After All This Time

Now I’m retired.

There’s no ceremony. No real finish line. Just the moment itself, and the strange quiet that follows. I thought it would feel different. Maybe I expected more clarity, more finality. Instead, it feels like a pause in a long sentence I’ve been writing for nearly three decades.

People think your life changes when you start something. But I know now it really changes when something ends.

I’ve been coaching in women’s football since the late 90s. I never stopped, not really. Even in the Army, I found a way. Soldiers have daughters. And those daughters had teams. And I coached them. I was often in full kit, still shaking off dust or adrenaline, and there I was on the sideline—giving instructions, fixing shape, building confidence.

I’ve even written before about how, in the middle of actual gunfights—real, sustained exchanges of fire—somebody would suddenly bring up how his daughter was doing on the team I coached. Not after. Not later. Right then. That’s how life was. Compartmentalized. Surreal. But very real.

Still, after 2001, it was never the same. I wasn’t the same.

There’s a duality to it now. A before and after. There was a version of me who had patience, lightness, softness. And then the fuse got shorter. I was never cruel, never unkind—but I changed. War does that. It reorganizes you. Rewrites your internal tempo. And while I never walked away from the game, I never quite got back to that 2000 version of myself, either.

What I’m realizing now—at 48, retired, 100% disabled by the VA—is that the challenge isn’t choosing between those two selves. It’s learning to carry both.

And despite everything, I’m still here. I still want to be part of the game. Not in a loud way, not in a way that demands space. Just in the ways I can. Whenever I can. Because after all these years, I still believe in it. Still believe in what it offers—not just on the field, but in people’s lives.

I hope, in these nearly 29 years in women’s football—in America, in Europe, in countries I didn’t expect to end up in—that I made some kind of impact. Not on how people scout or how they recruit. That stuff comes and goes. I mean on the players. I hope I helped them become better players, but more than that, I hope I helped them become better people.

I hope I helped them understand that how they feel matters. That mental health is part of the game. It took me a long time to learn that for myself. But once I did, I saw it everywhere—players struggling silently, thinking they had to just “push through.” What they needed was someone who said, no, it’s okay to talk about it. To name it. To carry it together.

The game still has a long way to go. But I hope when people look back on my time in it—whether they remember my name, my face, or just a moment we all shared—that they remember there was a guy who cared. Really cared. About who they were. About how they felt. About what came next for them.

That’s the legacy I’d want.

Nothing flashy. Just real. Just human.

That’s enough.