Throughout the last 2 parts of this series, I’ve given a brief insight into the week I spent at PSV Eindhoven with Raymond Verheijen and FC Evolution. While it’s important for me to share as much as I can, I have to respect all other coaches on the course, including the organiser and only share my experience. If you scroll through various social channels, you will see similar posts regarding the week that we had and what that coach in question thought.
While first impressions and my experience is worthless for others in this instance, it does give you a small snippet of what to expect on one of these coaches. Yes, it is very uncomfortable and you could overloaded until the last second of the course, but surely that’s what you want? When you’re training your own team, would you under load them and make them feel comfortable? Or, would you put them under pressure to develop their coping mechanisms? We know what answer you would choose, so it shouldn’t be any different for us coaches!

Coming to the conclusion of this 3 part series, I’ll now share my evaluation in 3 sections.

Coach educator – What he offers?

As mentioned in part 1, RV to some is very much like the marmite brand slogan. Quite often those that cast comment, haven’t attended a course, but seem to know quite a lot?
I’ve been on the pathway for many years and I’ve never experienced any problems. I have had moments where he has criticised me for my work, but that’s as far as it has gone. Was he right to do so? Yes. Did it improve me? Yes. These situations can be uncomfortable, but they are used to highlight incompetence and to show you the mirror. Does everyone always want/need praise and never told ‘wrong’ in this industry – or, would you rather have something highlighted and then given clear/concise feedback, that’ll improve you?

During this course, there were a couple of minor ‘hiccups’ that he dealt with easily and prevented further things happening. Again, if this was your changing room, at your club, would you strive to do the same?

Removing any biases or ‘emotional attachment’ with FCE, as expected the content on the course was excellent. Why? It was delivered in a logical process, with objective references and clear information. There was a common pattern of the same language being used throughout, which gave me a better chance to understand and to connect the ‘dots’.
Throughout my years on the courses, I’ve learnt an enormous amount and have built up many friendships along the way. Most, I’m still in contact with today and the common factor with all of them, is the coach educator. We all meet when we can, visit the courses and continue our coach development through online courses and literature.

Each course evolves, improves and continues to accelerate in quality, year on year. The demand on coaches is high, but why would you have it any other way? This is what coach education should be like.

We all have opinions on football, with some happy to share their own whenever they can. I have one, that I’d like to share.

From an education perspective, this pathway should be a must for all coaches. The disappointing thing for me is that the English FA don’t endorse it, so the amount of hours I put in (as well as others in the UK), doesn’t get reflected with my CPD requirements for the license I hold. Instead, the below ‘par’ content that is available here (mostly online), doesn’t come anywhere near what FCE offer and is clearly produced as a by product to generate revenue and to ‘tick a box’.
The question now is, why don’t the English FA endorse these courses? Could it be fear, arrogance or purely egotistical reasons? For a nation as big as ourselves, we need to do better and there are accessible options out there to assist with this.

While thing’s probably won’t change anytime soon, I’ll still happily invest my own time and money in learning abroad, as for me it’s priceless.

Sub group – Our reflections

Our sub group met up recently and discussed a number of things that we experienced during our time together. While we didn’t come to any conclusions, we did attempt to falsify some of our thinking and produce some new ideas. Each coach shared their main reflection and this consisted of;

Periodisation
Experience before comprehension
Scoring methods, during practice games

We originally arranged to meet for 1 hour, but we exceeded this easily. As we didn’t come to any conclusions on the above 3 reflections, conversations are still ongoing. The topic of scoring methods was something that absorbed a lot of our time while we were away, for the reason that it can have a big impact on the training session. Conditioning the behaviour you want is key and this will assist with the respective outcome you would like, so the scoring system has a huge part to play in this.

With daily discussions about this and other things still taking place, I look forward to sharing some ideas in a future blog!

Individual intentions – Were they achieved?

For context, in part 2 I shared my individual intentions with you;

“Before I travelled to the Netherlands, I tried to outline exactly what I wanted to get out of the week. Without having an intention, aligned with something you wish to achieve, you are going in no particular direction. You can’t also evaluate your progress, so the whole exercise is pretty pointless.

I decided that my intentions for the week would be to observe how other coaches, including RV, delivered their content and what use it could be for me.

I also had my eye on reverse engineering, session design and learning about 2 different coaching styles”.

Observation of other coaches – One of the main purposes of my attendance, was to see how other coaches work. I wasn’t concerned about, ‘what they say in the sessions’ or ‘what coaching points they had scribbled down’, it was more to see what they proposed for their training session design. In the build up to this, there was a presentation and this was equally interesting, in the fact that their application differs from mine and others.

Reverse engineering – This is a very complex tool that RV has used within his programme for the last 12-18 months. The purpose is to work backwards from the execution phase, within a player’s football action. You then explore if the deciding and communication are aligned, which can then give you an indication of where a possible fault may have taken place. This is still very much work in progress for me.

Session design – As a part of the course intention, this was an area that we spent a lot of time on. We focused on three different types of training session, which could lead to a vast list of different outcomes. Our subgroups ‘how’, was to design the training and then execute it.
The training session we designed, wasn’t the best and there were a number of small faults exposed. One of the players moved from his playing position regularly, which was due to the space that we sacrificed in trying to achieve our outcome. Instead of telling the player ‘not’ to do something, which is extremely false and artificial, we were encouraged to watch and adapt where needed. Doing it this way would unconsciously effect the players thinking and do what we wanted. During the session we did try and adapt, but it didn’t really effect the situation of what we wanted, so this evaluation is still ongoing!

Coaching tools – In the previous blog I listed this as coaching styles, which was incorrect. Upon reflection, it is coaching tools that I wanted to learn more about. The two in question are;

Reference coaching
Situation coaching

Both can be used and you would be encouraged to do so, when the occasion dictates. You could use reference coaching by asking questions in conversation and situation coaching at training, when you’re trying to expose something, to then improve.

Final message

Thanks for taking the time to read this 3 part series. It has been enjoyable to get some of my thoughts out onto paper and while a lot of it is still fresh, it may give me other opportunities to discuss certain topics further.

For any coaches that have any questions about this experience or the pathway I have chosen to take, please email me on [email protected]

For any FCE related enquires please email [email protected]

I wish you well for the season ahead.