Morocco: Lamia Boumehdi, an inspiring football coach

Former football player, Lamia Boumehdi is today one of the key female figures of football in Morocco. From 2015 to 2016, she was the coach of Wydad women’s team. Since 2019, she has been the coach of women’s U17 national team.

Before becoming a football coach in 2015, Lamia Boumehdi was first a football player. A passion that she has nurtured since her childhood. At a very young age, while girls of her age were fond of dolls, she preferred soccer balls. Realizing that she wanted to make a career in soccer, she discovered that there was unfortunately no women’s soccer club in her hometown, Berrechid. Her mother therefore decided in 1997 to create one where her daughter and the other girls of the city could play. This is how the Berrechid women’s club was born. In a few years, she became a star of the club. 

At just 16 years old, she was called up to the national team and participated in the African Cup in South Africa in 2000, then became captain of the Atlas Lionesses a few years later. But in 2009, at only 26 years old, a ligament injury forced her to stop playing.  A real disaster ! Following her injury, she lived a difficult and painful situation that forced her to stay at home. Faced with her passion for soccer, her entourage managed to convince her to return to the soccer fields, but as a coach.

From football player to coach

Determined to become a football coach, she went back to school. She first passed a license C, then a license B and later attended the University of Leipzig in Germany. In 2015, at the end of her training, the WAC, one of the Morocco’s leading football clubs, contacted her to train its women’s team. She coached the team for a year. In 2019, the Royal Moroccan Football Federation (FRMF) appointed her as the coach of the U17 women’s national team. A generation that she accompanied to the U20 and which won a 3rd place at the African Games in Rabat and a gold medal at the North African Tournament. 

Despite her successes, Lamia Boumehdi still has to fight to impose herself in an environment where machismo reigns. A situation that does not discourage her, but that pushes her to work and commit herself more for the development of the practice of football by women in Morocco.

Ambitious, her next dream is to become one day the coach of the women’s national soccer team and why not, the first female coach of an elite men’s team.

Danielle Engolo