On a sunny morning at the George Town Annex, there’s a respectful hush as the coach gets up to speak.
“I will be fair, I will be firm, I will be your friend and your father,” he tells the group.
“What I expect from you in return is discipline, determination, dedication and desire.”
Ernie ‘Gillie’ Seymour has been delivering that sermon to generations of youngsters for almost 40 years. He estimates he’s said those words “100,000 times”.
Michael Myles heard it as his very first training session, as a 10-year-old goalkeeper in one of Gillie’s first international youth teams.
He heard it again this week as the wiry veteran initiated a new group of young ballers with his tried and trusted formula.
“Football is life and life is football,” says Seymour, who uses his coaching sessions to prepare youngsters for the world beyond the soccer pitch.
Myles was back at the Annex last week as a donor, helping to fund Seymour’s programmes at Cayman Athletic Sports Club, and to talk to youngsters at the latest soccer camp. He credits the coach first with keeping him off the streets, then with getting him into college, and inspiring him to pursue a career in social work.
“I wouldn’t be where I am if it wasn’t for Gillie and people like him who put me on the right path,” he said.
“A lot of us in my generation grew up in single-parent families and he filled that father figure role for us.”
When Gillie says he will be a ‘father’, he means it. When he started out in the 1980s, he had an old station wagon that he would drive around the island to pick up kids for practice and drop them off afterwards.
“There must have been 20 of us crammed into that little station wagon,” Myles recalls, “and he would drive from West Bay to Bodden Town to make sure we got home safe.”
Gillie didn’t just teach soccer. He taught life skills and encouraged them to get an education. And when they needed direction and discipline, he dished it out with kindness.
More than a coach, Seymour has been a father, a mentor and a fixer for generations of Cayman youth.
He describes it as his calling, and insists that while he may no longer work for the Department of Sports, he certainly hasn’t retired from coaching.
As the head of Cayman Athletic Sports Club, he is rarely away from the field.
“I’ve given back more than I have received,” he commented earlier this month when his retirement from the Department of Sports was announced.
But the rewards come in other ways.
At an East End bar with a friend, a few weeks ago, he ordered two bottles of Dragon Stout. The bar man, a former player, wouldn’t let him pay.
“I can rarely pay for a drink or a meal,” he said.
His proteges are everywhere.
Myles, who now runs the Inspire Cayman training school, pays it forward by helping youth find careers and direction in the working world.
Gillie also looks with pride at the children that have come through his programmes and have gone on to success off the field. Richard Hew, the CEO of Caribbean Utilities Company, and Albert Anderson, the CEO of the Cayman Islands Airports Authority, smile back from a faded team photo he keeps on his phone.
Countless others have gone to college. Some he is happy to have kept out of jail and on the path to a productive life.
Despite his efforts, others did end up behind bars.
“Some of the best footballers in Cayman are up in Northward,” he said.
He never gave up on them, and from time to time he will get a call from the prison, “Coach, help us settle this dispute.”
Energetic children need an outlet, he believes, and without football many more would have ended up in trouble. He worries for today’s children, growing up in single-parent families where ‘the Xbox is the baby sitter”.
Seymour can’t count the number of kids he has coached. And few forget his influence.
As if to prove the point, while we are sat in the shade of the bleachers listening to him talk about Pele and the fundamentals of dribbling, shooting and passing he tries to instill in his players, a former star player drifts by.
Marlon Bailey is in town for a short while with his family. He lives in Miami now but wouldn’t visit Cayman without paying respects to his coach.
They reminisce for a minute over the winning goal Bailey scored in a famous 1-0 win over Jamaica in the Caribbean Under-20 World Cup qualifiers.
Bailey traces his fingers across the memory of a bruise left by a tough Jamaican defender in that clash.
He credits Seymour with keeping him and his team-mates on the straight and narrow.
“These are great memories,” he says, looking out at the youngsters chasing a ball around the Annex, under the watchful eye of assistant coach Lovane ‘Pelo’ Joven.
The children at the camp on Friday are almost as effusive, screaming “Coachie, pass” in undisguised glee as he joins in a small-sided game, showboating his repertoire of flicks and back-heels in the summer heat.
“He’s the best…,” one of the youngsters says simply.
For Gillie, the joy of being out on the field is pure.
“I will be coaching till I fall over and can’t do it no more,” he says.
That’s a great thing, Myles agrees.
But he wonders where the next generation of Gillie Seymours is coming from.
He hopes those who came through his programmes will give back to the young people coming through today.
“He mentored a lot of fatherless children and there are many more out there today that need that help. It is up to us, the ones that benefited from his coaching, to try to be those mentors,” he said.
Rumours of Gillie’s retirement may have been exaggerated, but when he does finally hang up the whistle, Myles says, his legacy will extend far beyond the football field.
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