Qualifications

[Unregistered]

Name one great football player who is or was a great coach. BB? Parcells? Shula? Walsh? Lombardi? Knoll? Landry? Dungy? How about the Harbaugh brothers? Mediocre quarterbacks. Look at MLB, NHL, and NBA coaches. The VAST majority were mediocre/average players and in many cases were minor league players or borderline major league.

This influx of D1 hotshots as soccer coaches is just another example of why soccer is treading water in the US. The business models are being driven by the demands of customers, many of whom have very little experience with the game and simply don't understand the difference between being able to do something and to teach something.

I am a very proficient guitar player (boy, talk about the 10,000 hour standard being spot on....) but I am a horrible guitar instructor. I simply cannot explain stuff that I do naturally without thinking.

I am not saying that a top D1 player cannot become a good coach. That is not the issue. The issue is when playing ability trumps all other criteria that most of us know works in the coaching arena.

- Cujo

My feeling on the matter is that it is selection bias.

The pool of great coaches come from a vast pool of all people that want to be coaches, so the success rate of become a great coach is very small.

When you start with a small pool of great players, then whittle that pool down by they fact that most of them are well off and thus don't "need" to coach, there aren't many people in that group left willing to put in the work needed to become a great coach.

Also, many of these great players start at (near?) the top where there is much less room for error. So they "fail" to become great when they never really had the chance to learn.

I will conceed the point that it is often hard for experts to know how they do something, but I'm not sure that's any different for "low skilled" players. The lower skilled are just more used to sitting down and figuring out the mechanics of a skill.

The one thing I will say that high level players have is that they are more likely to have been exposed to high level coaches. If the player is paying attention to the process of coaching that is taking place while he is being coached, that experience can be useful when he starts coaching.

[Unregistered]

These arguments are a little silly. We all know gerat coaches can come frmo different backgrounds. We know a gerat coach (or teacher) when we see it. There are less gifted athletes who are coaches who aren't better because they weren't good players. Some of these don't know the correct techniques or that you are not offsides on a throw-in or whatever. Some obviously do. But if an old coach can't teach how to strike a ball correctly then he or she isn't going to be very good. In those cases, your odds may be better with the recently graduated college player as opposed to the English teacher who gets assigned to the freshman team and hasn't even watched a soccer game. I don't agree with Cujo's examples either. You have to be a hell of an athlete to play in the minor leagues or even good D3 at any sport. And you're so geniusly gifted at guitar you can't teach it? Nice, gratuitous plug about yourself and tossing around the 10,000 hour thing.

[dd2]

Lots of interesting responses in this thread. I think a few of the comments adopt a rather extreme reading of my earlier post, or at least one that wasn't intended. All I said was that, as a parent, I'd be more interested in my kid playing for a young coach who had played D1 soccer than a 15 year HS coach with no playing experience beyond high school. I think the reasons are defensible, even if people might not agree.

I think that the most important thing for youth soccer coaches to develop is technical ability. I think that HS soccer depends very little on technical ability, and I don't think most HS soccer coaches teach it very well. My hypothetical soccer coach played only HS soccer. Why would I have any confidence that he (or she) had been technically well-trained? Teaching kids to run, run, run and subbing as soon as people tire is not the game I want my kid to be taught. A D1 college soccer player is much more likely to have been well-trained technically and know how technical ability is developed. Moreover, the D1 player is a lot more likely to have experienced tactical complexity and good coaching. The kids I know who have been recruited and observed D1 practices have reported that the quality of play and practice is very high - higher than HS or club.

I think some may misinterpret my preferences for an argument that playing skill determines coaching skill. That's not quite right. Does playing skill help a teacher? Absolutely. It's hard to teach something you're not good at yourself. My daughter's math teacher needs to be good at math, and in fact part of the problem with our country's science and math education system is that too few of our most talented scientists and mathematicians go into teaching. They don't have to be at the very top of their field, but they need to be pretty good at it - better than some of the teachers my children have had.

