Author’s note: Jason deVos is a former captain of Canada, ex-English Premier League defender, CBC soccer commentator and a successful product of the Canadian player development system.
He is also one of the most outspoken – and interesting – Canadian experts on the beautiful game.
As technical director of Oakville Soccer Club, he is spearheading the hiring of a large squad of new coaches, to implement newer, better approaches to youth soccer in Canada.
Can love of the game really be more important than winning? Read on, and judge for yourself.
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CSN: I see a situation in Canadian coaching development where the CSA’s “Wellness to World Cup” might be a decade away from producing any real, tangible results. I see pro teams that don’t really have a vested interest in following along. I’m concerned that we might even have more fragmentation at this point. Where do you see it from where you stand?
JDV: Things take time. There’s no getting away from that. And not changing because it’s going to take time is no excuse. You have to have a long-term approach. I’ve been asked many times how does Canada qualify for the World Cup? It’s not a quick fix. How do we get better at the international level? It has to be a long-term approach, and that’s a ten- or twenty-year project.
But it starts with improvements in coaching, improvements in player development, a unification of a player development pathway, so that people who come into the game know the steps required to get to the highest levels – if their child has the ability to play there. We don’t have that right now in Canada.
I get asked all the time “How did you get to the national team? How did you become a professional?” And I honestly can’t answer that question, because it was such a winding, pitfall-laden trip up the ladder. For every step forward, I took two steps back – and sidewards steps. I’ve told people countless times, as well, that if I could count the number of times I was told I wasn’t good enough to play at the professional level, I would long ago have run out of fingers.
The guys who make it and the girls who make it to that level, they don’t do it because of the system. They do it in spite of the system. And that’s why the system needs to change. I’m encouraged by the changes that are coming. Coaching certification is going to match up with LTPD (long-term player development). Those changes are coming on-line in 2012. I’m looking forward to implementing them here at my club, and trying to get as many coaches as possible out there trained in what’s required to teach kids how to play the game of soccer.
CSN: So how, exactly, did we get here? It seems to me that a lot of the pitfalls people have pointed to while I’ve been doing this series include the sheer lack of professional clubs in Canada, a bit of a vacuum in leadership from the Canadian Soccer Association and the fact that soccer in Canada has been, a still really is, overwhelmingly a recreational game as opposed to a professional one.
JDV: Well, just because it’s a recreational game doesn’t mean it can’t have a professional structure. And the reality is soccer is a recreational game around the world. The amount of players that go on and play at a professional level is miniscule compared to the number that play the game for fun and recreation. The notion that we shouldn’t be a professionally run organization, or we shouldn’t have a professional structure because it’s largely recreational, in my opinion, is wrong.
I think what we need to do is put in place a very clear development pathway for players of both genders, so that they know how to reach the highest levels of the game. Because if you go into any hockey rink anywhere in Canada – in the smallest community – and you ask the parents on the side of the rink watching their sons and daughters play the game how you get to the highest level? They know. They know how to get to the NHL because there’s a pathway there. And we need to create something very similar.
It’s a unique challenge, because of the diversity of our country and the makeup of our country. The challenges that they have in British Columbia are different from the challenges they have in Saskatoon or New Brunswick. There is no paint-brush approach where we can paint the whole country the same, and put the same program in place in every province. It has to be individualized, but it all has to follow the same principles. And that’s why LTPD and the science behind that are so important.
CSN: You and I were talking about this at BMO Field last week: that “Wellness to World Cup” is a beginning and a blueprint, but you think there’s still a lot of information and material that has to go into that thing before it’s really going to be useful.
JDV: The thing about LTPD and the “Wellness to World Cup” document that was published: it’s a veritable encyclopedia of information about what’s wrong with the game in our country. And as I said before, there is no quick fix. I believe that the CSA are taking steps to make things better. The governance change that is coming is very, very important in all of that.
