One week ago, I arrived in Mexico City. My work visa for the USA had expired, meaning two and a half years finally came to an end. Last summer, 2019, I married the love of my life. We have been together for over six years now, but half of that has been spent apart. We passed the three year apart mark just a couple weeks ago. What it meant for me was that finally, we would be together, in the same country, as we finalise the visa application and begin the process of moving my wife to England on a spouse visa.
Luckily, to pass the ten weeks or so I would spend in Mexico, I found a job. Fortunately, they offered me a two month contract. The venue was very close to the apartment where my wife lives, making it super convenient. All seemed to be going well. I spent many of my final hours in St. Louis in bed, praying for death, as I battled the flu. I brought that to Mexico, and had recovered slightly, but you know me, eager to work and even more eager for football.
After just two days of work with this new club, I quit. Here's the story as to why, which I explained on Twitter last week. Enjoy.
Gather round the campfire children, and let me tell you a story about why I'm going to quit my new job after two days.
Reason number one, which alone is good enough, is that I want to spend more time with my wife. Three years apart ended a couple days ago. Currently, I would spend one hour with her per day. Bugger that. The money, nor the quality of the job, are worth the expense of losing time with her. The money is essentially peanuts, and in regards to the job itself, I genuinely feel I would go backwards if I stayed. For my own football development, I'm better off watching games and reading books and articles all day. The coaching is so bad. I will get to that.
There were a couple red flags prior to taking the job. A big one being a lack of coaching methodology, a game model, a weird schedule that has teams rotating coach multiple times through practice, and a huge part of the schedule being dedicated to unopposed practice. (A friend, former colleague, someone who worked for this club had also warned me against it)
There was also the blacked out part of the generic contract I received. I copied and pasted it, to see what it was. It gives employees a guarantee of transport and housing. As I am using neither, I am saving them money. Surely I should get more wage?
I turn up. We chat. Still no closer to understanding the methodology or game model. There's no curriculum. We have weekly topics, but they are generic, and with no game model to relate it to, what do you do? Two weeks ago, I told him my uniform size. I arrive, he hasn't ordered it. Gives me his old stuff. It's too small and tight for me. You can see my knob. I'm not well hung at all, and I am coaching kids with a clear outline of my dick. That's with the pants on. With the shorts, I get one of those camel toe type arrangements that splits the balls, one in either leg of the shorts.
Early afternoon, I work deliver a session with a coach at a school. The two sessions I have seen were so offensively bad. Don't stand kids in line for ages, and then bitch at them for losing focus. Don't kick them out of the session if they make a mistake.
At the club, each session is interrupted by a coach delivering SAQ. At least half of that is the kids doing a lap of half the pitch. I'm always cautious when it comes to SAQ with kids. If they're playing often, do they need it? What benefit does it actually have? Imagine halfway through your session, you have to give your kids up for twenty minutes, so that they can run round a bit, and then come join you again, to pick up where you left off.
Here we go. Time to start drawing what I have seen. This was the first one, which set a very low bar.
13 kids, 2 active at a time, 0 decisions, 0 variation, kicked out the session if you use the wrong part of the foot.
Here we go. Time to start drawing what I have seen. This was the first one, which set a very low bar.
13 kids, 2 active at a time, 0 decisions, 0 variation, kicked out the session if you use the wrong part of the foot.
We all know how much kids love to stand around doing nothing. We also know how often you chase after a ball to turn around and attack or defend the same direction depending on who has possession.
This is at least an improvement as now each kid has a ball. 30 sole rolls with the right foot, turn around and go back to the line doing 30 sole roles with the left foot.
Tonight I saw this classic. At least it was a kid passing and not the coach. Supported by helpful suggestions like "accuracy" and "shoot." Players in the line were obviously grilled if they didn't pay attention. This was used with U12.
An interesting variation on the classic. A disguised pass in the form of a drag back. The use of poles instead of cones adds more legitimacy.
Apart from the game at the end, I have not yet seen a drill, exercise, or any kind of activity, where there is not a majority waiting in line. Not one or two players, a majority. Like 4 out of 16 working, the rest waiting. It's like they hate including all the kids. Most of what is done is unopposed, a lot of patterns which have somewhat unrealistic angles and distances. Players are grilled if their touch is bad, but of course it is bad, as there is no defender to punish them.
