‘Winnipeg welcomed me in with open arms’: Former Valour captain Fordyce named assistant coach

Daryl Fordyce always knew he wanted to coach.

So as the sun began setting on the Northern Irish midfielder’s playing career, he began writing the next chapter. For the past five years, he has been working on his coaching badges, now holding a UEFA ‘A’ License.

After retiring following the 2022 CPL season, all that work has now paid off. Valour FC today announced that Fordyce, their former co-captain, is back with the club as an assistant coach and coordinator of youth development.

“I’ve had 20 good years in the game, my passion now is to go into coaching,” Fordyce told CanPL.ca. “Over the off-season it started to evolve [with Valour]. Once I got a good chat with [Valour head coach] Phil Dos Santos he said ‘Hey, there’s an opening here and let’s talk’. Very, very grateful; very, very excited.”

Valour also announced that assistant coach and video analyst Jay Bhindi and goalkeeper coach Patrick Di Stefani are also remaining with the club.

Fordyce believes Valour FC is the perfect place to start that coaching journey. Having spent the last three seasons playing for the club, he has seen firsthand the opportunity that exists in Winnipeg.

“Our facilities are incredible,” he says. “You look at the stadium we have, the gym facilities, the locker room, the treatment. Everything we have here is in place to excel as a professional player. Now for me going in as a coach, everything is in place.”

Off the field as well he has taken a shine to Manitoba’s provincial capital. He says that the city gets overlooked a lot, particularly because of its notoriously inclement winter weather. The summers, however, are some of the most beautiful in the country and the people are incredibly kind and helpful, Fordyce says.

“People talk about Winnipeg being really cold, and hey, the whole of Canada is really cold whenever the winter comes,” he said with a laugh, later adding that he’s “very settled with the family and Winnipeg welcomed me with open arms. I have been forever grateful for that.”

Fordyce brought with him a wealth of experience, having previously spent time with North Ireland as a youth international, as well as AFC Bournemouth, Glentoran, Linfield, FC Edmonton, FC Cincinnati, and Sligo Rovers.

He becomes the latest player this off-season to step off the field and into a coaching or front-office role within the league. He says that retaining that type of knowledge and experience within the league will only help it grow long-term. It will also help veteran player recruitment he says, as they can see the potential post-career benefits of joining the CPL.

“Nick [Ledgerwood], Mason [Trafford], Jamar Dixon, Drew Beckie, guys like that,” said Fordyce. “Proper professionals within the game that had great careers, a ton of knowledge they can pass onto the next generation, whether they are in the office or on the pitch coaching… It’s massive for me, for that extensive knowledge of those players that I mentioned that just retired to pass on to the next generation. They’ve all been there, they’ve done it and now it just filters down throughout the whole system.”

Fordyce will get his own opportunity to learn from an experienced mentor as he starts his coaching career. He is incredibly excited about the chance to get to learn from Dos Santos, who has a wealth of experience behind the bench himself in the USL, as well as MLS with the Vancouver Whitecaps before coming to Winnipeg.

“Oh, I’m going to be learning every single day. In the short space that I’ve been here so far it’s incredible,” says Fordyce. “For me, I’m just really excited and so fortunate to have someone of Phil’s calibre to learn from and help grow myself as a coach.”

Fordyce admitted that the last few years with Valour have been incredibly frustrating at times. The club missed the playoffs by a single point in 2021, and again finished fifth in 2022 despite being very much in the race until the last few matchdays. The club still has yet to make a postseason appearance.

Fordyce, however, is looking to help change that history, and believes that the clubs’ off-season recruitment has gone a long way toward taking that next step.

“When I decided to retire, one of the things I said to Phil was I’ve played three years but we really need something extra, a younger version of me with more quality,” he said with a chuckle. “I look at some of the players that we have signed and I’m very, very excited. As I said to Phil, if I was playing this year as a player I would be confident walking onto the pitch with the players he has recruited.”

But he has been around the game long enough to know that what looks good on paper doesn’t necessarily translate onto the pitch. With that in mind, he will be offering the club’s players plenty of advice — some that he will be surely taking himself as he begins this new role.

“In this game, nothing is given to you, you have to earn your right every single day,” says Fordyce. “You can’t take anything for granted, you have to always strive every day to better yourself in whatever situation you find yourself in you have to keep moving forward.”