Having seen her budding football career cruelly ended by a series of injuries, former national youth player Toni Cowan is now honing the skills of young female footballers in her capacity as national Under-15 assistant coach.

Just 22 years old, Cowan, the daughter of KSAFA administrator Jackie Cowan and Lance Cowan, general secretary of premier league outfit Cavalier, is the youngest national coach employed by the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) and by extension, could be one of the youngest in the world.

But just watching her in action one would have no idea this young promising coach, who could still be in the prime of her playing career, is not a veteran in the field.

“I have been player coaching from I was playing. I was always helping my teammates when it came to technical stuff. My coaches, when I was at Ardenne High School, was very comfortable leaving me with my teammates and having me showing them the correct techniques,” Cowan pointed out.

“I feel that it (coaching) was something that I always did naturally. I knew that the 9-5 (job) wasn’t for me. It was either football or I doing football. So it was a natural progression from playing to coaching,” she said.

Cowan, who has a bachelor of arts degree in sociology from the Loyola University in Maryland, USA, was recently appointed national Under-15 assistant head coach by the JFF and is on her first tour of duty in that capacity.

“I never saw it happening that quickly. All I knew was that I wanted to coach. I was just focussing on getting my Level I and Level II,” she pointed out.

“When Captain (Horace Burrell, president of the JFF) called and said he is making me assistant coach, I just said yes, because it didn’t really soak in yet because I was just doing what it is that I love to do. So I don’t feel like I am doing anything different than just waking up and brushing my teeth,” said the young coach.

When quizzed as to how she feels being so young but handed a very important job of moulding and shaping equally young minds just a few years younger than her, she sat back in the chair outside her hotel room, paused for a minute, took a deep breath, then replied:

“I am honoured and grateful to have this opportunity at such a young age… to be 22 and is the assistant coach of a national team. It doesn’t matter what team, and I am thankful for getting this opportunity to prove that I have the ability to be a good coach.”

You can see the unbridled joy in her eyes when she coaches these young girls, but deep behind that lovely smile Cowan is hurting. That pain is not from a couple of surgeries from her hip to her ankle, but that pain of watching the girls strut their stuff while her career ended abruptly.

The talented Cowan was called up to Jamaica’s Under-17 team while just 15 years old as a striker and although she wasn’t a regular starter then, the pencil slim player was switched to right back and began getting more playing time.

But the former Meadhaven, Constant Spring and Harbour View player while in preparation for a CONCACAF Under-20 Championship, received a major injury setback in her international career.

“I was really upset. It was a squad match and a teammate clipped me and I found out the next day that I fractured my angle and it wasn’t only that I wasn’t going to Guatemala, it was wow, I am leaving for college in two weeks’ time,” she explained.

“So it put my school career starting off as an injured player, so it was kind of hard on me. I started playing competitively from I was 12 and had no serious injuries and that CONCACAF tournament would have been the biggest for me, so it was a big blow.”

That was just one of several other injuries to follow and in 2013, Cowan called it a day on her playing career at the age of 21. Now, she is a full-fledged coach aiming to establish herself and looking to leave a lasting impression on hundreds of young players with her own style of coaching.

“I have been around a lot of different teams, but what I realise in Jamaica is that we don’t train properly until we get to the national programme,” she pointed out.

“A lot of the girls don’t get exposed to the structured training sessions and for me, any team that I work with or is going to work with, will have it structured so whoever I am working with learn the game.

“For me it’s not about winning, it’s about the players’ development. It’s about getting the players out there and learning the right techniques and I feel like that is my focus and that’s something I will bring to Jamaican football because I don’t see that is here unless you playing national football or some of the male premier league teams,” she argued.

“My training sessions… I actually take the time out to look at the players and their needs individually. I see how I can tweak anything to get them better. So I am very focused on the individual growth, which overall helps the team grow,” she said.

Having spent years studying and playing in America, young Cowan believes that’s a plus in her budding coaching career.

“Because I was injured at an early age, it allowed me to step back and look at how my coaches operated and it’s basically an insight into how Americans operate.

“When you think about American football, you think about them being technical, disciplined and focused and it allowed me to see the effects of a structured training session and that shaped the way I plan to coach here.”

“There are a lot of techniques and different ways they warm up and why they warm up, why you need to stretch. Why you need to run and I have brought that here with the national team,” she concluded.