In
all official speeches, comments and articles regarding South African football
there is a stereotype call for better ‘quality football’, ‘quality players’,
‘quality development’, ‘quality facilities’ and even ‘quality refereeing’.
Amazingly and very strange is that no one calls for better quality coaching!!
Isn’t
common knowledge that in modern football quality coaching is the number one
factor? Instead, the talking is always that ‘we have over 9000 qualified
coaches and we need more’.
In
the current state of naivety and ignorance that affects the technical
development of SA football it is still accepted that the quantity and not the quality
of coaches would produce superior players and high standards football. How
incredible is that technical people do not realise that Level 3, CAF and UEFA
coaching licenses are not passports to success or high football performance!
(see those thousands of unemployed coaches in Europe who have UEFA
qualification).
The
knowledge and new information in the coaching business is very useful and
exciting but also very vast (in some cases larger than the qualification
content!). It requires regular updating courses and non-stop individual
studying – just to cover approx. 23 areas of precise/scientific coaching
information. Without such additional sources of learning even the best coaching
talent in SA would not succeed at the top of performance.
It
could also explain why in SA technical directors, coach educators and national
team coaches don’t know the difference between the styles of play and systems
(!?). The sooner full acceptance is given to the need for high quality coaches
the better for the future of the game in the country.
By Ted Dumitru
