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Thursday, May 1, 2008
Coach Valdis Bole
Greater Louisville, KY
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By: Betty Coffman
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Photo(s) By: Betty Coffman
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The coach of Atherton’s boys soccer team for over 18 years, Valdis Bole also coaches the U18-90 Girls team at Javanon Soccer Club. HSSTM sat down with him to discuss how soccer has changed in Louisville over the last two decades and his perspective on the differences between coaching school and club teams and between coaching boys and girls.
HSSTM: Tell me about your background.
Bole: I grew up outside of Chicago and started playing soccer when I was 9. I played collegiately at Aurora University. I have been coaching since I graduated from college back in 1980. I started at Atherton in the fall of 1990. My wife grew up here. I have two sons. One is a junior here [at Atherton]; he plays tennis. The other one graduated two years ago. He played soccer.
HSSTM: Tell me about Atherton’s soccer program.
Bole: It’s changed since I first came here. At that time it was mostly white soccer players with basic backgrounds. Now we’ve become very diverse and now we have all these different cultures. We still have our white players and they are not a minority, but we have Bosnians, African players, South American players, Hispanic players. So we’ve got quite a mix and all those cultures have their own idea of how soccer is played. But most of these kids have a passion for soccer. Coming from their ethnic background, soccer is an important part of their lives.
HSSTM: Do you have trouble finding enough good players?
Bole: It depends on the freshman class here in high school. We may get five or six, and that’s not enough always. This year we had 12 or 13 freshman incoming players and a lot of them had previous playing experience with club soccer.
HSSTM: What else has changed at Atherton?
Bole: I’ve been here 18 years and last year the board decided that our field needed to be refurbished. The practice fields are helped by HYR (Highland Youth Recreation) Soccer. They put in Bermuda fields so practice is great because the fields get watered and they’re soft. The ball is not bouncing. But when we were playing on the game field, the field would get hard and the grass would burn out, but now we have Bermuda down there. Now we get to practice on a good surface and play on a good surface, too. It really helps with our speed of play. The players can play faster. They can do more things with the ball. It helps if you’re skillful and the ball stays on the carpet.
HSSTM: How is your Javanon girls team?
Bole: All the girls are seniors now and almost all of them are going to school and playing and they finally found their schools. We had a tournament in Northern Kentucky. The weather this spring has been so wet, but we just opened the indoor facility in January so we are able to practice indoors without missing a beat. We would have been hurting. There was no way on some days to practice outside.
HSSTM: How is coaching at Javanon different than coaching high school?
Bole: I’ve been coaching there 12 years. Kids want to play there and it’s very competitive. We’ve been very successful, especially on the boys’ side where they’re ranked 24th nationally. The girls haven’t had quite the success the boys have had, but they’re still very competitive. A lot of these boys and girls want to go on to play collegiate soccer and a lot of them have. They see Javanon as a stepping stone.
HSSTM: How is coaching boys different from coaching girls?
Bole: I told my girls yesterday, the difference sometimes in how we play and how the boys play is that testosterone. Boys will do silly things. They will say something or do something and react right away instead of thinking about it. Boys get over things quicker. You can be harder on them and they don’t take things as personally. The girls are more team oriented. They are so concerned about teammates and how they feel. They don’t want to command each other or help each other out on the field. I tell them, ‘You’re not going to hurt everybody’s feelings. You’re going to hurt everybody’s feelings more if you don’t say anything and we either give up a goal or we lose a game because we’re not communicating.’ The girls are very team oriented, whereas the boys--if somebody gets hurt, some of them think, ‘I can play in that person’s place now!’
HSSTM: What changes have you seen in Louisville soccer since you’ve been here?
Bole: When we first moved down here from Chicago, Louisville was not as advanced in soccer. In Chicago, there were different ethnic groups and all the kids my age were playing soccer. Here it wasn’t until the mid ‘90s that it caught on when we had the ethnic people coming into Louisville. It has helped. There are now a lot of adults playing on Sundays. You can see it at Seneca Park. They will come and practice in the evenings. There is hardly any space there. I’d like to see when this generation grows up in the next ten or 15 years what they’re capable of doing. They can take it to a higher level.
HSSTM: What is your biggest challenge in coaching?
Bole: Trying to determine how bad they want to play. How committed they are. Are they willing to work hard to be the best players they can be and do they want to learn a little bit, too?
HSSTM: What is your philosophy about off-season training and club soccer?
Bole: We want our athletes to play other sports, too. If they’re concentrating on one sport by the time they are a junior or a senior, then they should play club soccer. We encourage our kids to go out for other sports, and a lot of them do. Whether it’s tennis or swimming or running track, I’ve had a lot of kids that are doing other things.
HSSTM: Who inspires you?
Bole: When I graduated from college, right away I wanted to coach. I went to a college coach. He said, ‘If you want to coach you have to go to a coaching school. Just because you’re a player doesn’t mean you know how to run a team or coach players.’
Then I worked the summer camps with Bob Gansler who played professionally and also did a lot of teaching of the coaches here and he coached the men’s national team the first time they were in the World Cup. So he’s coached collegiately and youth. I learned a lot being at his camps and seeing how he ran things. There was a lot of input from other coaches, too, with different backgrounds and from different areas of the country.
That’s part of coaching. You learn a little bit from a lot of people. Once you think you know it all then you should probably stop coaching. There is always something you pick up from somebody.
HSSTM: What is your favorite part of coaching?
Bole: I like to see the kids have passion. I like to put them in uncomfortable situations in practice because the game at times can be very uncomfortable. Then I say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to deal with the pressure if you love playing this game.’ It’s all right to make mistakes and learn from your mistakes, but at the same time you have to take risks. If you’re going to be successful you have to be a risk taker. You can’t play uptight. You have to play to the best of your ability. You may not always win. Some nights the other team is better, or in soccer, you may not be lucky that night.
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