But as important as skill (at least for a soccer coach) is exposure to the game at an appropriately high level. Yes, Harbaugh is a great NFL coach and a modestly successful NFL quarterback. His exposure to the game at its highest level (not his intrinsic skill as a player - which primarily helped him experience the game at a high level) surely helps him. It's given him insights that Bill Belichick (not even a college player, I believe) had to make up the hard way with years of experience (and a father who was a successful coach). Same with Doc Rivers or Pat Riley. Their exposure to the game at a high level helped them become the coaches they are. So, in my view, a D1 college player has learned things about the game that my hypothetical HS soccer coach probably hasn't.

Now the one thing I didn't talk about in my post was teaching ability. That's obviously just as important as playing skill or exposure to the game. You can't teach what you don't know. Even if you know, you can't teach if you can't teach. So here, I concede that experienced coaches have insights about teaching that my D1 rookie coach wouldn't have. That having been said, the mere fact that someone is experienced doesn't make her a better teacher any more than the mere fact that someone is a skilled player. It helps, but no more than that. There are some awful experienced teachers. You certainly can't argue that someone will be a good coach BECAUSE he or she was a relatively weak player.

So back to my original, hopefully more clear, point. The original poster criticized a club for hiring someone straight out of college to be a coach. All I'm saying is that some kids straight out of college might make pretty good coaches, better than at least some more experienced ones. Obviously any good hiring process involves an interview and an honest assessment of teaching ability. Some young people make terrific teachers. Hopefully those who have that gift and an appropriate knowledge of the game become coaches.

[Unregistered]

Good stuff from dd2 as usual. Those arguing about the great coaches who were less (comparatively) gifted athletes I assume would concede one point. All of those folks were gym rats or something similar to that in terms of exposure to the sport. BB is a good example, for as dd2 points out he is a coach's son. Same reason a lot of college bball coaches love having point guards who were the sons of coaches (not necessarily the highlight reel guys but they know what they are doing). There is a huge difference between folks like that and the math of gym teacher at school who no soccer experience becoming a coach and then 15 years later being considered a good, veteran coach.

Here's another example. Do you think the super-talented kids who are selected for Teach for America are good teachers or potentially very good teachers? I'll take my chances on one of those in a poor, urban school district as opposed to someone with a mediocre background from a very mediocre college background who gets thrown in to teach AP English. One last one. Would you prefer someone really good with a gerat background who loves the game and loves coaching but is doing the coaching as a waystation to something else (e.g. KC who is now in business school at U Mich) or someone from a relatively weaker background who also may love the game and is on a permanent or semi-permanent youth soccer coaching track (you can fill in the examples here on your own).

[Unregistered]

Please read
"Coaching Soccer: The Official Coaching Book of the Dutch Soccer Association"

There is a whole section on what qualifications a coach should have . Number 1 criteria for Youth soccer is Experience.Not playing experience COACHING experience

Read the Talent Code . This same is also stated . Experience coaching ! not playing


I have seen clubs with DOC that are 25 years old .That is insane!! What does a 25 year old kid know about coaching . If he played pro or college his mind was on playing not on coaching . Two different things

I started to coach in my last year of college . I thought I knew it all . By the time I got 5 years under my belt and took some coaching courses . I realized how much I didn't know.
I knew the rules and the game but had no clue how to run a session where I would truly have an impact on performance.

[Unregistered]

Please read
"Coaching Soccer: The Official Coaching Book of the Dutch Soccer Association"

There is a whole section on what qualifications a coach should have . Number 1 criteria for Youth soccer is Experience.Not playing experience COACHING experience

Read the Talent Code . This same is also stated . Experience coaching ! not playing


I have seen clubs with DOC that are 25 years old .That is insane!! What does a 25 year old kid know about coaching . If he played pro or college his mind was on playing not on coaching . Two different things

I started to coach in my last year of college . I thought I knew it all . By the time I got 5 years under my belt and took some coaching courses . I realized how much I didn't know.
I knew the rules and the game but had no clue how to run a session where I would truly have an impact on performance.

Good luck with your E license and your U12 town team.

