Gareth Allen was a professional snooker player. After a career in the sport, he started an apprenticeship with Airbus in North Wales, where he is now a Skilled Aircraft Fitter. He is also a WPBSA qualified snooker coach. You can find Gareth on X and LinkedIn.
When I was three years old, my granddad bought me a snooker table for the front room in their house, a little 6-foot table. I would watch snooker on TV with him, and when I was 12, he started taking me down to the local snooker club. That was my first time on a full-size snooker table.
I played in local leagues and then progressed to adult tournaments and the Welsh amateur tournaments. I made my Welsh amateur men’s team debut on my 18th birthday, so that was quite memorable.
All my experiences of winning and losing in amateur leagues helped prepare me for eventually qualifying for the professional tour in 2015.
I spent two years on the professional circuit, then unfortunately lost my tour card in 2017. I was approaching my 30th birthday later that year.
And I just thought to myself, after what I’ve gone through in the two years. Is it really what I want to be doing for the rest of my life? I wasn’t quite sure, so I decided to give Q School another go – Q School being an amateur snooker competition which serves as the qualification process for the World Snooker Tour. But looking back on it now, I wasn’t fully committed to it.
I knew it was time to call it a day. I played full-time for eight years, with the help of family and various sponsors.
After I’d told my sponsor that I was going to quit, he said, have you ever thought about coaching?
I’d done a couple of little lessons with people that have asked for advice in the past, but never thought about doing my official badges and going into it properly.
He said he would pay for me and support me through my coaching badges and later on that year, World Snooker launched the Level 2 coaching course and now I’m a qualified snooker coach.
How did you come across Airbus?
I never wanted to be a full-time coach, so I started searching for jobs in what I used to do when I left school, which was working in IT, which I’d done for about six years. I’ve got IT qualifications, so I thought, I can go back into that. But it turned out all my qualifications weren’t recognised anymore and were out of date.
I went down to the job centre to get advice on what I should do. They got me a part time job in a warehouse picking and packing parcels. I did that for about 6 months to get some money coming in.
Then I saw Airbus were hiring apprentices. I’ve got lots of family and friends working at Airbus, they are a huge local employer. I thought, I don’t know anything about engineering or aeroplanes. But it’s a completely new challenge.
I started in September 2018. I completed my apprenticeship two and a half years ago and I’m currently part of the shop floor fitting team.
What was the apprenticeship like?
I started my apprenticeship when I was 30, and I was put in a classroom with people in their teens, just out of doing GCSEs at school. The engineering, aeronautical engineering apprenticeship I did has a lot of maths and science with it and I’d not done that since school. I might have forgot a few things!
I was in a classroom with 16, 17-year-olds that had just left school; they know all this algebra. I’m sat there thinking, I was good at maths but it was 14 years ago! The tutor knew I was older than all the others, so she gave me extra help. I passed my apprenticeship with the with the highest grade possible.
You go around the classroom introducing yourself in the first week, and I said: “I’m Gareth and I’m 30.” I had to explain I had pursued a career in professional snooker.
It soon goes around the whole college. Everyone’s Googling you, saying, ‘You’re literally a professional snooker player!’ And they treat you like a bit of a celebrity. It was a weird experience. I had loads of questions, people saying, ‘I watched you on YouTube last night against Ronnie O’Sullivan.’ And I’m like, yeah that was me. It’s nice, you know? Getting recognised for being at the top of your chosen sport.
How has snooker helped you in your career?
Snooker is a very individual sport. You’re out there on your own, so you’ve got to be resilient and you’ve got to have really good composure. It’s a very, very mental sport. I think that’s stood me in good stead, being resilient. Snooker has taught me quite a few things like that, like working on my own and when I’ve played in snooker teams. When I started off here at Airbus we formed different teams as apprentices to work on our own on projects and I was good at teamwork.
I’ve always worked hard and been competitive at snooker, and I took that attitude into my apprenticeship. Through snooker, I had strived to be the best and I still do it in my day-to-day job. When I go to work now, it’s got to be a good standard cause you can’t park a plane at 37,000 feet to repair it!
I took a lot of what I learned during professional sport into my new career and I think it I think it’s really helped me.
How do you feel looking back on your snooker career?
I feel very, very proud of what I did in snooker. I’ve got trophies, I’ve got clips on TV and videos, pictures and things to look back on, lists of people I played against – including John Higgins, Ken Doherty and Jimmy White.
My favourite match was playing Ronnie O’Sullivan at the China Open. I’ve looked up to him my whole life, it was played in front of 300 million people online. I didn’t get the win, but it’s the whole experience walking into an arena with a packed-out crowd of 2000 people, and hearing the roar of the crowd when he introduced Ronnie. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. And I was just like, wow, this is actually happening. I’m playing Ronnie O’Sullivan. It was a huge moment in my life, I will never forget.