While he was still in high school, Michelsen took charge of his first team — one in his hometown, Tonder, that was made up of players just four years younger than he was. He coached an under-18 women’s team in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city, while studying for a teaching degree. His success there earned him a shot at the senior women’s team at his club, IK Skovbakken. After he won the Danish Women’s Cup, Michelsen, not yet 29, was handed control of the men’s team.

His appointment, he acknowledged, was greeted with skepticism: His age and his background — or rather, his lack of one — were held against him.

“Some of the men were resistant,” Michelsen said. “I was only 28. Some of them were older than me, and they were thinking, ‘Who is this?’ ”

That is a question, you sense, that Michelsen is used to answering. He flicks through every stage of his career — from Skovbakken on through Denmark’s lower leagues, via a brief detour as a coach in Tanzania, and on to SonderjyskE and success — with the help of a slide show on his MacBook.

It encompasses not just where he has been but also what he has learned and what he believes. He recites his story with confidence, at speed. He has been through it many times before.

That, of course, is the lot of the career coach, as opposed to the ex-player turning his hand to management: to be greeted with initial suspicion, as an outsider and an interloper, someone deprived of the specialist knowledge that can come only from spending 20 years amid the liniment and bravado of the locker room.

Michelsen acknowledged that each stage of his journey had presented new challenges — “coaching women, coaching men older than me, coaching players on contracts, coaching abroad” — but looking back, he said, the hardest, by far, was the first.