Beane preaches to Kiwi coaches
Too many youth football coaches let their ego ruin the experience of their young players, a leading talent development expert says.
Todd Beane, who runs the TOVO Academy in Barcelona, spent January 13 and 14 at the Ole Football Academy in Wellington running a coaching course for 37 coaches from New Zealand and Australia.
He said the biggest trap young coaches fell into was getting too invested in results.
’’It’s that their ego is too attached to their weekend result. I am guilty of this, I’m the first to raise my hand and say when I was a young coach I had so much of my ego on that bench that I forgot what the game was about, which was really the development of the players.
‘‘I was almost a former player still playing on the bench, and that’s not right. It should be about the player’s development. Once you become a coach, it’s no longer about you, it’s about your capacity to facilitate the development of another person.
‘‘The wins and losses are just an indicator of what we know and what we are yet to learn. I think that’s a barrier, but not isolated to New Zealand, as coaches, that’s on us. We have to be calm, let the kids make mistakes and then take them for icecream after the match.’’
Beane’s philosophy is based on working with legendary Dutch coach and father-in-law Johan Cruyff for 14 years before his death in March 2016.
During that time he was able to soak up the knowledge of some of the leading coaches in the world.
‘‘It’s pretty hard not to sit around a kitchen table with the likes of Johan Cruyff or Pep Guardiola or Ronald Koeman or Frank Rijkaard, and not be like a kid in a candy shop. I just happened to be an old one, I was like 40 years old taking notes, scribbling away while they’re moving the salt and pepper shaker talking tactics and talking about Ronaldinho and Messi and Deco and Thierry Henry.
‘‘These are heroes, I never played at that level and all of a sudden you’re hearing a mastermind of the game, I think one of the brightest minds football has ever known, who is your father-in-law with whom you are working, talking about the game in ways I had never been exposed to before.’’
The ultimate ending of that process was the formation of TOVO.
The academy teaches football with a 3C basis, with the aim to teach cognition, competency and character simultaneously.
That means no traditional warmup, no passing or shooting drills, which Beane said bores the kids. It is mainly based around rondos and small-sided games with everincreasing difficulty levels. Every training scenario needed to be based around a situation or pattern a player would see in a game.
‘‘The training that is based upon cognitive development, development of competencies and the development of character,’’ Beane said.
Wherever he goes to deliver this coaching gospel, he gets the same question (which also came up in Wellington).
‘‘People say: ‘oh, but what about skills or ball mastery or technical development?’.
‘‘I try to convince them over a couple of days that we can develop the technical aspect of the game, what we call competencies, as well as the cognitive development of the game.
One of his most important messages was to ensure the game remained fun, because any coach who took the fun out of sport had failed their players.