The Big Interview: Julie Hemsley
Julie Hemsley was assistant to Ted Copeland when England went to a World Cup for the first time in 1995. Now living and working in the USA, she speaks about her memories
Julie Hemsley became one of the most influential women in the English game during the early 1990s, when the Football Association finally lifted the ban on women playing football and retook control of running the sport from the independent Women’s Football Association.
Hemsley was a player for the former Brighton GPO (General Post Office) team from 14 years of age and remained involved with the club through to when they became Brighton & Hove Albion, 32 years later as a player-coach, as well as an Assistant Community Development Officer.
During her playing career, Hemsley also played professionally in Sweden for Surahammar IFK and was the only woman out of 92 members to sit as an England Council Member for 10 years between 1993 and 2003.
“He needed someone involved in the women’s game and I was one of the most active female coaches…”
After a career which saw her represent her country at senior level, Hemsley became the assistant head coach to Ted Copeland when the FA took charge of the women’s game to help prepare the senior team for their first World Cup appearance in 1995.
“I was involved with the old WFA,” she recalls. “Liz Deighan and I were going to run the Under 21s, then the FA took over women’s football and Charles Hughes invited me to Lancaster Gate and offered me the position of assistant manager.
“It was a pretty big deal. I was working with Brighton in the Community at the time and Ted was offered the head coach position, so we hit the ground at the same time.
Copeland, 53 at the time, had worked exclusively in men’s football at the time, having played and coached in Saudi Arabia, before returning to the north east where he was appointed the FA’s Regional Director of Coaching for the North of England.
It was during that time he was offered the opportunity to become the women’s team head coach as an FA employee on a part-time basis, with Hemsley joining him to offer her experience and knowledge of the women’s game.
“At the time, I was hopefully going to be mentored to take the role, but things change, and I think me and Ted did a good job,” says Hemsley, who has now lived in the USA where she coaches since retiring in the mid-2000s.
“He needed someone involved in the women’s game and I was one of the most active female coaches. I was developing women and girls at Brighton, that was my job. Barry Lloyd was the manager at Brighton at the time and when Charles offered me the role I said I’d have to ask the club, but they weren’t going to hold me back. It was a privilege to be asked to do it.”
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Hemsley, who was the 58th player to be capped for England and was one of the many invited back to Wembley last year to be presented to a sold-out crowd and to receive her legacy cap, also became the first woman to sit on the FA Council in 130 years, an experience she describes as “amazing” as she got the chance to both coach England and drive the game forward off the field too.
“It started to get taken more seriously when the FA took over,” she recalls. “You had the runaway clubs like Arsenal and Doncaster Belles, but what did they really do for development in the 90s? Nothing. The FA took over and there was a bit more of a structure and my job was to give Ted as much information about the best women’s players as possible.
“Ted didn’t go and watch women’s football really. He was an FA man, but a good coach, so we’d talk about players and history was kind of rewritten because we had to start a fresh. There were try-outs and he did a good job with what we had.”
Copeland was assistant coach of the women’s team for five years, guiding the Lionesses through the group stage of their first World Cup appearance in 1995 and in the same year the semi-finals of the European Championships, with the two tournaments coinciding while the Euros were held every two years.
He was the first man to coach the team after the FA takeover and remained in charge until he was succeeded by Hope Powell, and Hemsley is best placed to offer an insight into the methods of a coach who worked hard to take the team forward.
“It was a good thing for the women’s game the FA took over. They took the resources we had before…”
“Ted’s sessions were tough. The girls were a bit hesitant, they didn’t know how it was going to be, but they’d go to Lilleshall, they’d get all the attire, three Lions on their jersey, all the best pitches. We were treated like professionals, but it was tough because the women’s game had its mindset, certain clubs and managers didn’t really work with the national team positively in the beginning.
“Ted worked really hard to make connections and get clubs to release players. It was hard for players, they had to work, had to take holidays for their country, some lost their jobs to go to the World Cup in 1995 because they’d already used their time off, but it was what they’d worked for and they wanted to do it.
“It was a good thing for the women’s game the FA took over. They took the resources we had before. We’d always had a council member, but it didn’t seem to me like we were utilising them. It was like Aladdin’s cave, why weren’t we growing faster? It wasn’t filtering down. We watched players, I remember watching Kelly Smith until we felt she was mature enough to come in.”
She adds, “I thought Ted was a good manager, we got to a semi-final of the Euros, quarter-finals of the World Cup, qualified for the Olympics but Team GB wasn’t allowed, so Brazil took our place, but we had a lot more to work with than the old WFA. That’s not a knock against them, they just didn’t have the resources to further the game.
“As a person? He was a family man. He knew how to treat women properly, he knew what he wanted. He was very organised, he was typical Technical Director for the FA. They put their sessions on, sometimes we’d have conversations about reeling it back a bit because the understanding level wasn’t there. You don’t put an A Licence practice on because the players played by instinct, the tactical understanding wasn’t there. We used to laugh about it because every Thursday we’d do set-pieces, we’d have where everyone needed to be, we tried to make a routine and get into good habits because they’d go back to their clubs and do something different, so we worked very hard to create that structure for them.”
It's hard to emphasise to those in the modern day how big of a step it was for the FA to take over the running of the women’s game from the WFA, after banning the sport for 50 years, hindering the development of the sport beyond recognition.