These guys are not modern and progressive coaches. What they are doing and how they are doing it is so outdated. Football and coaching is always evolving. Not every new idea is a good idea, but you still have to be in 2020, not 1980. My last employer may be having some well documented troubles in Boston, but the football product was great. We had a game model, and everything came from that. The progressions and expectations at each age group were clear. Our curriculum, style of play, and coaching methodology was top notch. This came from minds far greater than mine. But every session, every exercise, every progression, every coaching point had a purpose, and it all linked in.
How can I coach movement of your strikers if you haven't told me;
How many strikers you play with
The formation behind
How you build up play
What support runs you want
What type of chance creation you are looking for
What their roles are out of possession
It was part of my job at my last employer to;
Educate coaches
Educate parents
Teach our curriculum and methodology
Interpret the info and apply it to our club
I wrote schemes of work for our goalkeepers, for our futsal programme, and different camps we had, all based on our organisation's game model. This stuff is important. You can't make stuff up on the spot. There has to be a clear idea we all adhere to.
I had pretty much decided earlier this afternoon. But went in with an open mind to try again. Perhaps it was a bad first day? Maybe I am having trouble with the change of environment? No. Day two just confirmed it all. DOC came and took over my U17 group before we progressed into a game. Said he wasn't keen on the sessions he saw me doing earlier, and that intensity had dropped with these U17s compared to last week before I was working with them. So he took over. I thought I was going to get schooled on how to coach. Immediately four boys are sent out of the game to wait their turn, because obviously not everyone can play at this club. One team attacked a goal with a keeper, while the defending team booted it out of play. This essentially became a wave practice geared towards counter attack. But the topic was finishing? Never mind.
The coaching masterclass I was expecting came in the form of shouting;
"Faster"
"Don't lose it"
"Run"
"Pressure"
No challenges, questions, explanations, feedback. Just shouting generic stuff while the players ran really fast.
How can you not be working from a concept? Players need to understand the how and why associated with the decisions and actions of the game. Tell them what information to look for and how to analyse it. Tell them how to gather this information. The game has a series of principles which are followed based on how you execute your style of play in any given situation. What run do you make in this situation, why, and what alternatives are provided within this picture? What are the priorities? What is the risk and reward associated with each decision? This is what players need to know. Not harder, better, faster, stronger.
Might eventually stop bitching. This experience has been eye opening. I remember it being bad here in 2014 and 2015, but probably because I am so much more qualified and experienced now, every little detail irritates me. THESE KIDS DESERVE BETTER
Most of the delivery comes in the form of intimidate and humiliate.
WHY ARE YOU NOT SHOOTING? WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO PASS HERE? DO YOU SEE A DEFENDER? THEN WHY DID YOU PASS? I CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU (plural) THAT YOU ALWAYS SEEM TO PASS RATHER THAN SHOOT!!!! This coming from the guy who spent forty minutes "teaching" "dribbling" and then told the U7s he would kick them out of the session if they didn't pass.
Maybe I'm the idiot for wanting relationships with the players. I need to know who they are, their habits and tendencies, their personalities. I want to challenge and inspire, to do that, I need to know them. I need to observe and listen. And for that to be effective, they have to know me, and that they can trust me. They know I respect them and have their best interests at heart. Their success is my priority, not my own clearly visible dick stroking ego.
Kids are sadly too often a commodity used by adults for their own gain. We think we have to be mean to kids for some ideals of "discipline" and that they need to respect us through fear. Many coaches play the old fashioned emotionally absent father, who never engages, only punish. And a lot of coaches feel their knowledge is enough, and they put down books forever, never to attend another course. What you think and do should always be under scrutiny. You should be different every few years because you are always evolving, improving, refining.
Mexico is really stuck with a lack of help and guidance from the Federation. Most know of coaching licenses being a thing Europeans do to get jobs in Europe.
You learn to be a coach? I thought you just felt it in your bones. Coaching is the only profession where you don't need training or education, right? You played a bit, and you're a better armchair coach than your mates, so give it a go. You knew the national team coach should have picked that other guy, and because they didn't win the World Cup, that's all the confirmation bias you need to suggest you know what you're doing.
Time to get yourself a whistle, a clipboard, and a polo with your initials on.
Thus ends the Twitter thread copypasta. Here's a photo of what should be seen in training sessions:
Interpret stretch as to challenge. Honestly, none of this stuff was present at that club over those two days. The kids hardly touched the ball. In one exercise I observed, a 6v7 at U8, one boy touched the ball six times in fifteen minutes. Two of those times, the ball hit him, and the other four was him discarding it immediately. The session design was fundamentally flawed, but the coach could not see that, and instead would blame the kids for not putting in the effort and working hard enough.
