As you may have seen via social media channels, I’ve just returned from a 7-day experience at Dutch giants, PSV Eindhoven. During my stay, I participated in the FCE Pro Course and coached the under 15/16 age group, alongside a number of other coaches.
The week was extremely demanding with a very, very high bar set. In environments like this, you can either learn to adapt and participate as much as you can, or, you can sit and be a spectator and simply watch the course pass you by.
Throughout this 3 part series, this being part 1, I wanted to share my reflections with anyone who might be interested. The intention isn’t to try and persuade readers to take up a course with FC Evolution, it’s intended to give you an honest insight to what happened during the week. There are plenty of courses on today’s market, but I struggle to find one that offers as much as these courses do. Yes, you get access to professional set up’s and environments, but the chance to test your thinking and challenge others, is what the biggest attraction is for me. Forget about licenses and past experiences, I have been with managers and coaches from the highest level, who are working alongside coaches with minimal experience in the US, for example. This is what coach education should look like and not that of, I’ve played 1000 previous games, I get instant ‘entry’.
Before I start to share my reflections, I’ll give you some context so you can view this 3 part series, through my lenses. If you take these points into consideration, then it could possibly give you the best possible chance of digesting the text.
Previous courses – I’ve now taken part in around 12 courses with a mixture of live workshops and online content. Due to this high rate of participation, my references (information received) are a lot clearer and this allows me to come up with more concise solutions to potential problems. While there is no guarantees with this, it does allow me more chance to be successful.
Pathway – Naturally with any qualification, you want to (hopefully) push yourself and reach the highest level you can. On this pathway there are a number of routes you can take. Online then live, live then online or, just live and just online. While to some it may seem odd to do both online and live courses, it allows the coach to confirm learning and test potential hypothesis with other coaches. Once you work through the various levels, there is a ‘Personal Development Course’ at the end, which is restricted to a small number of coaches. This course was ranked as the ‘Pro Course’ and in other words, Level 3.
The coach educator – Marmite comes close, on how to describe this. You either love it or hate it? While many tend to disagree with Raymond Verheijen, you can’t fault what the man does for coach education in the world of football. He uses ‘rock solid’ objective references and will always explain things in a logical order. While subjectivity does have place in football (your application to a certain situation), RV does an extremely good job at removing this from conversation, thus making the chances of coming to a clearer solution, a lot higher.
While most accept this, improve and conduct themselves accordingly (practice what you preach), a minority do always struggle. Does this make them ‘bad’ people or ‘poor’ coaches? Of course it doesn’t. What it does prove though, is that the brain of some coaches can’t cope with the overload and they simply crumble.
In England RV isn’t looked upon positively (from my various feedback from different areas of the game). I really don’t know why, as most comments are about him and not about the content. Would you go to a course here, to just see that person, or would you commit your time to learning and taking what you can from various presentations and case studies? Listen to the message or shoot the messenger? He does openly say throughout each course, that he could be wrong and looks forward to being proved that way.
Course intention – Each course I have taken part in, has an intention that you are working towards. This past week was the final piece in a 3 part process, with the following intended outcomes;
Course 1 – Amsterdam – Design and re-design (of training session)
Course 2 – Zagreb – Re-re-design (of training session)
Course 3 – Eindhoven – Apply (training session)
I took part in course 3 and our job was to apply the training sessions (that had been planned and tested for the previous 2 weeks), with the PSV Eindhoven players. There were a number of coaches that did take part in week 2 & 3, as well as week 1, 2 & 3. Their job was to transfer vital information to the coaches who were new to week 3, giving them an opportunity to ‘coach’ us. This is a very similar situation that all coaches find themselves in back home, where you have information and want to ‘download’ it into the brains of your players. How you do this is your decision, but if you fail to provide clarity and guidance, you could be leading your players (coaches in this case), in a less effective direction. This could then mean that you fail to accomplish the ‘team’ (course) intention.
On Tuesday, I’ll progress into Part 2 for a more in-depth look at exactly what we got up to on the course!