Hemsley admits “nobody likes change, but it was good change”, but doesn’t believe there was necessarily any guilt at what they’d done in banning women from playing the game.
“FIFA had an influence on the FA taking us under the fold because other nations were doing it. I think they wanted to see it was done properly. A pathway, a structure. I imagined they were excited, here’s a sport where they could essentially create it in the way they wanted. I think they thought treat it like the men, but it’s different, everyone knows that, it needed to be nurtured in a different way.
“Encouraging girls to play football in the 90s was hard, but we had community directors, regional officers, we could go into schools, boys and girls’ clubs. One of my remits at Brighton was to make sure every amateur club had a girls and women’s section. You go in there, you advertise, you attract and we were helping the pathway for Ted to select the players. We had a Under 16 team, then a Under 18 team, so it developed over the years.”
Ahead of England’s latest attempt at winning the World Cup for a first time, now heading in as European champions for the first time, Hemsley reflects on heading to Sweden in 1995 for just the second ever official edition of the tournament.
Women’s football under the FA wasn’t even two years old, and the squad which would face Canada, Nigeria and eventual champions Norway was a talented one, but inexperienced at the top level.
The level stretched from 33-year-old captain Debbie Bampton, to up and coming 18-year-old defender Mary Phillip, as 3-2 wins against both Canada and Nigeria was enough to see them through in spite of a loss to Norway.
“We did well, but we lost to Brazil [in the quarter-finals],” the former assistant recalls. Our aim was to get into the quarter-finals and we did it and I think we were a bit unlucky, but they were a good team. Brazil never had anything either, they didn’t have a lot of kit, we were in a way better position than a lot of countries because we had the backing of the FA. The girls got shirts to keep, shirts to swap, they treated us like they’d treat any other national team and that was great.
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“We knew what we wanted to do, we were matter of fact. We played against Nigeria and we got beaten up a bit. I remember going on a seven-hour train overnight to watch Nigeria, that’s how it was back then. It was a good World Cup for us, we were just disappointed the other seven were going to the Olympics and we weren’t. We weren’t Great Britain, we were England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the girls accepted that.”
The support for the team was good though, even in the mid-90s, as Hemsley recalls, “We had fans travel, my mum even came! Hope Powell gave my mum her shirt, which was nice. People from clubs came over, it was one of the first occasions the girls were away with each other for a long time. The football was good because the competition was improving. It was the second real World Cup, so it was still new, but FIFA were doing a lot of good things.”
Hemsley also recalls an act of contrition from Sammy Britton to one of the Brazil players, who happened to be staying in England’s hotel, after they’d knocked them out of the tournament, given they had a lack of kit and equipment with them.
“Sammy was being nice to one of the Brazilian girls. We stayed at the same hotel and some of them didn’t have a lot of kit, so Sammy handed some of her stuff over.
“There was a lot of camaraderie back then. I felt a lot of countries wanted each other to succeed. They’d want to beat you, but there would be a ‘good luck’. The quality was great. Canada were getting better, USA obviously were strong, Norway won the tournament. Sweden were very good, oh my god, Sweden and Norway were always top.
“Norway played their 4-4-2, but it was so effective. You played a 4-4-2 and trying to adapt that was tough in some respects because it was so common. I used to play out in Sweden, so I had friends there who came to watch which was nice. You can’t really enjoy it because you’re working. All through the 90 minutes we were taking notes of everything, you didn’t really get a chance to take it in.”
When Copeland and Hemsley were moved aside for what would be a 15-year stint in the role for Powell in 1998, Hemsley remained in her role at Brighton on the FA Council until 2004, when she moved over to the USA and for a period actually dropped out of the game, before ending up as a goalkeeper coach and a general coach at various colleges around the USA.
“I didn’t want to leave, but you know how it is. Politics and that,” she chuckles. “I worked in a college over here just with goalkeepers. I’ve got Pauline Cope to thank for that because we didn’t have a goalkeeper coach, so I’d go and work with the goalkeepers, but then Simon Smith came in from Newcastle United.
“That’s how I got a job in a college here! I got out of soccer for a while, now I’m back in it full-time, it’s been a bumpy road. The last time I spoke to Ted he was working in Dallas. I don’t speak to him as much now. We had no conflict, I just felt no need as I stopped working in football. I think Ted’s been off the scene a bit.”
Hemsley though has nothing but good memories of her time in the game in England, as well as her period working with Copeland for the national team she’d been so proud to represent as both a player and later as a coach.
“He was very tolerant, very patient. He was a teacher, he tried to deliver a lot for the girls. If we developed them here, they’d make the clubs better too. It was just a whole big development thing, but of course we wanted to win.
“What we did have trouble with was venues. We didn’t have a big fan base, so we played in smaller venues. We took a game down to the old Goldstone at Brighton, which I loved! We’d always try to go to the places where people would support us the most. We’d try to have one in the south, one in the north and one in the middle, so we could get new fans too. We’d hand out free tickets to schools and what not.
“It wasn’t just coaching a team, it was running women’s football in some respects. There was a lot of good done by people. I think we managed the players well. I thought I was a good assistant, he gave me my roles, I did them as well as I could and I think as a pairing we did well. We had Mandy Johnson, our physio, our doctor was a woman too, so he had good people around him who knew the sport he could ask questions of, it was a good time.”