Players were not challenged, other than having to adhere to the coach's shouts of run faster and work harder. Rarely did it look like the game. Because it was all patterns and unopposed drills, there was no decision making, and even when the exercise became more dynamic, the confines of the decisions were incredibly narrow, partly due to the exercise design, and partly due to fear of being reprimanded by the coach for going slightly off course.
It was never fun. Fun is a byproduct of session design, in that it is engaging, challenging, competitive, and has a degree of autonomy. Fun can also be part of the environment, but that was drained completely from the environment.
The last few days, I have spent time getting to know the coaches and the methodology of another club here. The feel is totally different. Nobody seems scared of the boss. The way the coaches engage with the kids is completely different. And best of all, they have a methodology. I read it all. It makes sense, and it is appropriate for kids. How can people in this day and age not have a plan when it comes to coaching? How can there be no methodology, philosophy, or curriculum? Why do so many insist on creating tense environments and ruling through fear? Truly insane. Would you expect your kid's teacher to just make it up on the spot? No. You would expect them to have a scheme of work, delivered over a period of time.
In places like Mexico and the USA, there's often no quality control or accountability. Parents can't tell their arse from their elbow when it comes to teaching methodology, and have an antiquated view of how adults should interact with kids. They expect the teacher to give a lot of information, and for the teacher to instil discipline and hustle.
Here's a formula for you: Outcome (goals, wins, trophies, success) is driven by process (methodology, philosophy, formation, curriculum), and process is driven by character (confident, resilient, intrinsically motivated).
Most parents can only judge by outcome, because it is somewhat quantifiable, although largely arbitrary. There are too many factors at play, and parents are aware than less than 5% of them. What's obvious is the scoreline. How we got there, they cannot see, so peer through their 5% perspective and draw conclusions that are often so wildly inaccurate, that it regularly hurts my head trying to conceptualise how they came to such a conclusion.
Youth clubs have to provide a process. And it has to be child-centred, ego-free, long-term thinking. It's easy to win in the now; pick tall and fast kids, born January to April, boot the ball long, and never pass sideways or backwards. If you want plastic trophies to make up for your small penis, then go ahead and replicate that formula. You'll win games, attract better players, which means you can then cut your weaker players.
Instead of the gatekeepers of knowledge (as genuinely, the vast majority of coaches I have worked with are dumbasses when it comes to football and pedagogy) try to view coaches as the architects of a learning environment. Look up "ecological dynamics." Part of creating this environment of learning is psychological, simply; not being a dick to kids. This means not humiliating and ruling through fear. This means not berating them for every mistake. This means also getting the parents to shut up, as they manipulate the environment on gameday from the sidelines. We have to get kids to trust us, and if we want them to learn, we need them to come out of their comfort zone. They won't leave the comfort zone if we shout at them and punish them. They will stay right inside of it, doing the basics, trying to absolve themselves of responsibility by avoiding the ball and avoiding decisions.
What can parents look for in sessions? Here's a few things, not a complete list:
Rondos and possession games.
Lots of questions and discussions of concepts.
Positive reinforcement.
Players being given autonomy and ownership.
No lines, no laps, no lectures.
No physical punishment for failure.
Players operating in small spaces.
Lots of exercises with game realism (does it look like part of or similar to the game? Is it free flowing and dynamic?)
Lots of small sided work and overloads, 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4, 5v5, 2v1, 3v2, 4v3 etc.
Players being encouraged to keep and protect the ball, via passing, dribbling, turning, shielding rather than kicking it out of bounds.
Players making decisions within exercises, rather than following set patterns and routines and prescribed by the drill.
Do the kids smile?
Are the kids excited to go to practice?
Do they speak highly of the coach, or do they not like and/or fear them?
If you want your kids to learn and have a positive experience, a large part of that comes down to the coach (session architect). If you're paying a lot of money, as most are in the US, you have to hold your coaches and clubs more accountable. Ask questions. Get to know what their philosophy and curriculum is, and why. This stuff really is important. We're not making professional athletes, but helping to develop well-rounded human beings.
Lastly, after coaching with my dick on display for two days, I think back to all the times I didn't coach with my dick out, and how I took it for granted.
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