People like to point the finger of blame at the CSA, saying they don’t do this and they don’t do that. But the truth of the matter is they were never set up for that. They were never set up to make these changes that need to be made. The structure was wrong. The technical minds who understand the game, who have been involved in the game for a long time, who know that these changes need to happen, don’t have the power to make them happen. They have to be approved by people who are not necessarily trained in those areas of expertise. And that has to change.
So you have to empower people who have been in the game for their whole life, who have a wealth of experience coaching the game, and teaching kids how to play, and playing the game themselves. Just empower people like that to go and make those changes that are necessary. In my time, back in Canada since I retired as a player, I have met so many, so many knowledgeable, knowledgeable people in the game who are so frustrated, because the changes that they know they need to make – that they want to make desperately – they can’t make because they don’t have the authority to make them.
And what’s happening now, I think, is there’s a real movement starting across the country where the technical folks are kind of getting together and saying, look, we know we need to do this; we know what the right thing to do is; let’s get together and do it. It’s starting to happen. We’re starting to see those changes being made. But until we’re in a position where the decision makers who have the final authority to say yea or nay on these things are in a position where they’re knowledgeable, where they understand the game, or they’re willing to let those who do understand make those decisions, then we’re going to struggle.
I like to use the analogy of school a lot at the club here. Would you send your child to a school where none of the teachers had any qualifications? Right away, the answer’s “No.” Well, would you send you child to a school where there’s no curriculum? Right away, they say “No.” Well why do we do it in soccer, then? We allow ourselves to be put into a club where there’s no curriculum, there’s no development pathway, there’s no certification of the coaches, there’s no oversight into the teachings that they’re bringing to their players, who are the students of the game.
We need to professionalize that. And when I say “professionalize,” I don’t mean buying and selling players. I mean putting in place a structure where people with experience and knowledge and training and education in the game are given the opportunity to make an impact. And that’s why I got involved at Oakville, because I wanted to make a difference, and make an impact at the grassroots level, because it has to start there. It can’t start at the highest level and trickle its way down. It doesn’t work that way. It has to start at the grassroots, and then come from the top, and meet in the middle.
Good leadership at the CSA, the OSA and all the provincial associations across the country, where they empower their technical experts to make decisions. So the technical director of the OSA and the technical staff of the provincial associations are given the authority to make changes that they know they need to make. And then, at the grassroots level, the clubs are hiring technical directors who understand the game, who have played the game, coached the game, have training in how to teach kids to play the game, are given the power to make those changes happen.
CSN: I’ve heard you use the word “curriculum” on the national level as something that still needs to be drawn up. Whose job is that going to be, and how soon can something like that be accomplished?
JDV: I don’t think that that’s a quick fix either. I know the United States have released their curriculum, and it’s excellent. It’s a very comprehensive breakdown of what’s required at the various ages and stages of development. We have access to that kind of information here in Canada, but it’s a question of resources. The United States Soccer Federation has infinite resources compared to what we have in Canada.
At the club level, it would be wonderful if a club of a thousand players or five-hundred players had a technical director who could go on the CSA website and download a curriculum for the players at that club. Then all of our players, across the country, would be trained in the fundamental basics of the game.
I use that expression all the time, that we don’t do a good enough job in this country of teaching players the fundamental skills required to be successful in the game at the highest level. It’s not about focusing all of our resources on just the very small, few elite players. It’s about giving everyone the basic foundation. It’s like building a house. You don’t build a house on nothing. You build it on a foundation.
The foundation in soccer is the ability to control the ball – to be comfortable with the ball at your feet, to pass the ball, receive the ball, dribble the ball, shoot a ball, and then relate and interact with your teammates to try and put the ball in the back of the net – and keep it out of your own net. Those are the fundamental core skills required to play the game. If players don’t have that, they’re never going to be successful in the game.
We have a multitude of problems in Canada. One of the biggest is our focus on winning over all else. We rush to win. We force kids to be what we perceive to be successful too early. We put them in a competitive environment where their future opportunities are determined by the outcome of the game. Not on their ability to execute the fundamentals of the game, which will lead them to success five or ten years down the road, but whether or not they can win a game when they’re ten years old.
