Online Mentorship 2024 (level 1)

Course description

In the subjective football world, many coaches just copy the champion which means that they will always be behind the leaders in their field. This online Mentorship will help you to stay ahead of the game by becoming an independent football thinker who no longer relies on others to develop new ideas and unique solutions.

Just imagine a football coach wanting to learn HOW to best coach football players. He browses the Internet and stumbles upon hundreds of online courses about management and coaching. The overlap between the different courses is minimal, yet they all promise you the ‘holy grail’ of coaching. How on earth is a football coach supposed to separate relevant from irrelevant information in this jungle of flavours of the month? HOW to coach football, depends on all kinds of external factors. Does the coach work with women or men, with adults or children, amateurs or professionals, does his team train two, three or more times a week, does he have access to a whole, half or quarter pitch to practice, etc.? It is, therefore, challenging for outsiders to determine HOW a coach should manage a specific situation.

Many courses present concepts based on the differences between people in, for example, personality and culture. In this online Mentorship, Raymond Verheijen has taken not the differences but the similarities between people as the starting point. All players and coaches have to deal with the same game characteristics (WHAT) and evolutionary principles (HOW). Based on these similarities, universal coaching tools will be presented that give direction to HOW to coach football independent of subjective opinions, preferences, beliefs or experiences.

The Online Mentorship will start on September 1, 2024, and will be concluded on May 31, 2025.

Course procedure

On the 1st of each month, a 2-3 hour course on one of the 9 topics will be available for the entire month.

Also, a pre-recorded 2-3 hour FAQ session will be available during which the most frequently asked questions will be answered by Raymond Verheijen. This session will also be available until the end of the month.

During each month, you can watch the clips at your own tempo and at your own convenience until the last day of the month.

Certification

After successfully completing the Online Mentorship, delegates will receive an official FCE certificate.

Learning outcomes

This is what you will get out of the twelve 2-hour courses, twelve 2-hour Q&A’s and over 30 hours of extra online content:

• Football theory course: a deeper understanding of the WHAT of coaching football and in particular the difference between knowledge and experience. Learn which coaching tools will help you to get to the essence of the game and to avoid more subjective or superficial coaching.
• Football coaching theory course: a deeper understanding of the fundamentals HOW to coach football. Learn how to apply the most effective coaching tools to help your players improve, for example, by designing football situations to provoke the desired competent football behaviour.
• Football tactics course: a deeper understanding of the meaning of tactics in football. Coaching tools to improve the (non-)verbal communication between your players. Learn what is best for your players instead of using your players like robots to execute the tactics of international top teams.
• Game insight course: a deeper understanding of the decision-making process of players and the difference between tactics (team) and game insight (player). Learn why many people worldwide are talking about a lack of ‘creative’ players.
• Football technique course: a deeper understanding of the difference between executing a decision (football) and executing a technique (gymnastics). Learn how to improve, for example, the football action ‘passing’ instead of just the basic action ‘kicking’.
• Football fitness course: a deeper understanding of the difference between football fitness (fitness in football context) and non-football fitness (fitness outside football context). Learn how to help your players perform football actions at a higher tempo instead of just running more distance.
• The Men’s and women’s game course: a deeper understanding of the fact that women and men are playing the same sport. How to anticipate the specific characteristics in both the men’s and women’s game, for example, to reduce the number of ACL injuries in the women’s game.
• Football periodisation course: how to plan football training from day to day and week to week to optimise the training effect of every session. Learn how to avoid your players accumulating fatigue in-between activities and losing their freshness.
• Youth academy periodisation course: how to apply the principles of football periodisation with youth players before and after the growth spurt. Learn how to implement all the above Online Mentorship topics within a youth academy structure.