The ex-Singapore national youth coach now building up women's football in Africa's tiniest nation

Familiar with Seychelles? It's the smallest nation in all of Africa. With its pristine white-sand beaches, clear blue waters and array of luxury resorts, the archipelago is typically known as a romantic tropical holiday destination.

That's about all I knew of it, until I met with Ms Chris Yip-Au.

It's a scorching Saturday, and somewhere on the island of Mahé, the 32-year-old and her compact Toyota hatchback are trundling along on its gravel roads in the 30°C heat.

She's on her way to work – a women's football match will be played at the national training centre in a couple of hours. The changing rooms need to be prepped, lines on the pitch need to be marked, the goal posts need to be shifted.

All this needs to be done in the sweltering heat, but unlike most other football matches played by national teams, there is no pre-match assembly detail that can be called upon to do the job.

Instead, the responsibility lies wholly on Ms Yip-Au, the head of women's football and the women's national team coach for the Seychelles Football Federation.

Over a video call on Mar 2, she told me, with a tongue-in-cheek grin: "My only motivation to go to the gym is to make sure I'm strong enough to move the goal posts."

During matches, in between yelling instructions and guidance to her players, Ms Yip-Au can also be found crouching pitchside with a camera to photograph gameplay. 

With no dedicated media team for her to tap on, sometimes she writes up a match report herself and sends it, along with the photos, to local newspapers which are often more than happy to publish them.

And because public bus services in Seychelles end early, Coach Chris occasionally doubles up as Driver Chris, ferrying players home one by one in her car.

I was astonished to hear all this. But it all makes sense once you realise Ms Yip-Au is the only full-time staff member for women's football in the entire country. 

Apart from an assistant coach and a team manager who help her on a part-time basis, she handles all aspects of the Seychellois women's game – both on and off the field – though you'd be mistaken if you think her role is merely that of a glorified logistics manager.

"What really drew me to this job was the chance to be the head of women's football … to lay the right foundations," she said.

Ms Yip-Au previously held positions as head coach of Singapore's Under-16 and Under-19 women's football teams from 2020 to 2023.

At various points during these stints, she often felt that her ideas on how to improve the administrative side of women's football were not given the time of day, which left her feeling discouraged and disillusioned about the impact she was able to make.

"There are a lot of things you can't change and improve if you are just a coach, but if you are given that power to make decisions, you can make things better," she said.

"On that end, I am enjoying what I am doing now."

She paused a beat, then added: "Minus all the logistics."

FROM SINGAPORE TO SEYCHELLES

If you ever find yourself in Seychelles, an archipelago of 115 islands north-east of Madagascar, it won't be hard to spot Ms Yip-Au.

Aside from the fact there aren't many Asian faces living or working there, the African nation has a population of just over 100,000 – that's half the number of people living in Sengkang town.

I imagine it could be easy to feel out of place, I remarked. Yet Ms Yip-Au said she has settled in well in the country that speaks French, Seychellois Creole and English, so much so she often forgets she's a foreigner.

"My job requires me to work with a lot of the locals, and after spending so much time with them, I don't feel like I don't belong," she said.

"It's only when we take a photo and it comes out that I (look at it and) realise, 'Oh – I'm not actually African!'"

But how did she go from a tiny dot in Asia to another one 5,400km away, clear across the Indian Ocean?

About a year into her stint as head coach of the Singapore Women's Premier League team Still Aerion, she got a call from Ms Angeline Chua, a close friend whom Ms Yip-Au had known from her playing days.

Ms Chua held the Seychelles job from April 2021 to February 2023 and subsequently joined the Fiji women's national football team as head coach.

There was an opening there, Ms Chua said. Would Ms Yip-Au want to try applying for it?

Though she later found out that she was only the federation's second choice, Ms Yip-Au was offered the role in late August 2023, and started work in October.

In hindsight, she said, it was quite the "crazy decision".

"When I met my fellow football administration counterparts from Africa, they were all like: 'You mean you just jumped on a plane and went to a continent you've never been before?'

"And I'm like… 'If you put it that way…'" she chuckled.

Her parents had never even heard of Seychelles before she told them about the offer. All the same, she said, they weren't surprised at her decision to pack up and leave.

"They know I'm quite YOLO one," she said easily, referring to the acronym for "you only live once".

"When you're young, you don't really want to stay in a single country. You want to see the world a little bit more. So when the opportunity came, I just hopped on it."

BUILDING A LEGACY OF HER OWN

When Ms Yip-Au arrived in Seychelles in 2023, women's football there was in a fragile state. 

Following her predecessor Ms Chua's departure, the role of head of women's football had been left vacant for almost 10 months.

And just days before Ms Yip-Au's arrival, the national team recorded its biggest-ever defeat in a friendly match against Malawi, where they were thrashed 17-0.

"I had to start from ground zero," admitted the Singaporean.

The team's most recent international matches were against Singapore in November 2025, when Ms Yip-Au took the squad to Bukit Gombak Stadium for a training camp. They lost those matches 9-0 and 7-0.

While the scorelines make for sombre reading, they must be considered in context: The nation was introduced to the football governing body FIFA's Women's World Ranking for the first time only in 2022, even though the rankings were launched in 2003 with over 100 active national teams at the time. 

Seychelles currently ranks 176th out of 198 teams worldwide.

For a nation this small and young in the sport, Ms Yip-Au is clear-eyed about what success in Seychelles looks like, and it's not a number on a scoreboard.

