The following was sent to me after last years event – published here unedited and with permission.
The 2016 3four3 Coaching Conference in Vegas: Philosophy, Identity and Authenticity
By Adam Finney
I went to the 3four3 annual coaching conference in Las Vegas at The Palms. It cost $400 not including the hotel rooms, which were nice and cheap as Vegas goes (conference rate). I was one of the million plus people who had originally been exposed to 3four3’s “legit” coaching education and moxy through their U11 possession soccer video on youtube years ago. The cost of their year long coaching program (with very few activities in it compared to most soccer education) was also $400. I vacillated for a while, then after seeing more glimpses of what 3four3 had to offer and reading about The Golden Rule to Team and Player Development, it hit me, and I joined frantically. What has transpired since, in terms of growth and development in my teams, was enough to, without question, bring me to Vegas for the annual conference.
I should start by qualifying that I am a sucker for soccer programs, expenses, courses, etc. It was impressed on me years ago, in broken English, by a friend and talented coach, that “every time I lose, I go back and study”. In the digital marketing age, there are whole industries built up to sell you things to study – and I spent and spent and went and coached and did more … not less. Long story short, after ten years of “study” and expenses and badges and nearly ten thousand dollars spent on courses and books and videos and gas – I found my teams playing less attractive, less identifiable soccer, and frankly, more jungle ball than ever before. After reading “The Golden Rule” and a following blog post on “A Huge Mistake Well-Meaning Coaches Are Making” it all made sense. The light bulb went on. The rest is history.
I should also qualify that I, in no way, would walk away from this symposium or any feeling like I was now equipped with a magic bullet to slay the vampirical forces haunting soccer development in the USA. That ambition, felt more than cognized, ten years ago was what led me down the rabbit hole of “Play Like Barcelona in 9 Sessions” and coaching badges which did not amount to a discernable style of play in my teams. But, as the old contractor I sometimes work with once put with a weary twinkle in his eye: “Sometimes we have to pay for our knowledge…”. I think I am not alone in saying, a whole lot of coaches in the USA have paid a lot for a little.
The conference is opened with a transition presentation by mastermind Brian Kleiban whose youth teams have, from within the US Soccer club and academy system, accomplished an unprecedented international standard.
What Brian Kleiban is proving with his rise into the highest ranks of youth development in this country and the world, is that his attractive brand of possession based development is possible and it does work. What 3four3 is proving is that by articulating a philosophy, coaches can focus-in almost surgically on the key ingredients to their success: identity, vision, a core group of related activities which produce results.
The reason that 3four3 does not open up their entire tactical knowledge for one lump sum in year one is that it would be like trying to build a Tesla muscle car without a plan simply by looking at the finished product and hearing about its prowess. That is the very type of identity copycat coaching that has historically haunted our country’s youth development.
Well meaning coaches stack activities on activities to try and suss out the magic of the end product of Barcelona without knowing the first thing about what they stood for, how they taught it and what they had to risk to do it. The activities that go along with that are just ingredients, but the mentality that one has to have to properly utilize them has to be developed slowly, over time. As Kleiban writes of mastering the craft, you have to “Go learn how to make rice, before you make sushi”.
It’s not just a one size fits all program that anybody can apply like an algorithm. One coach noted at the event that if he had been given the whole program at once he would have skipped over all the beginning steps and gone straight for the end activity. What the 3four3 program preaches is incremental, dedicated steps to build a system, not just invoke one through copying the first team activities of a team who has been doing it for their entire childhood. This is where US Soccer, and its private players club MLS, finds its biggest deficiency – it’s not a club based approach, it’s a shotgun happenstance marketing extravaganza with no measure for the success of any club.
Later, at the 2016 coaching conference, former US Soccer National Team Player and US U15 coach Hugo Perez speaks about the need for “de-segregation” of US Soccer and that if positive change is going to happen, it will start with the “grassroots and work its way up”. Instead of a top down approach, he advocates for a local and regional inclusive approach that harnesses the creative potential and talent of all areas in the US. But, as Ted Westervelt who hangs out and talks shop with coaches in the Friday night mixer at the Palms, continues to remind followers on Twitter – that is not in the interests of the MLS who maintains a 200 million dollar price tag just to get in the conversation of joining their league, all the while, blocking 10,000 clubs from participating in their D1 sanction.
