Nicky Cowley

The whole thing felt surreal.

It was only 10 months earlier that we’d moved away from our families in Essex. Left teaching careers lasting more than a decade. All for the opportunity we’d dreamed of, to work in football full-time.

We joined a club that was in pain. A club that was still reeling from being relegated out of the football league six years earlier.

That pain wasn’t something we shied away from.

One of the first presentations we made to the group focused on the pain that Lincoln had suffered in previous years. Dropping out of the football league had really hit the club hard, and we thought that if the players could see that – observe it with their own eyes – then it would become easier for them to understand what we were trying to achieve.

Sometimes in life, when things haven’t gone so well, you just need to hit the reset button and start again. That’s definitely what we were trying to do at Lincoln.

Danny

Living between Lincoln and Essex, where our families were, wasn’t easy. But, like Nicky said, when your dream and ambition since day dot has been to be involved in professional football, you feel that if you don’t take the opportunity, you’d live to regret it.

Especially when that opportunity comes at a club with real potential.

“We wanted to bring an enthusiasm and direction back to the club. Reconnect it with the people. To do that, we needed to learn quickly”

For us, this job is about much more than just the team. One of the reasons winning on a Saturday is important is because, as well as points, it buys you time.

The time you need to build a club, not just a team.

At our previous club, Braintree, we’d only been allowed to build the team, so we knew it was probably going to be a short-term venture. But at Lincoln, we were being given the opportunity to build the club from the bottom up.

And when we looked at the support and the fanbase, we believed that if we could get it right, it had a lot of legs.

Lincoln’s a little bit out of the way, geographically – it kind of stands on its own. So the people have such an allegiance… not just for the football club, but the whole city. They’re so proud to be Lincoln.