First License
I started the new year with the status of a football coach in three teams without a coaching license. Precisely, I was assigned to be the head coach of the under 11 years old (U11) hobby team and the assistant coach for the U13 and U20 competitive teams. HIFK Fotboll, as a club performing in the highest tier of Finnish football, had an obligation only to hire football coaches with UEFA licenses. Thus, the club was very supportive in helping me receive my first football license: UEFA E. I completed the entire course within a couple of months. The course directly helped me and my training sessions started to get more organized. In addition, while acting as an assistant coach, I was learning from the head coaches of U13 and U20 possessed UEFA A and UEFA Pro licenses, respectively.
Coaching Progress
Altogether in 2021, I also completed three courses: UEFA E, UEFA D, and UEFA C. To summarise my learnings, here comes the bullet points below:
- UEFA E: Organized training sessions & adding learning points for each exercise/drill/game.
- UEFA D: Examples of football elements (e.g. body positioning; field references)
- EUFA C: 3rd man principle & Game focus. Promoted a complete rebuild of my coaching philosophy and all my training plans with the focus on teaching individual players' techniques within the context of game focus.
I have been keeping a diary of my learnings since the beginning of 2021. That diary helped me to create short induction videos for my assistant coaches. Videos were intended to introduce new coaches to how my U11 team was organized, as well as to share the club's expectations and general guidelines on how to lead training sessions. Overall, I created 10 short videos, each addressing one particular aspect of coaching. Once I completed the UEFA C course, I was able to revise the whole video course for new coaches. As a result of the revision, I created a presentation with all my learnings, as a football coach:
Moved to Belgium
I lived in Finland for 8 years. Within this time, I worked for 6 football clubs in Finland, including AC Kajaani (Kajaani), TP-47 (Tornio), FC KTP (Kotka), KajHa (Kajaani), JäPS (Järvenpää), HIFK Fotball (Helsinki). My story in Finland ended in October 2021 when I permanently moved to live in Belgium due to personal reasons. Soon after I moved, I got a new job in the field of sports betting, as a marketing data analyst. Since the beginning of 2022, I live in Leuven but that would be the story for the next year...