The conference, however, is not really about bashing the inadequacies of US Soccer or its various coach education platforms. Positive remarks are made by Sacha van der Most van Spijk, former head coach and technical director of Chivas USA, with regard to Northern California’s organic league, NorCal Premier started by the Zeimers which offers “quality coach education”. Sacha’s presentation on his takeaways from time at Clairefontaine and especially the pedagogical approaches of Atletico Bilbao and Belgium’s Standard Liege echo the kinds of glimpses of international clubs’ pedagogies Norcal Premier provides for free or little cost to their coaches; being a member and having attended some, I can attest. Although his presentation is tailored to a specific playing style, that is precisely a goal and focus that 3four3 is producing in its coaches and its players.
Ultimately, that is what the 3four3 coaching conference and also their coaching education platforms provide: a club based approach that is building something … something that hopefully will one day rival anything in Europe or South America.
Although the 3four3 guys have developed players internationally and beaten Barcelona’s youth squad internationally, they don’t boast about this stuff. It is business as usual for them trying to straighten out what is important in player development and how to go about improving.
This is where it gets interesting: as a Norcal coach I can attend a technical director and coach presentation in classroom and on field about tactical periodization and its application to training. This window, provided by their coach education program, elicits all sorts of higher level learning and the ability to “stare at what you want to become” as youth coaches with international ambitions. However, what 3four3 provides is an identity. While we all want to learn from other clubs, the overall takeaway from their program is the key ingredient lacking in most if not all of US Soccer: how it fits into a framework for attractive, possession based, positional, pressing soccer. In other words, a style of play. Mention of the happenstance, all over the place styles of every MLS academy emerge in the discussion throughout the weekend; Perez points out that he as a U15 National Team coach was told that he could never play a positional possession game with his players due to their various club styles and lack of cohesion; in his tenure, he proved them wrong.
Conference coordinator John Pranjic talks in passing about the business conferences below at The Palms and what people gave up to be there; the coaching symposium, by comparison, seems a better deal than the best Vegas buffet. It is, however, structured like the finest celebrity dining: a feast of ideas. Plato in his Republic writes about the process of acquiring knowledge, similar to don Juan’s comments about leaving behind imitation and doing. The acolyte moves from the cave of shadows based on rash opinions and beliefs, through reason to the ultimate form, the precursor of absolute goodness. When we apply this to the craft of coaching, the reason based philosophy of “the ultimate form” is up to debate. For 3four3 coaches it is easy though: It is Bielsa, Pep, Cruyff, Total Football, attractive, possession based positional football. As an educator, it is stunning for me to see such clear comprehension – a sheer byproduct of the content marketing approach of the Kleibans who articulate what they want and how they want to get it. As a fan of Barcelona and as writer Jonathan Wilson adeptly coined there “phalanx of 5’7” geniuses” it also speaks to the beauty and potency of a game not preternaturally conceived to favor the Big Strong Fast giants as so many distinctly American sports do … some sort of nod to Goliath? Or perhaps his perceived advantage which as of late has been questioned. The idea behind Barcelona is one that tracing back to Cruyff and a legacy far before him (writes Wilson in his tactical history Inverting the Pyramid) is one that mental acumen and mental quickness can outplay physical prowess in soccer as the ultimate chess match unfolds. Thus, the 3four3 ultimate form is one that surpasses simply the illusory argument that “if only our best athletes played soccer we’d win a world cup.” It implies a magic in the craft of the game that is beyond simply the physical.
In a nutshell that is what the coaching conference struck upon. Yes there were tactical and technical takeaways, but not like other coaching conferences which either through parallel practice (overweight middle aged coaches pretending to be ODP players) or decontextualized theoretical dissertations (some very good but hard to trace back to the roots), the 3four3 conference, like their coaching program, offered a crest jewel: the synergy of philosophy, identity and vision of the ultimate form (for positional, possession based soccer), into a braintrust of ways to access the highest level of play for players from the grassroots on up. It is the very type of brilliance that the most successful national teams and clubs utilize; it is the very thing our country’s well meaning coaches have been lacking, stumbling around, exhausted and thirsty in a desert of empty concepts, tempted to buy “99 Drills to Finish like Ronaldo” or perhaps rely on putting it in the mixer like their club or college coach did with awkward glee 25 years ago. It is why I will be back next year.
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