With the second season for the Orlando Pride all wrapped up, Head Coach Tom Sermanni is ready to get back at it for year three. The veteran coach, who has been managing soccer teams for the past 29 years, is set to head into his 30th year with the same mentality he has always had when it comes to coaching the beautiful game. With that same mentality, however, comes an ever changing way of putting ideas into action.
Sermanni will spend some of his off-season in England and Australia to scout players in the FA Women's Super League, Champions League, and W-League. Mainly, his job there will be to scout players for the future, but with Sermanni, a big part of what he wants to do is also to learn about how other teams tend to operate.
Something that Sermanni has learned over his vast experiences of coaching soccer, is that the game is always adapting, always changing and evolving. As a coach, the need to adapt with the game is incredibly important in order to stay at the top, a fact that is vital for the Pride manager.
“You’re still learning different things, you’re still looking at things differently,” Sermanni said, “I think that’s the only way you gotta keep growing. I coached with a guy once, very experienced guy, and I asked him about adapting his style of coaching. He said, ‘I kinda just do the same thing’ and it stunned me a bit. To be honest, the game left him behind and I think looking at that as a coach, regardless of where you’ve coached, what you’ve done or how old you are or all this experience people talk about, you’re always learning and trying to pick up new ideas and even just new ways to do things.”
For Sermanni, who played and coached both in the UK and Australia, the different perspectives that both countries and the soccer associations bring to the table are a huge benefit for him as he scouts the region for talent.
“You learn everything,” he said, “You’re always picking up things. Whether it’s a system that a team plays that you might like or a player that you see that you like, you sit down and chat with people, you go watch a couple of training sessions and you see different things. So, it’s all of that. It’s just always important to keep up your base of knowledge and trying to continue to improve that, regardless of how old and decrepit you might become.”
Even as he heads into his 30th year as a coach, Tom Sermanni is, by every sense of the word, still a student of the game and that is a tremendous benefit for the future of the Orlando Pride