[Unregistered]

My feeling on the matter is that it is selection bias.

The pool of great coaches come from a vast pool of all people that want to be coaches, so the success rate of become a great coach is very small.

When you start with a small pool of great players, then whittle that pool down by they fact that most of them are well off and thus don't "need" to coach, there aren't many people in that group left willing to put in the work needed to become a great coach.

Also, many of these great players start at (near?) the top where there is much less room for error. So they "fail" to become great when they never really had the chance to learn.

I will conceed the point that it is often hard for experts to know how they do something, but I'm not sure that's any different for "low skilled" players. The lower skilled are just more used to sitting down and figuring out the mechanics of a skill.

The one thing I will say that high level players have is that they are more likely to have been exposed to high level coaches. If the player is paying attention to the process of coaching that is taking place while he is being coached, that experience can be useful when he starts coaching.

I disagree for the most part. Part of being a great player is having innate and intangible skills that cannot be expanded by hard work alone. Your argument would suggest that anybody can learn calculus if they just try hard enough. Certain players have the ability to see things develop several steps before other players do. It is just not having the technical ability to exploit what you see but the game intelligence to see these things develop. Listen to anyone who understands the game talk about Gretzky, Bossy, Lemieus, Brady, Manning, Bird, Beckham, Valderama, etc. They were always several plays ahead of their opponents. Ted Williams is another classic example. While he could teach someone to replicate his swing how is going to get them to have 20/15 vision and the ability to know what the pitcher is throwing as the ball comes out of their hand? There are simply some things that cannot be taught. Most of these players will admit that it is hard for them to teach players how to do the things they do. This is why playing ability is so disconnected from coaching ability. What benefits these players on the field actually hurts them as a coach. Furthermore this is not some theory that I developed. I am merely repeating what is commonly asserted by various observers of the respective sports.

_Cujo

[Unregistered]

And you're so geniusly gifted at guitar you can't teach it? Nice, gratuitous plug about yourself and tossing around the 10,000 hour thing.

Seriously? Why the nasty shot? I don't care if you care about my guitar playing ability - I merely used it as an analog the mechanics of mastering a complicated technical skill. I should further state that even if I practice another 10,000 or 30,000 hours that I will never be as anywhere as good as Eric Clapton. Furthermore, Clapton's playing ability doesn't guarantee that he will be a great guitar teacher either.

BTW - it doesn't appear that you understand the 10,000 hour "THING"......

Too many people seem to think that mastering something is only a matter of having the right coach and putting enough time into mastering a skill. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is far more complicated than that. Luck, innate intelligence (not just IQ), physical gifts (size, speed, coordination etc.) play major parts in becoming elite at anything.

- Cujo

[Unregistered]

I disagree for the most part. Part of being a great player is having innate and intangible skills that cannot be expanded by hard work alone. Your argument would suggest that anybody can learn calculus if they just try hard enough. Certain players have the ability to see things develop several steps before other players do. It is just not having the technical ability to exploit what you see but the game intelligence to see these things develop. Listen to anyone who understands the game talk about Gretzky, Bossy, Lemieus, Brady, Manning, Bird, Beckham, Valderama, etc. They were always several plays ahead of their opponents. Ted Williams is another classic example. While he could teach someone to replicate his swing how is going to get them to have 20/15 vision and the ability to know what the pitcher is throwing as the ball comes out of their hand? There are simply some things that cannot be taught. Most of these players will admit that it is hard for them to teach players how to do the things they do. This is why playing ability is so disconnected from coaching ability. What benefits these players on the field actually hurts them as a coach. Furthermore this is not some theory that I developed. I am merely repeating what is commonly asserted by various observers of the respective sports.

_Cujo

Your calculus analogy is (unintentionally ?) a very good one. I certainly do beleive thAbsolutely almost anyone can learn calculus if they try hard enough. The problem is not with the difficulty of the calculus, rather the problem is the fact that most kids aren't taught algebra and trig (and other more fundamental maths) properly. Kids are taught to solve specific problems rather than learning to understand the material.

