I joined York City Academy at eight years old. Nine years inside a professional football  environment, one of the most formative experiences of my life. 

But at thirteen, something shifted. 

The pressure of performing at elite level started to take over. Pressure from coaches. Pressure  from myself. It accumulated into something I didn’t know how to handle. I stopped playing freely.  I played scared. Afraid to make mistakes, afraid to take risks, afraid to be myself on the pitch. 

I became a shell of the player I knew I was. 

Nobody addressed it. Nobody sat down with me and helped me understand what was  happening mentally or how to work through it. I carried it through my teens until at seventeen I  walked away from football entirely. 

I never got the support I needed as a young player. But that experience never left me. It drove me to find the answers, through coaching, through 150+ hours working one on one  with individual players in New York. I learned what develops a player mentally and physically.  What builds confidence that holds up under pressure. What was missing when I was thirteen. I built Forge around those answers. 

So that every player who works with me gets what I never had - a coach who understands  what it feels like to lose yourself under pressure and knows exactly how to build you back. 

We're proud of how far we've come, and we're excited about the future ahead.