|| COACHING

PABLO TOLEDO // SPORTING PROJECT DIRECTOR , RUSH SOCCER

I normally tell our head of content that it is not necessary to add my name on fragments that I ’ ve written . I do that for two basic reasons : The first one is that I don ’ t want people to think that the Rush Way is ultimately “ Pablo ’ s Way .” I didn ’ t come up with it , I learned it . The second reason is that I really don ’ t care about the credit . I ’ m pretty good at managing my own ego , and among the many flaws I do think that ’ s one of the best qualities I have as a coach .

I break my own rule in this post because the opposite happens : This is Pablo ’ s Way , not the Rush Way , and I mean to be honest about that because there is absolutely no science behind what I ’ m about to say . I did not learn it from anybody ; it simply came from self-reflection , and I ’ m pretty sure there are better ways to do it , but this is mine and maybe by sharing it I can trigger some good thoughts from you .

The role of the coach in youth soccer is to facilitate environments that accelerate learning . That ’ s a statement . That ’ s why we talk about development in coaching and not so much about performance . That ’ s why we have a 6-3-1 philosophy , and that ’ s why another two million things .

Now , what I frequently see , and I also experienced as a novice coach , was a conflict between the idea of developing and the idea of winning ( or trying to win , because it ’ s not really a choice ). When I first started coaching , even if this embarrasses me to admit now , I just wanted to win , and all of my decisions were secretly based on that . I ’ d say appropriate things in terms of development , but my actions were not always congruent .

When I realized that I felt hypocritical and that I was really missing the ball , I evolved into a sort of Himalayan coaching monk , and all I was focusing on was learning aspects , not caring about results , whether positive or negative .

There were some good improvements over that period in which I learned to be more methodical in my observation , less reactive in my coaching , more rational , more thoughtful and purposeful , but over the years I realized that was also wrong . I was still missing the ball .

When I observe other coaches , a large percentage of the time I think they are also going through one of those two phases .

What I realized over the years ( and it is important to put this in context : I ’ ve been primarily coaching U16 + boys for years now ) is that I needed to care about winning , because my players cared about it . I need to honor their desire to win the game and they need to feel that I care about it to sustain a top coach-player relationship . I needed to bring my emotions back , but control them , use them wisely . As you get close to performance stages , players will love you for the human aspects of the relationship , but those relationships are firstly built on knowledge . Your players build the relationship with you over the foundation that they feel that they can learn from you , and you can help them win , otherwise you would just be a great guy / gal to them but they would probably prefer somebody else to coach them .

46 | Soccer Journal