Just like in soccer. When kids aren't encourage to be creative, to really understand the situations, they will never thrive at the highest level.

The thing that makes great players great only gets in the way because they let it. They shouldn't be trying to teach how they do what THEY do. You are right - what they do is often undecipherable (call it magic if you will).

BUT, they do not need to teach what THEY do. The up and coming great players will have their own magic, but for the 99.9% of other players they just need to be taught the right way of doing things.

Getting back to the heart of the discussion though, wouldn't you agree that the vast majority of d1 players are not "great" players, but most are folks with a decent amount of talent and a lot of hard work and thus those players aren't handicapped by this greatness factor whether such a handicap exists or not.

[Unregistered]

Seriously? Why the nasty shot? I don't care if you care about my guitar playing ability - I merely used it as an analog the mechanics of mastering a complicated technical skill. I should further state that even if I practice another 10,000 or 30,000 hours that I will never be as anywhere as good as Eric Clapton. Furthermore, Clapton's playing ability doesn't guarantee that he will be a great guitar teacher either.

BTW - it doesn't appear that you understand the 10,000 hour "THING"......

Too many people seem to think that mastering something is only a matter of having the right coach and putting enough time into mastering a skill. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is far more complicated than that. Luck, innate intelligence (not just IQ), physical gifts (size, speed, coordination etc.) play major parts in becoming elite at anything.

- Cujo

Because you (always) post from on high and have not been "taught" humility. Now we've got you and Eric Clapton in the same sentence. And I think almost everyone knows that the natural gift factor and one's raw resources are critical factors.

[Unregistered]

Because you (always) post from on high and have not been "taught" humility. Now we've got you and Eric Clapton in the same sentence. And I think almost everyone knows that the natural gift factor and one's raw resources are critical factors.

Humility has nothing to do with anything in this forum. And certainly not from my perspective. I have alot of experience with sports esp. soccer (and music) and I believe that I bring a meaningful and useful perspective to the discussion at hand. Beyond that I have no agenda to force people to see the world as I do. Nonetheless I do believe that I am on the right track much of the time.

Finally including Eric Clapton in the same sentence in which I discuss my guitar skills was to point out that I will never come close to his ability. If you think that is not displaying humility then you either have no idea what the word means, you didn't understand what I was saying, or you are trying to distort what I said by misrepresenting my intent.

But back on point here. There really seems to be two primary schools of thought. 1) Anybody can be good at anything if they just try hard enough, 2) that there are upper limits of skill and potential for anybody that undertakes any endeavour and that hard work and dedication are only a part of the reason why people become successful at the highest level. Personally I think that #1 is a load of crap and that #2 is more likely. That is not showing a lack of humility but rather shows that I am in touch with reality.

- Cujo

[Unregistered]

And I think almost everyone knows that the natural gift factor and one's raw resources are critical factors.

Those two factors are less important thank you think. Take an average soccer player, make her 5-11, put her in an upper middle class home, give her a blond pony tail, make her attractive, and teach her that stylized arm-position "club style" of running and she will get recruited far more often than an average looking, poor, dark-haired, 5-1 unattractive but highly skilled player.

[Unregistered]

Humility has nothing to do with anything in this forum. And certainly not from my perspective. I have alot of experience with sports esp. soccer (and music) and I believe that I bring a meaningful and useful perspective to the discussion at hand. Beyond that I have no agenda to force people to see the world as I do. Nonetheless I do believe that I am on the right track much of the time.

Finally including Eric Clapton in the same sentence in which I discuss my guitar skills was to point out that I will never come close to his ability. If you think that is not displaying humility then you either have no idea what the word means, you didn't understand what I was saying, or you are trying to distort what I said by misrepresenting my intent.

But back on point here. There really seems to be two primary schools of thought. 1) Anybody can be good at anything if they just try hard enough, 2) that there are upper limits of skill and potential for anybody that undertakes any endeavour and that hard work and dedication are only a part of the reason why people become successful at the highest level. Personally I think that #1 is a load of crap and that #2 is more likely. That is not showing a lack of humility but rather shows that I am in touch with reality.

- Cujo

I don't think 1) and 2) are at all contradictory. Take your own example you will never be as good as Eric Clapton (ie great) but you worked hard and put in your 10,000 and became very good.

[Unregistered]

I don't think 1) and 2) are at all contradictory. Take your own example you will never be as good as Eric Clapton (ie great) but you worked hard and put in your 10,000 and became very good.

New poster. I think in most facets of life you will see many examples of hard work beating out wasted natural talent. However if you have been around sports enough you have seen kids who have dedicated their lives to a particular sport to their detriment. They lacked the prerequisite speed, quickness, balance and athleticism to achieve the goals they were chasing and would have benefited from being more well rounded.

[Unregistered]

Lots of interesting responses in this thread. I think a few of the comments adopt a rather extreme reading of my earlier post, or at least one that wasn't intended. All I said was that, as a parent, I'd be more interested in my kid playing for a young coach who had played D1 soccer than a 15 year HS coach with no playing experience beyond high school. I think the reasons are defensible, even if people might not agree.

I think that the most important thing for youth soccer coaches to develop is technical ability. I think that HS soccer depends very little on technical ability, and I don't think most HS soccer coaches teach it very well. My hypothetical soccer coach played only HS soccer. Why would I have any confidence that he (or she) had been technically well-trained? Teaching kids to run, run, run and subbing as soon as people tire is not the game I want my kid to be taught. A D1 college soccer player is much more likely to have been well-trained technically and know how technical ability is developed. Moreover, the D1 player is a lot more likely to have experienced tactical complexity and good coaching. The kids I know who have been recruited and observed D1 practices have reported that the quality of play and practice is very high - higher than HS or club.

I think some may misinterpret my preferences for an argument that playing skill determines coaching skill. That's not quite right. Does playing skill help a teacher? Absolutely. It's hard to teach something you're not good at yourself. My daughter's math teacher needs to be good at math, and in fact part of the problem with our country's science and math education system is that too few of our most talented scientists and mathematicians go into teaching. They don't have to be at the very top of their field, but they need to be pretty good at it - better than some of the teachers my children have had.

But as important as skill (at least for a soccer coach) is exposure to the game at an appropriately high level. Yes, Harbaugh is a great NFL coach and a modestly successful NFL quarterback. His exposure to the game at its highest level (not his intrinsic skill as a player - which primarily helped him experience the game at a high level) surely helps him. It's given him insights that Bill Belichick (not even a college player, I believe) had to make up the hard way with years of experience (and a father who was a successful coach). Same with Doc Rivers or Pat Riley. Their exposure to the game at a high level helped them become the coaches they are. So, in my view, a D1 college player has learned things about the game that my hypothetical HS soccer coach probably hasn't.

Now the one thing I didn't talk about in my post was teaching ability. That's obviously just as important as playing skill or exposure to the game. You can't teach what you don't know. Even if you know, you can't teach if you can't teach. So here, I concede that experienced coaches have insights about teaching that my D1 rookie coach wouldn't have. That having been said, the mere fact that someone is experienced doesn't make her a better teacher any more than the mere fact that someone is a skilled player. It helps, but no more than that. There are some awful experienced teachers. You certainly can't argue that someone will be a good coach BECAUSE he or she was a relatively weak player.

So back to my original, hopefully more clear, point. The original poster criticized a club for hiring someone straight out of college to be a coach. All I'm saying is that some kids straight out of college might make pretty good coaches, better than at least some more experienced ones. Obviously any good hiring process involves an interview and an honest assessment of teaching ability. Some young people make terrific teachers. Hopefully those who have that gift and an appropriate knowledge of the game become coaches.

VERY well stated and as a result, I think there's a great amount of consensus to be had.

All making affirmative arguments behind who could or can be a great coach - essentially anyone. But a great point (which I alluded to as well), there is no way not being a skilled player is an attribute of great coaching; but some inside soccer take that to being prejudicial and a limitation. That view is simply narrow minded.