Sven de Haan has immediately resigned as head coach of vv Hoogezand. The trainer was done with the behavior of part of his group of players.
For weeks, De Haan, who grew up as a footballer in Groningen, has been annoyed by the mutual banter and swearing, but also the way in which part of his group of players experiences football. “First of all: they are nice guys,” says De Haan. “But in terms of sports experience, attitude and behavior, this group does not suit my way of working at all. I want a group that is serious, that wants to achieve something as a team. Guys who work for each other, who form a team.”
Football school in Spain
At the end of the season, De Haan, who is considered a talented trainer and received his UEFA-1 diploma in Zeist on Wednesday, would definitely leave Hoogezand. Next year he will settle in Jávea, just above Alicante in Spain, to set up a football school there. But that upcoming departure is separate from his motivation for quitting the red-black first division club, he says. “I just planned to finish the season. But this costs me too much energy.”
It already started in the preparation, says De Haan. “I already thought: pooh, that’s going to be a tough job. Boys who insult each other for the slightest thing, who spend all their time focusing on each other, it irritated me from the start. But I also saw it as a great challenge.”
‘External help also didn’t help at all’
That challenge lasted exactly four months, because on Tuesday evening De Haan decided that enough was enough. “Of course you hope that there will be a change in behavior. We also called in auxiliary forces: an external expert, who made the boys think and gave them assignments, they completed questionnaires about their behavior. But it didn’t help anything. Yes, it was a little better for a while, but a week later it went wrong again. They fell back into their old mistake.”
De Haan has been around since he was 15 e coach and was on the field at Lycurgus in ‘City’ for six years, including three years as head coach. He then spent a year as assistant coach at first division club Oranje Nassau and last year he was head coach at Helpman-zatedag. Does he blame himself? “I always look in the mirror and I will do that extra well in the coming weeks. But I’m glad I made this decision. These four months cost me a lot of energy, while I want to do things that give me energy. In the end it was really flogging a dead horse.”
Poor performance
With 3 points from 5 games, Hoogezand is last in the first division J. But according to De Haan, those poor performances are not directly related to the mediocre relationship he had with the playing group. “But of course the mentality they have counts. It concerns 4,5,6 players who are constantly working with each other, and I don’t think that is conducive to performance.”
Not only De Haan is resigning, team manager Bo Brakels has also resigned with immediate effect. The club’s board reports in a statement on the club website that assistant coaches Gerwin Bodewes and Hiwa Barani will take over De Haan’s duties for the time being.
‘This announcement speaks for itself’
In the same statement, the club says it will refrain from further comment. “This statement speaks for itself and we will therefore not respond to questions from the media,” it said. Chairman Andy Kasto and player Heine Uuldriks were also not reachable by telephone. On Sunday, Hoogezand will play the red lantern cracker against WKE’16.