Musings of a Community College Coach: Teaching the game
By Liviu Bird
A common misconception, particularly in American youth soccer circles, is that “the game is the best teacher.” Other common refrains are that soccer is a “player’s game,” and that players deserve credit for when things go right and coaches deserve blame when they go wrong.
The top level of the American game has offered the best example of why that line of thinking is flat-out wrong.
The Portland Timbers were nowhere when Caleb Porter left his job as the University of Akron head coach to take over at the start of the 2013 season. His club’s turnaround took critics by surprise because they couldn’t understand how a first-year head coach with no professional experience could have success in MLS.
Porter’s success stems from a strong coaching philosophy that he has instilled to great effect. On Wednesday, the Timbers’ website released an interview with him in which he outlined that philosophy in some detail:
If you were to sum up your club’s playing philosophy in just three words, what would they be?
CP: I think it’s three P’s. It’s possession, it’s pressure, and it’s passion.If I’m breaking it down in more detail on the attacking side, I think the possession is more passing with precision and purpose. If you’re breaking it down on the defensive side a little further, the pressure is persistent, punishing pressure. If you’re breaking down the passion side of it, it’s the passion for the club. The passion for our team. Passion for our supporters. The passion for the game. The passion for our philosophy. The passion for our mission.
This is far from the first time that Porter has expounded on his philosophy. In earlier interviews, he described it as a desire to dominate games through possession and pressure.
“We need to create a structure where there are definite roles and responsibilities on both the attacking side and on the defending side, where everybody knows exactly what they should be doing within our system,” Porter said in the above interview. “But within that, we need individual players to feel, I don’t know if “freedom” is the word, but to feel as if their strengths and talents can come out.”
Most teams and clubs, at the youth level and above, completely lack a coherent philosophy and a plan to put that philosophy into action. Putting a philosophy on paper is an important first step that most fail to execute.
If it’s not on paper, coaches will feel no need to adhere to it. Without a philosophy and concrete idea of how a coach wants to shape his or her team, success is nearly impossible. Left to their own devices, players would dribble out of the back and try to nutmeg their way to goal.
That’s why soccer is not “a player’s game.” That’s why structured training and tactical instruction is the only way to learn, not just by playing the game. (Pick-up soccer and unorganized games have their place, but not as a primary means of instruction.)
Don’t get caught up in the terminology. “Possession” is most often used as an empty buzzword — it’s not a philosophy. The questions that need to be answered are: how does your team possess? How does it change depending on field positioning? What is each player’s responsibility in each phase of play: attacking, defending and transition?
Just as schools fail without a proper curriculum in place, clubs and teams are doomed to the same fate if they don’t outline their own curriculum and document how it will be implemented and taught.
It’s different for clubs and college programs. We don’t have years to build players up and teach them to play the way we want. That’s where recruiting comes in.
But as a staff, we sat down on multiple occasions before the season started and outlined exactly what each player on the field’s role is in each phase of play. We decided on an overall philosophy and unified style of play that we would teach this fall.
More than offering the ability to be criticized, developing and fleshing out a philosophy allows coaches to be on the same page in teaching players. Every coach has his or her own individual philosophy, so making sure that a staff teaches the game in the same way is a vital step to success at the higher levels of the game.
Liviu Bird is an assistant coach at Edmonds Community College in Washington state, as well as a reporter for SoccerWire.com and NBC ProSoccerTalk.
