Ian Ormondroyd is a busy man; a far busier man than he could have imagined a decade ago.

As head of City’s flourishing football in the community department, the diary is always full – but you won’t hear him complaining.

It is a labour of love for the one-time winger after a career cut ridiculously short through a serious ankle injury.

When Ormondroyd was forced to hang up his boots in 1999, the future looked uncertain.

The opportunity to succeed former players Ron Futcher and Gavin Oliver in the community post came up by chance.

Futcher had just gone, while Oliver wanted to devoted his time to a hotel in Sheffield that he had bought with his wife.

Ormondroyd, fed up with life without football, agreed to fill in the gap but he had no pretensions of taking it on full time.

He said: “I was playing a bit of golf and was bored out of my head. It had been six months since I’d stopped playing and I didn’t really know what to do next.

“I agreed to take over for a couple of months as a bit of a stepping stone. I was looking to get into coaching, perhaps with the centre of excellence first and working my way up.

“Unfortunately, because of the condition of my ankles, I wouldn’t have been able to coach at a proper level. I couldn’t have worked on a training ground with the injury.

“But I quickly found that I quite liked this job – and now I’ve been doing it for 11 years.”

The department that Ormondroyd heads is unrecognisable from those early days when he worked in a team of two with one minibus at their disposal.

Now a staff of 16 uses a fleet of vehicles to deal with the “tens of thousands” of people that take part in their projects.

He said: “It’s completely diverse. The business has grown so much to cover so many different areas.

“We deal with all age groups, from nursery kids right through to 70 to 80 in an extra-time project that we fund. We cover so many areas and we try to do everything for the right reasons.”

Club community programmes are light years ahead from the time when it was simply a case of getting children kicking a ball around the local school.

City, like the 71 others under the Football League Trust umbrella, must work to four themes: sports participation, education, health and social inclusion.

While football remains the common link binding each one together, the staff are now social workers as much as sports coaches.

A homeless group, for example, meet to play games at Manningham Sports Centre every Friday with a meal afterwards; Valley Parade will next month host an African men’s HIV awareness day.

Last season, the department oversaw a stop-smoking campaign on the concourse before the Rotherham home game. Football is the hook to that education.

They run three disability clubs each week and a team recently travelled to Holland and Germany for a tournament.

Ormondroyd, known in the game as ‘Stix’, said: “We try and engage anybody that wants to play football. Anyone with a learning disability is welcome to come along and play.

“We are closely connected to the club, and they are very pleased with what we do, but we are a self-funded charity.

“We have to justify everything that’s in place to the Football League, who monitor us regularly, and we’ve gained silver criteria with them for what we are doing.”

A board of trustees, headed by City company secretary Alan Biggin, meets quarterly. Former sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe and City’s two chairmen are among the members who go through all the business plans and financial reports.

It is a thriving operation – and one that is likely to keep expanding.

l Football in the Community will be running coaching courses throughout the summer holidays. Details are on their website www.bradfordcityfitc.org.uk or by calling 01274-706850.