"If we don't have the foundation, there's really no point talking about anything else," she said. Debuting at a big global competition like the World Cup, she reckoned, is an aspiration that requires a longer runway of about 30 years or so – and even that is ambitious. 

The focus right now is not in major wins and flashy trophies, but in building women's football from the ground up. 

Since taking up the head coach post in 2023, Ms Yip-Au has revived the women's league and rebranded it with a new logo and marketing push.

She also established a league for girls in secondary school, and is now building connections with primary schools to build a more systemic pathway for girls to play football professionally.

She has also been working hard at what she sees as her most important job: Helping Seychellois players "dream bigger".

For instance, Ms Yip-Au had helped to recommend several of her players to clubs overseas for opportunities to play in a foreign league. 

One of them, Ms Pascalina Moustache, made history in 2024 by becoming the first female player in Seychelles' history to become a professional footballer – signing a contract with FK Saned Joniskis, a club that plays in the top division of Lithuania.

Ms Moustache has since had a spell at Turkish club Hitab Spor Kulubu, and now plays for Irodotos Women FC, a second division club in Greece.

The player has regularly expressed her gratitude to her coach. 

"Every year without fail she will thank me – I think she never expected in her life to be a professional footballer. She's probably dreamt of it but never knew it could be a possibility until now," said Ms Yip-Au.

She emphasised that she wants everyone in her team to dream just as big. 

"Maybe they might not wish for it, but it's important for them to know that if they really wanted it, it is possible."

Another one of her players, Ms Reena Esther, managed to snag a contract with Ms Yip-Au's former team Still Aerion with her help in 2024 as well. 

"Sometimes you just need to shoot your shot. That's my life motto," said Ms Yip-Au.

With a laugh, she added: "At most they say 'no' only what!"

DIDN'T WANT FOOTBALL IN THE FIRST PLACE

Ms Yip-Au's journey in football thus far has been a colourful one. Perhaps what's most ironic about the young coach who now spends every waking moment inspiring an entire nation of young footballers is that she very nearly didn't play the sport at all.

"I wanted to play basketball or track-and-field, but my school didn't have those co-curricular activities," she said. What the school did have was football. 

"I thought: 'Since I'm going to be doing this for four years, why not make the most out of it?'"

Football also served as somewhat of a distraction during her parents' divorce at the time, which by her own account was "a bit messy". For a period, she shared a single room with her mother and younger brother in her grandmother's flat – an arrangement she described as suffocating. 

"Having football gave me something to do outside of school, and that was helpful, instead of hanging around and getting into vices. Playing football was a good way to pass the time." 

She thrived at it, finding her place on the field as a creative forward player. 

Ms Yeong Sheau Shyan, who is part of the Football Association of Singapore Council and the current head of women's football at Singapore Premier League club Lion City Sailors, coached Ms Yip-Au when she joined Bowen Secondary in 2009.

To Ms Yeong, the teenage Chris stood out immediately among her peers.

"It was a very raw team, but (Chris) was outstanding in her abilities already," Ms Yeong told me. "That's what I remember: Small little girl, but very technical and very fast."

Before long, Ms Yip-Au was scouted to be part of the U-16 women's national team set-up. Following the completion of her A-Level examinations, Ms Yeong asked her to help out as an assistant coach for Arion Football Academy, which she had co-founded.

"There were a few other girls I tried to bring into coaching as well. But Chris had energy – she worked well with the younger kids (and) was playful enough to keep the fun in games and in training," she said.

Ms Yip-Au spent the next 10 years working diligently in the game; assisting with youth national teams while still in university and coaching at-risk youth through the SportCares Saturday Night Lights programme.

At every stage, she said, she doubted if coaching could really be a full-time career for her. And yet at every stage, a new opportunity to coach appeared.

"I took it as a sign," she said. "Like, oh – maybe this really is for me."

But even now, two decades after she first learnt to kick a football, Ms Yip-Au is adamant about one thing: There is much life to be lived outside of the sport.

"FOOTBALL DOESN'T DEFINE ME"

Under the FIFA Elite Coach Mentoring Programme, Ms Yip-Au attended a coaching workshop in Zurich, Switzerland earlier this year, where she found herself surrounded by some of the best coaches in women's football.

The venue overlooked a gorgeous lake. In between sessions, while the other coaches spent every meal and break talking tactics, Ms Yip-Au spent the whole time scanning the room for someone who might want to go for a swim.

"Why is nobody talking about going to the lake?" she recalled thinking, laughing at the memory. "It's so beautiful. It's so nice. But I'm the only one thinking about it." 

It soon dawned on her: She is not like the other coaches.

"I realised many of these coaches are obsessed over their job, over football," she said. 

"I don't have that same obsession. I don't want football to be my personality."

So who is Chris Yip-Au when she's not on a football pitch?

These days, she makes the most of the natural beauty of Seychelles, going for dives in abundant crystalline waters in the Indian Ocean and hiking up the mountains away from the city centre.

But she also loves taking photographs – so much so that she has even entertained thoughts of doing it for a living, despite knowing it is a tough job. "I do cover games ... just to remind myself that I have this skill and talent too."

Towards the end of our conversation, I observed that she has come a long way from the reluctant teenager joining a co-curricular activity simply because there was nothing better available.

I asked what her 14-year-old self would make of where she is today: Relocating to East Africa, running a national programme, jetting to Europe to have breakfast with coaches she used to watch on television.

She didn't hesitate.

"Young me would be wondering how I got to know and interact with all these people. She'd ask: Who is this cool person living on an island, being in charge of things?"

"I think 14-year-old me would think that I'm super cool."