How HV Myra is building one recognisable youth programme with LEAD

Raoul Grevenstuk is the technical manager at HV Myra in Amstelveen, in the Netherlands. He already knew LEAD from his time in Nijmegen, and at Myra, he says, “it’s really taking off.” He explains where the club started, why it works with LEAD and where it wants to go.

Plenty of knowledge, spread across the club

Myra was not short of knowledge: the club already had good coaches and a great deal of hockey expertise.

But that knowledge was also quite spread out across the club. Coaches mostly made their own sessions and had their own ideas and ways of working.

That made it hard to build one clear, recognisable line through the programme, from the youngest players all the way to under 18. “For me, that is one of the most important reasons we started working with LEAD.”

Structure: setting down what the club values

What I really like about LEAD is that it gives us structure. We can set down much more clearly what we consider important in our youth programme.

That covers the whole programme: what the club wants to develop technically, what it wants to pass on tactically, what it expects physically at each age, and “how do we make sure all those parts connect logically in the end?”

A common thread, not a script

At the same time, I think it is very important that LEAD does not decide how a coach should run every session. In my view that would actually backfire. A coach has to keep thinking for themselves, make choices and be able to respond to the level and the needs of their team.

That is how Raoul sees LEAD: “as a common thread running through the programme.”

It gives coaches direction and something to hold on to, but leaves enough room to make their own choices and adapt sessions to their own team.

One hockey language

What Raoul sees emerging above all is “that within Myra we are starting to speak the same hockey language.”

As technical manager, I can steer the content of our programme better. And at the same time, coaches have a better idea of where we want to go and why certain topics come back.

Which is exactly the point: “In the end, you also want to avoid a player’s development depending too much on whichever coach happens to be with their team that season.”

Filling it in together, with pizza

Myra wants to take the next step. Raoul is planning a get-together with a group of coaches, on a Saturday at the end of the afternoon: “Very informal, with pizza, but serious in content.” They will discuss themes such as technique, tactics and the physical side, and then develop sessions and drills together within LEAD.

I don’t want it to be something that is only filled in by me as technical manager and then sent to the coaches. There is an enormous amount of knowledge among our coaches. That is exactly the knowledge we want to bring together.

So they discuss questions together such as:

• What do we want a player to learn at this age, and why?
• Which drills and which coaching fit with that?
• How does it build on what the player learned before, and what they will need at the next age?

That way, I think, our coaches get much more ownership, and it becomes not my learning line or LEAD’s learning line, but more and more a Myra programme.

More than a platform

On working with LEAD:

You don’t just deliver a digital platform and then say: good luck with it. You think along with us about the implementation, about our learning line and about how we bring our coaches along. The workshops and the support around it help too.

Where Myra is heading

Myra is in the middle of it, and there are still plenty of steps to take. “A change like this is not built in a few weeks. But I can already see that LEAD helps us connect all the knowledge, ideas and qualities within Myra much better.”

The aim is clear: “not lots of separate good coaches with separate good ideas, but building a recognisable HV Myra youth programme together.”

LEAD gives us the platform for that, but also structure. The hockey content and the culture around it, we build together in the end.

Curious how LEAD turns a learning line for each age group into a season for every team? Read more about the Season Engine.