Author’s note: Ray Clark has been director of player and coaching development for the Canadian Soccer Association since 1992.
A native of London, England (and supporter of West Ham United), he has literally seen it all where Canadian soccer blueprints are concerned.
You’ll get a lot of the CSA company line here – understandably – but that’s a very useful perspective in trying to understand where soccer in this nation is headed.
There are valuable insights into the intended future of youth player development – and some strong words for Canadian professional clubs that don’t hire Canadian head coaches.
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CSN: Before we get into talking about the future of coaching development, what is your honest assessment of what the problems have been, in the Canadian set-up, up until recently?
RC: Well, when I first came in, in ’92, one of the biggest problems was we didn’t have any money. When we came into the earlier part of this century – with Holger Osieck – things picked up a lot. We had an influx of money, and new ideas from Holger, and that was a great boost for us. We had some success on the field, as well. We started to actually invest in coaching development, whereby we would subsidize coaches coming to the B-licence courses, for example. Three-quarters of the cost of the course we paid, to make it viable for coaches to come in. And the program took off. Then, when Holger finished, his replacement brought us more in line with what they were doing in UEFA, and again we’ve come into a far more tactically based licensing program at the higher levels. I think while I’ve been here the coaching program has improved tremendously.
CSN: Some of the criticisms I’ve heard from people who hold the Canadian A-licence is that it’s not necessarily respected overseas, and that it might put too much emphasis on things like nutrition and fitness, and not enough on man-management and tactics. Do you have a feeling about that?
RC: I think whoever says that hasn’t been involved in our program for at least fifteen years. As I said, when Holger arrived in 1998 we worked very closely with the NCCP (National Coaching Certification Program), Holger felt it stressed too much science, at the detriment of the on-field stuff. So he had us pull away from the NCCP, and we are actually still not back into them yet. In the last five years or so, we’re branched out into a more tactical approach – how to teams playing in a certain way. Coaching is very much tactically based now. There has, obviously, to be an emphasis on fitness as well, because if the player’s not fit, he’s not going to be able to get through a game. But it’s nowhere near what it used to be back in that time.
CSN: After Canada was eliminated early from the Women’s World Cup, Jason de Vos very publicly said that one of the big problems with the Canadian structure – and we’re talking player development here, but it’s coaching by extension – is that players in what he considers the crucial age group – 10, 11, 12, 13 – entering puberty, becoming young adults, are simply not getting the drills they need, the basic nuts-and-bolts football that they need from coaches in Canada.
RC: The game in Canada is very much recreational. Because of that, it’s a house league-driven type of approach. And invariably – and I don’t mean any disrespect to the people coaching there – it’s mainly parent coaches, and I have to say it’s mainly people who don’t really know the game of soccer very well. And house leagues rely on it, because there’s not enough people to be able to coach these teams. That obviously has an impact. The other way we can reach those people, and offer help to them is through a coaching program. We tried to do that in the past. When Holger came in, we tried to structure it, but when it was actually out there it became more of a young adult thing, as opposed to “here’s what you need to know about children and how they develop.” Our current Wellness to World Cup long-term player development plan really narrows it down to how to work with player six-and-under in the basic Active Start phase, and into the FUNdamentals phase, and so on.
CSN: When I talked to OSA chief technical officer Alex Chiet recently, he basically put the Wellness to World Cup blueprint in front of me, and said “We’re instituting this, this and this.” This is becoming the national vision of how to move forward. In your terms, how do you see that document for people who may not be as familiar with it? What are the differences between what happened before, and what’s going to happen now?
RC: First of all, we’ve got to say that it’s not a program in itself. It’s a philosophy, and what comes with that are the programs that will help to drive that philosophy. It’s not just coach development or player development. It’s also about competition development and league structures. It’s also about facilities, because there are places in Canada where they don’t have enough facilities to be able to run a decent program. In terms of coaching, what we’re looking to do now is promote the fact that it’s player-centred. Whatever we do has to be based on what the players’ needs are. And at different phases of development, we’re going to see they have different needs. And there are windows of opportunity that we need to capitalize on. But the fundamental problem is still going to be that the people delivering this are still going to be parent-coaches. For me, speaking personally, I think one of the major, major issues we have now – and I’ve seen it first-hand myself because I have young kids and I’ve been through house-league programs – is that clubs have to develop, within their own structures, support mechanisms for those coaches out there who are working at the grassroots level. It’s not enough to have one technical director responsible for a club of three, four, five, six-thousand kids ….
