So what's in a name?
Not much, really: when we talk about a manager in England, it's very different than when we talk about a manager in the US. A trainer means something completely different in college than it does in a youth club. However, how we organize our roles, both within an organization, and organizing ourselves for the different roles we play can be a big determinate in how effective we are.
It may seem a little odd to American ears when a manager is talked about "being active on the training ground." What else would the manager do? Well, actually, quite a lot. The English structure of coaching a squad is much more analogous to the college football model in the US than how most of us manage our college teams or youth clubs. The manager sets the agenda, but the coaching staff generally conducts the training. In American college football, the traditional role of the head coach, epitomized by Bear Bryant, was to watch the practice, and decide who was or was not ready for the weekend game. (Preston's first team training ground has a scaffolding tower reminiscent of the Bear's tower over-looking the Alabama practice fields, though admittedly much smaller than the Bear's.) A professional football manager usually does much the same, and is managing a coaching staff that does the bulk of the daily work of preparing the team to the manager's specifications.
The key role of the manager, in terms of training, is defining the problems to be addressed – what can we improve on the most in the shortest amount of time that will have the greatest impact on our play? Having a bit of distance from the daily tempo of training can be a big help in seeing what the “big picture” items are. I can't imagine there are many among us who haven't at some point in our careers done three, four, five training sessions in a row on basically the same topic because “the players just aren't getting it.” Well, perhaps that is as much as they will get right now, and our time would be better used moving on to something else. Or, perhaps if we had the manager's eyes up on the tower watching, he could tell us where the breakdown is.
It makes sense: the manager's remit with a professional club is to insure results, which may include avoiding relegation, gaining promotion, winning silverware. A coach, on the other hand, is to improve the individual players and the cohesion of the unit to raise the level of play of the squad as a whole. In other words, the coach gives the manager the tools to his job, while the manager keeps a "big picture" view and defines the coaches' tasks within the organization: what players need work on specific skills or decision making processes, what units within the team need to improve, and, of course, what "improvement" means. The manager then directs the staff who does the bulk of the training. If the manager wants to play indirect, possession football with a five man midfield, clearly training sessions working with a four man midfield playing direct, over-the-top balls to the forwards are not merely useless, but actually detrimental. Sometimes the manager will make a coaching point, lead an exercise, or conduct an entire training session. Or he might not be at training at all, but instead evaluating a prospective player or scouting an opponent.
One person can, of course, both manage and coach, but I think it's helpful to think of the roles as separate. By clearly defining our roles, we can focus on doing one job at a time, and doing it well. For those of us who have coached at small colleges, we oftimes find ourselves doing everything, from laundry to recruiting to coaching, and everything in between. An organization needs to have an overarching vision, an organizing force to achieve that vision, and then technical expertise to actually achieve it. Even if it is one person filling all of the roles, just to keep your sanity you need to be able to compartmentalize. One day, I'm setting the vision; in the morning, I'm determining the strategy and organization of the squad; in the evening, I'm doing the actual training. Blurring the lines muddles your thinking, and you start discussing philosophy of teaching in a training session, rather than actually teaching in the session.
I think a clear separation of roles has an application in youth coaching as well. In my experience, many clubs are in desperate need of a director of coaching -- someone who can set the vision for the club, create a coherent curriculum for player development, and engender a common club culture so the club is something more than an accretion of teams who wear the same shirt. However, once a DOC is hired, individual coaches often resist any influence on their team, and even view help as an encroachment on their authority. The coach, in short, doesn't want to be managed, and I think sometimes that is a failure to define the roles of director and coach and how they are separate, even if one person fills both roles, such as a head coach working without a DOC. Without club direction, the head coach of a team, whether he realizes it or not, is creating the developmental curriculum, defining the vision, and creating the culture that each player (and parent) recognize as "the club." Simply recognizing the differences in roles can make the arrival of the DOC seem like a relief -- finally the head coach can do away with the visionary hat, and focus on managing and training the team.
Likewise, as youth coaches we often make poor use of our assistants, preferring to manage and coach simultaneously and making poor use of the resource of a second coach. Sometimes it's a result of our assistant not having the necessary skill to run a session, but I think a lot of the time it is a failure of ego: we don't want to surrender control; and sometimes it's a failure of our own skill: we can't really define the problem we want the assistant to address in the session. Separating the role of manager and coach,even if one person has both of those roles and only separates them in their own thinking, helps to give a focus to the head coach/manager so that problems can be adequately defined and addressed.
Another way I have seen some youth clubs in the US divide the tasks of managing and coaching, and one that I think makes a lot of sense in the American game, is the distinction between coach and trainer. I've seen it the most where parent coaches function as the head coach, but a more experienced technician (oftimes a coach contracted from a third party service such as Midwest or Challenger) conducts one or more of the weekly training sessions. The head coaches of the various teams tell the trainers where the squads did well or did poorly, and the trainers then devise and run the sessions. The head coach has the opportunity to watch his squad at work without the emotion of a competitive match and can make some judgments about playing time and position. Also, hopefully, the head coach can learn something from the trainer about the game. It is, in some ways, upside down from the English model, where the manager is usually the senior partner in terms of experience (many coaches in professional clubs are, ultimately, aspiring managers) but I still think its something that can make sense for a lot of clubs. It maximizes coaching expertise and increases involvement of the club in the growth and development of each player.
So what's in a name? Maybe not much, but there is a lot to the roles those labels signify. I think that by clearly defining what each role in an organization is and does, we improve our teaching effectiveness, and maintain a bit more sanity. So what if you are it all by yourself --visionary, manager, technician, and laundry man, bus driver, and cook? Well, sitting down and clearly distinguishing each one of those roles can help do each job better. Don't try and cook while you're driving the bus -- you won't do either well. Likewise, don't try and devise a developmental philosophy while you're teaching midfield transition --again, you'll frustrate yourself doing neither well. The English distribution of labor won't necessarily make sense in the US -- we have different resources and needs, but a clear structure of the distribution of labor is a helpful tool to get the most of the resources we have and insure that our needs are addresed.