What it ends up doing is fostering a win-before-all-else mentality, and that exists across the board in soccer. And I don’t think it’s just soccer; I think there’s a lot of other sports as well. The research I’ve done and the feedback I’m getting from other sports is that the same mentality persists – that we have to win the game, and that’s how we measure success. We have to change how we measure success. For me, success is not about the outcome of a game when a kid’s eleven years old.
To me, the measure of success is – first and foremost – can we teach that child to fall in love with the game, and play the game for the rest of their life? If we can do that, wonderful. Second thing is: if we can teach them to fall in love with the game, there’s a very good chance they’re going to put in the hours needed to become successful in the game. The ten-thousand hour rule applies to anything. If you want to be an expert, if you want to be a top-level athlete, if you want to be a concert pianist, if you want to be a musician, if you want to learn multiple languages, you’ve got to be able to put in the hours needed to master those skills. You’re only going to do that if you love what you’re doing.
So the game has to be fun. If it’s not fun, you’re not going to put the work in to do it. But we’ve also got to be able to say that, if we’re putting that in place, we then have to take our best players and get them to the highest level of the game. We have a huge resource of natural athletic ability in this country, and we’re not harnessing it.
CSN: Oakville Soccer Club, where you are the technical director, has just made a huge investment in new coaches. The thing I hear people saying already is it’s all right for a big club like Oakville to do that, but how can a smaller club with less than a thousand players do the same thing?
JDV: It’s a question of how you allocate your resources, and what you want to put them to. We had various meetings over the last year with clubs from around the province about how they structure their club, and who is making the technical decisions? In a club of four- or five-hundred kids, they’ve got a very significant budget, and they have the resources to be able to hire someone. Maybe not on a full-time basis, but they can certainly hire someone part-time to train their coaches and deliver the curriculum for them, and put in place programs for those kids to teach them how to play the game.
It comes down to this question: why are you there, and who are you there for? If the answer is not “I’m here to make the game better, and I’m here to make the game better for the kids,” then you’re probably there for the wrong reason. And then you go to the secondary question, which is how do I make it better? How do I become a better coach? For me it’s through education.
In my own personal situation, I want to get as much education as I possibly can about how to teach kids the science behind player development, the stages of long-term player development, and what goes into that – the differences between training male players and female players, and the different stages that they go through. All of that stuff is contained within information that is out there, and available for you. Coaching certification programs, through the CSA, the LTPD program, the long-term athlete development Canadian Sport for Life website – there are phenomenal resources out there.
If you’re going to become a coach, and you’re going to be teaching and training kids, you have to understand the principles of developing young athletes. If you don’t, it’s going to be very, very difficult to just take a bag of balls and go teach them how to kick a ball and play the game, because there’s so much more that goes into it.
A small club, without the resources, this is where the certification of their coaches is so important. The vast majority of coaches at their club – probably ninety-nine per cent – are volunteers. We have over nine-hundred coaches at Oakville. So many of them – they love the game, but they get involved because their kids are playing. If they’re going to be going out there facilitating soccer for their kids at the youngest ages – four, five, six, seven -- It’s incumbent on us, as a club, to teach them how to teach the kids, and how to have fun doing that. If we can do that, those kids are going to get a great experience with the game at their initial stages, and hopefully fall in love with it, and then progress through the different stages of their development.
CSN: Last week, I published a long and actually quite touching interview with Nick Dasovic, and he talked about how he had to leave Canada to establish himself as a player, and now he’s worried he’ll have to do it all over again as a coach. And I look at his passion, his experience, and I can feel just how much he wants to move his career forward – there has to be a way that we can find to not have guys like this having to leave Canada to pursue their coaching careers. Ideally, what would you see as the best situation for how Canada could get the most out of Nick Dasovic?
JDV: I’ll be honest with you. I was really disappointed that Nick wasn’t given an opportunity. There are some that argue that he doesn’t have top-flight coaching experience, so he shouldn’t get the job of Toronto FC head coach, or he should be considered for the Montreal Impact job. But my argument is, if you don’t have experience, where are you going to get it? If no one’s ever going to give you a chance, how are you ever going to know?
Someone like Nick, you can argue that he’s got more coaching experience than Aron Winter. He coached Under-23 at the national level. He was an assistant coach for many years before doing an excellent job with the Under-23s. I don’t think people gave Nick enough credit for what he achieved there. They nearly qualified for the Olympics with a skeleton squad, where he didn’t have all his best players.
And despite all the turmoil that was going on behind the scenes at Toronto FC, I still think he did a very credible job of steadying the ship and trying to keep things moving in the right direction.
We have to look at what we’re trying to accomplish as a country. If we are serious about player development, and Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal being the top teams in Canada in Major League Soccer, if we’re genuinely committed to Canadian player development, why do they not have a Canadian coach? Someone like Nick Dasovic – and I’m not saying this because I played with Nick, or for any reason other than I think he should get a chance – you look at his background in the game. He has his UEFA-A licence, and is working on his UEFA Pro licence. That is the highest qualification in the world in coaching education.
If a guy like that’s not going to get a chance, who is? Someone like Colin Miller, who’s the assistant coach out in Vancouver, if he’s not going to get a chance, who is? These guys have played at the highest level, they have experience as coaches. If you’re not going to give them a chance to be a head coach, and bring a philosophy and a style of play to a team like Toronto or Vancouver or Montreal, who else is going to do it?
I find it really, really frustrating, and I feel for guys like Nick and Colin because, having played alongside both of them, I know how passionate they are about their country, and how proud they are to be Canadian. It pains me to see those guys not getting an opportunity to take that passion to a Canadian MLS team and bring it to the players.
CSN: You are also, obviously, a man with a great passion for the game. What are your own personal coaching ambitions?
JDV: Again, for me, it’s all about learning. I learn every day, and I’m really excited about the journey that I’m on right now. It’s a huge challenge being in charge of a club like Oakville. Being the technical director here has been a hugely rewarding experience for me, and every day is different.
In terms of my coaching, the coaching side of it is the enjoyable part of it for me. Actually getting to go out on the field with the kids and work with the players is the fun part of the job. The administrative side – which carries a huge work-load, especially at a club this size – is the difficult side of it. But trying to put in place a structure at the club here that will allow every player to maximize their potential, whether they’re starting out as a four-year-old in house league, or an eighteen-year-old trying to get a scholarship to a university in Canada or the United States – every single one of those kids, we want to try and give them the chance to fulfill their dreams. And the only way we can do that is if we have a very clear structure in place where everyone at the club is working together.
I was very fortunate in my playing career to finish at a club that was like that – Ipswich Town. Everyone there, from the day I set foot in the club to the day I left, took me and my family in as one of their own. It was very much a family atmosphere, where everyone was working together to try and bring success on the field. I want the same thing here. I want this club – Oakville – to feel like a family, where all of the coaches work together, and all of the players and all of the families, everyone here, all the staff, everyone works together to maximize the potential of every player.
People might find this strange, coming from me, but it’s not about the elite athletes. It’s not about taking all of our resources and pooling them together to make the point-zero-one per cent that might get to the national team level and make them the best they can be. If we have a structure in place that serves the benefits of everyone, those kids will benefit. They’re not mutually exclusive; the two go hand-in-hand. And we do that by improving the standard of coaching – by unifying the coaches to work together as a group to develop the players, and to educate each other.
The coaches that we’re bringing in here, I’m really excited about working with them because we’re all coming here with the same mentality. They want to learn. They want to be in an environment where they’re challenged and pushed. I’ll learn as much from them as they learn from me, and Rafael Carbajal is here as well. It’s a collective learning experience.
If we can do this, and we can raise the standard of coaching at this club, across the province and across the country, there’s a very good chance that we’re going to develop better and better players – and better and better coaches. And that’s only going to be beneficial to the game in Canada.
Also in this series: