Suddenly the bustling classroom at the back of the Guru Nanak Satsang Sikh Gurdwara falls almost silent and all eyes are on Dan McNamara. The Wolves head coach, experiencing a wrestling lesson, is engaged in a tense tussle. He twists, panting and heaving, eventually ends up on top of his opponent, and the room erupts.
Compared with some of the challenges McNamara and Wolves have grappled with during his eight and a half years coaching the team, this exercise was child’s play. Wolves, promoted to Women’s Super League Two in May, are visiting the gurdwara – which became Wolverhampton’s first in 1966 – as part of an afternoon city tour which has also included a trip to the historic The Halls music venue and a walk in the centre, as some of their new signings acquaint themselves with the area before the club’s first season as a fully professional women’s team, and their first WSL2 home match, against Sheffield United, on Sunday. Victory against Plymouth in the third-tier promotion playoff was the culmination of years of hard graft in the amateur game, and McNamara pauses for reflection as he chats from his office overlooking the Sir Jack Hayward training ground in Compton.
We’ve got a fantastic setup here, we’ve got our own spaces for the women, changing facilities, which have been added over the summer. My claim to fame was I was in the same youth team as Wayne Rooney for a few years at Everton – our tactics were: ‘Pass the ball to Wayne and he will score.’ And [when I left Everton] I probably fell out of love with the game for a little bit. To be here now working professionally in football is a dream come true.
And I think: ‘Leave the place in a better place than what you got it.’ I don’t think anyone could argue that we’re going to leave this place in a better place than when we first picked it up. It’s not been me; the girls have gone on the pitch and they’ve achieved it. But to have inputted a small bit into making dreams come true gets me quite emotional.” Promotion was a long time coming for Wolves, who won tier three’s northern division in 2022 but – with only one team promoted then – lost the playoff decider against the southern champions, Southampton.
McNamara missed that because he was overseas with the Royal Air Force, and watched from the Falkland Islands. Since 2024, he has coached Wolves full-time as part of the RAF’s elite athlete scheme – “they have extended me for an additional year to continue at WSL2; hopefully I can do them proud and represent the air force in a good way over the next 12 months,” he says – and his team lost two league games across the next two seasons. In 2025, they finished second but were heartbroken to find the club had not applied for a licence for promotion.
A year later, with a new executive chair in Nathan Shi, the club’s approach to the women’s team has changed, and McNamara’s team have cabins at the training ground as private changing areas, a meeting/analysis room and places to relax together. Some of the squad engage in a tense round of the card game Dobble after having breakfast together, before heading out for training. Further new training pitches will follow soon.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
