TEACHER TALK: The coach gets coached

I’ve played football for almost a decade, but I never thought that kicking a ball with a bunch of friends would one day result in a career as a professional coach. From learning about teamwork, hardwork, persistence, discipline, to accepting failure and encouraging teammates as a player to teaching the game, who would’ve thought it possible? But that did not mean the end of my learning journey. A teacher has to be open to ideas and to improve one’s way of teaching; there’s so much to draw inspiration from, and for me, it has always come from the kids I have trained.

It’s not just classroom learning or in this case, on-the-field learning that’s important—for both the student and teacher. Talking to them about their hobbies, their likes and dislikes while packing up for the day is one way I bond and get to know them better on a personal level. And whether they know it or not, they help me improve my coaching techniques.

I had been struggling to train toddlers to differentiate between left and right, and to get them to kick the ball with their weaker foot (usually the left leg) for a while. One day, one of the kids I train — four-year-old Johann — arrived at a training session after a dance competition, with one side of his pants folded right up to his knees and the other side down to the usual ankle length. As he excitedly told me all about his dance, I realised that my solution was standing in front of me. I folded the right side of the kids’ pants and left the other side down to their boots. That got them to differentiate between right and left while kicking the ball.

Neel, an excellent student of mine, loved football. But in a country where cricket is the popular sport, it took him a while to find friends to play the game he loved. While chatting with him, he moaned about the fact that since no one played football, he had no choice but to play cricket. That gave me an idea, why not mix both the games and play Cricket-Football. Instead of a bat, kids use their feet to hit/kick a size 3 football. Those fielding could use any part of their body except their hands to control the ball. And thus we began a collaboration of football with other sports such as Kabaddi, Tennis and Squash to bring out the best of two sports in one game.

Coaching is not only about teaching the game with its rule and technicalities, but nurturing the psychological side of the kids. At an interstate competition, the Under 19 team had to face the team that had won for the past 3 years. Many of kids I train had friends from the other team, who did all they could to lower their self esteem. They mocked the boys on chat and to add to our misery, the kids discovered that our school was so sure we would lose against our opponents that they booked our stay in Gujarat for one day when it was a three-day tournament. Clearly no one thought we could win. A pep talk was in order; I made it clear to my team that matches are won on field, not by talking but by playing. We needed to concentrate on ourselves and our teammates. I confiscated their phones to ensure no negativity surrounds them. Finally, we beat them on penalties and progressed in the competition; we made it through to the finals, which we lost. But runners up was still a victory for us, not to forget that two boys from our team play went on to play for the state.

Learning from the kids has involved a lot of listening to their endless talks about ballet and cartoons, sometimes watching movies like Frozen, or something about Barbie—just to be in sync with the little ones. It’s such a joy to be around them; to teach and also to learn from them at the same time.

(The writer is a Mumbai-based professional football coach, who has been training students between 3-35 years, for the past four years. He also has a small football club called Valiante FC, an 8-month-old start-up, and works as the head coach at Athletico Madrid, which runs free football training for underprivileged kids.)