Whitecaps coach stresses organized play
Dos Santos feels if training is on-point, his team can improve on the field
Marc Dos Santos must really love that new-car smell.
Four of his last five coaching positions were all expansion sides, from the Ottawa Fury (2014), Swopes Park Rangers (2016), San Francisco Deltas (2017) to Los Angeles FC last season. It’s already established that the Vancouver Whitecaps are an expansion team in all but name this season.
The first of those three teams all made championship games, and LAFC set several records with Dos Santos on staff as an assistant.
Whether it’s the joy of creating something from nothing, the challenge posed by a project of that scale, or just some strange masochistic addiction, it’s obvious the Caps’ head coach relishes the chance to shape a team’s identity.
And the key word to describe an MDS-coached side is “organized.”
The principles are the same no matter the formation. The defence is tight, compact, difficult to break down, with an emphasis on quick, aggressive counterattacks through the flanks that is counterbalanced by “pragmatic” decision-making to maintain possession.
It was the same when he was an assistant under Peter Vermes at Sporting Kansas City — the Whitecaps’ hosts tonight — and when he took the first-year SP Rangers to the USL title game. Nothing has changed, not even his talent as a quote-machine in media interviews.
Take this line from an interview with Paul Tenorio before his move from Kansas City to San Francisco — where he won the NASL title — describing the same training philosophies that his Whitecaps put on display every week at UBC:
“Look at Carlos Santana. I don’t think he plays piano to get better in what he does; he plays a lot of hours of guitar. So if you want to play a certain way, you have to train that certain way,” Dos Santos said.
“And it’s not enough to go to a board and write it down. Like in music, again, if I show you a YouTube video of a guy playing a guitar, but I don’t give you the guitar in your hand, it’s not going to help you. The training session has to
reflect that model every day.”
Dos Santos himself learned a lot from working under Vermes as an assistant and as the coach of their USL team, and their relationship was strong enough that when he told Vermes during the season that he wanted to leave for the opportunity in San Francisco the next year, he was met with nothing but support.
He returns to Kansas City, the so-called City of Fountains — as an MLS head coach for the first time, but knows his time there isn’t going to give him any special advantage.
“I know them very well. I know them better than anyone,” Dos Santos said Thursday. “In Kansas City, it’s never the right time (to win). They’re a very strong team at home … it’s going to be a very hard game.”