CSN: Like Jason de Vos is at Oakville right now? They just hired a bunch of new coaches.
RC: To be fair to Oakville, they’ve had support staff there for a number of years now. But it needs to be more wide-spread, to other clubs across the country. Even a club with a thousand kids – one person is not going to be able to deal with all that, and help the volunteer coaches, without whom we’d be snookered, and not able to have a program at all. But! They need guidance. How can we rely on people who have no background in the game and no coaching experience to deliver our program? We’re trying to get this ship on course. We have to provide support along the way – physical support, financial support of course. That’s why I think the emphasis has to be on clubs now to step forward and say “We need to support these guys, because they have the bulk of the players.”
CSN: So, as you say, we are in a country where soccer is overwhelmingly a recreational house-league sport. You grew up in England, in a soccer culture with professional clubs everywhere. These clubs have academies, and if you’re a coach coming up, you can catch on a team in the Conference or a non-league team, and move up the leagues, and maybe one day the door of the Premier League opens for you. Because Canada has so few pro clubs, we have very few chances for coaching. You look at someone like Nick Dasovic, who’s bounced around. Those jobs are the same crazy, high-turnover windmill that any other pro soccer coaching job is anywhere else, and the perception here in Canada is that you need an Aron Winter as opposed to a Nick Dasovic, and certainly the argument can be made – Winter has a tremendous footballing pedigree. Does the lack of pro-soccer coaching jobs in Canada make it hard to lure good people into the A-licence coaching program?
RC: My concern is that when you have Canadian clubs hiring coaches from outside of Canada, they’re not giving Canadians a chance. I’m pretty disappointed there. I would ask them to justify how they can do that. Yes, Aron Winter has a great pedigree as a player, but there are people here like Nick Dasovic, who’s also got a decent pedigree, but maybe not as high-profile as Aron. But certainly, he’s got MLS experience. He was given the reins for a few short weeks, and didn’t do a bad job. What would he have done if he’d been given another season? And if you look at the Vancouver Whitecaps, I think the same thing could be said of Colin Miller, who’s the number two there right now. He’s got the experience of coaching in Scotland, has played international football and has a sort of a track record, if you like, but is not given a chance because of an American. And I would argue are the Americans any better than the Canadians?
CSN: But you can train a man tactics and strategy, but you can’t necessarily put Torsten Frings’ phone number on his speed-dial, so he can phone him and say “Come work for me?”
RC: Well, I don’t know what happened with that one. From my experience, it’s been agents from around the world that get clubs fixed up. I don’t know if it’s particularly Aron Winter that’s gone and done that, or whether it’s an agent who contacted him. Agents are always looking for what’s best for their players. I don’t think it’s a case of whether they’re from Europe or from America or Canada or South America. I think you can find players. And these are quality players. They may not be a Frings, but you’ll get some decent, quality players who can play in MLS and do a good job there. I don’t want to point fingers at anybody, but I am disappointed that Canadian professional clubs are looking outside Canada when there are people in Canada with experience who need to be given an opportunity. That has to change – because that doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world.
CSN: But any other country in the world would have a larger number of professional clubs, and a more established culture. We’ve talked for years about soccer’s rise as a participation sport in Canada. Do you sense, though, any real increase within those kids of an interest in how Toronto FC is doing, or the Whitecaps, or the Canadian national teams?
RC: I think there’s interest in the MLS teams, definitely. There’s a connection there. I mean, who could have predicted in 2007 the turn-out of fans that TFC had? Prior to 2007, it was pretty bleak in terms of professional clubs up to that point. I thought the fans showed that they are interested in big-league soccer. They’re not interested in what they consider to be semi-professional soccer. And to be fair, not just to TFC but to Vancouver, the fans have been coming out as well, and I think the same will happen in Montreal. Vancouver have invested in an academy themselves – they did that prior to even starting in MLS, because they had a long-term vision. Montreal are trying to do the same thing now. Hats off to them! That’s great. But I think, again, if I had a criticism of them – Montreal just hired a coach from the U.S. whose highest standard has been USL. Well. We’ve got people who’ve done better than that. People in Montreal have done better than that. So why hire someone who’s not even of a higher pedigree, so to speak? I don’t understand why they don’t give them a chance.
