the tactics, Craig is the one in the huddle on a Sunday morning. The lads play for him. Half of why we got this award is him.

And it's the lads themselves. Fifteen of them. Half I've coached since they were eight. They've grown into this. The award is theirs more than mine. They walked up and collected it together because they all earned it.

The real success of the season

League table position matters at twelve. Cup runs matter. The Brandesburton win, the back-post tap-in against Esperanza, the clean sheet record from corners — all of that is real and the lads are right to be proud of it.

But the trophy with Fair Play U12 Winners 2025/26 — Springhead Spartans engraved on it is the one I'd hand to anyone who asks what does taking it seriously actually look like.

It looks like fifteen lads who can win 5-1 and still get rated for how they did it. It looks like a bench that backs the referee. It looks like parents who clap a good goal scored against their own kid.

It looks like this is what football is for.