CSN: We’re in an odd position in Canada, where much of our programs are paid for by fees of amateur soccer players, and this blueprint – Wellness to World Cup – is now going to dribble down into the house leagues. I have a dear friend who has two daughters who play house league – not rep, house league – and he is concerned that they don’t want to learn how to be professional players. They just want to run around, kick a ball, and play games. There’s going to be some push-back from the house leagues to these new standards, which are intended to take the best kids and help them become professional players. How would you answer that push-back, when it comes?
RC: Well, first of all, at the very young ages, it’s based on physical literacy. So it’s about movement – all of the things kids like to do. You just put the ball in there with them. We’re trying to encourage them to do things with the ball. Not everything, but the idea is that when kids go out there, they’re not just standing listening to somebody talk, they’re not just standing there passing the ball backwards and forwards for hours. They’re doing things they enjoy doing – running and chasing and competing with each other. These are natural things that come out of the child. All we’re saying is, this is how you could do it. This is how you can structure your practice, to the point where we’re giving coaches recipe books, if you like, on a CD where they can actually see all the practices they can run. All the work’s done for them. They just have to literally lay out the field, and let the kids play. And the kids enjoy it. These things have been tried. It’s not as if we’ve just come up with some drills. They’ve actually been tested and tried, and found to be working very well. There’s a lot of information from people like Tony Waiters, who had a big input into the development of the physical literacy program. There is a strong belief, based on evidence, that these things will work, and help the players to get better. Whether they want to be a professional or not is another thing. They all want to be as good as they can be. Wellness to World Cup is not trying to turn everybody into a World Cup player. But every player is going to find their level, enjoy the experience, and learn more and more about the game as they progress.
CSN: You’ve got pro teams starting their own academies. You have a flurry of academies out there. Obviously, a pro team is going to have its own agenda, based on what it needs to compete in Major League Soccer or the NASL. Academies – who knows? Provincial teams are still part of the mix, although the geography can make participation very difficult and daunting. Is it possible to unify all this? Can you tell Toronto FC and the Vancouver Whitecaps this is the blueprint we want you to use? Can this thing be universal, or are we looking at further fragmentation as more and more parties enter this field?
RC: The information in our program is proven information. It’s not just from Canada. It’s been brought together from around the world. We’re sort of leading the way a little bit, based on good, strong evidence from other countries of what works, and what doesn’t. We’re not asking the pro teams to do anything that’s going to hinder their development. They’re looking for a certain type of player, at a very high level. But when they want to reach down, eventually, the information we’re offering is not a million miles away from where they want to be anyway. I think it will help them, in terms of the coaches we’ll provide for them, and the players that come through from the grassroots levels. We would like to be working with them, in terms of what happens to those players at those elite levels. We can definitely complement what they do, and they complement what we do. We can offer them international experience, which they don’t get at TFC. And a player that’s had international experience has more value to them, in terms of experience they’ve gained that’s not available at TFC through normal channels. I feel strongly we can work together, and I think it’s up to the CSA – and we’re trying – to sit down with them and find how we can work together, as opposed to being in different areas. As for provincial programs – not everybody wants to be a professional player. Some people have a fear that, if they go to TFC or Vancouver, scholarship issues might be a problem down the road. There needs to be an alternative route where the door doesn’t close on them when they’re 21.
CSN: So let’s look at somebody who’s played soccer all his life, thought about the game a lot, had some sort of a career and his now in his late twenties or early thirties. He’s thinking he’s done as a player, and wants to stay in the game as a coach. What can you do for him?
RC: It depends what level they play at. We have a fast track for those who have a semi-professional background. If they played as a professional for three years, then we try and fast-route them into the B-licence program. (All this will change in the next two years, as we come up with new B-licence and A-licence programs.) The problem then comes in – where do we go from there? And this is where we come back to how clubs can support this program going forward, in terms of the number of people within the club working on a part-time basis – or full-time basis – that can support the grassroots model and the elite development model, especially in the larger clubs, where I feel more can be done. Again, I’m not trying to criticize them. I think sometimes we just have too narrow a focus, instead of opening our focus out and saying how can we best service players, so that we get the best for them, which will also be the best for the country.
Also in this series: