It happened a few time that people asked me about this. In sports it is not a question anymore, but in esports there is still a lot of protagonists that have a different opinion about it. With that in mind I decided to write this feature and share my opinion about this topic. I hope that it will help you forge yours.

For the purposes of finding answers and perspectives about it, I will first take the time to introduce myself and give my opinion about the professional coach role and its necessary skills. Secondly, I will talk about what both player and high performance experiences can bring to the mix. Finally, I will conclude this article by sharing my opinion about the impact of past player experiences.

1 —Introduction

As it is my first article ever on Medium, I think it is important to quickly introduce myself and share my journey in order to allow you to understand my standpoint. Even if I always try to remain impartial, this article will reflect my opinion based on my own previous experience.

For people who don’t know me, my name is Félix MUNCH aka “Féfé”.

I’m actually working as Assistant Coach (namely Player Development Coach) for the Overwatch League’s Paris Eternal team.

Before joining the OWL, I was Head Coach for Eagle Gaming with which we managed to win the Overwatch Contenders Europe season 2.

You can find more information about my overwatch journey as Coach on this page : Liquidpedia/Féfé

Eagle Gaming — Overwatch Contenders EU season 2 Champions

However, I did not start my competitive career with esports.

I studied Physiotherapy and worked for 5 years as an Athletic Trainer in professional Basketball notably with young French national basketball teams.

In the meantime, I graduated from a Master’s degree in physical and mental coaching.

2 — The professional coach position

In this section we will quickly review the role of Coach as a whole, including the strategic and human aspects which are, in my opinion, inseparable.

It is indeed essential to know which are the necessary skills to work as a coach in order to answer the problematic - and title - of this article: Is it mandatory to be a good player in order to be a coach?

Please note that I will only talk about the position of coach in collectives disciplines because I only have experience in those.

In addition to having started my professional career in the traditional sport, I myself played basketball at a fairly high level when I was younger (French national championship). I have therefore met a large number of coaches and some of them have clearly influenced my vision of what high-level coaching should be.

“First you coach the man, then you coach the player”

Coaching is first and foremost about framing.

Jon Gruden, a famous NFL coach and winner of the Superbowl in 2003, used to say that it was necessary to coach the rigor and discipline, mandatory for performance more than the strategy itself.

Culture beats strategy. Strategy is important but it’s your culture that will determine whether your strategy is successful. — Jon Gordon

Providing a framework and establishing an efficient working environment are the very foundations of performance. Having the best strategy on paper is useless if the team does not have the necessary rigor to apply it on a daily basis and therefore master it in a match.

In this notion of framework, we also find the notion of choice. Coaching also means choosing. Whether it is in the selection of players or the strategy to be addressed, the coach has to make choices. Whether they are good or bad, they are necessary to allow players to focus on their area of expertise: playing.

Coaching is then communicating.

The coach must be the guardian of the correct comprehension of every message, whether to the players or between the players themselves.

Each player is above all a person with his/her own personality and does not react in the same way to external interactions.

The coach must be able to always adapt his speech, at least the formal aspect of it, but not necessarily on its substance at the risk of disturbing the framework. Furthermore, he must be a teacher.

For Phil Jackson, the most successful coach in NBA history, he must be able to get the message across and for all players to take ownership of it.

One thing I’ve learned as a coach is that you can’t force your will on people. If you want them to act differently, you need to inspire them to change themselves — Phil Jackson

Phil Jackson, right after his 10th NBA title.

The coach, a strategist among the strategists.

Obviously, the coach needs to have a deep knowledge of the discipline in question, but he must not, in my opinion, be the only one to dictate the strategy and apply his expertise.

Through my experience as a player in Basketball, I noticed that the best coaches were not the ones who told us exactly how to play, but those who were able to convey their vision and style to us.

Before a vision can become a reality, it must be owned by every member of the group. — Phil Jackson

For my part, I value players expertise. They don’t work for me and I don’t work for them. We work together to move the team forward.

In professional sport, the expert of the game is first and foremost the player. He alone endures the constraints imposed by the pitch on a daily basis. Whether in terms of effort management, adaptation of his play style, and even live strategic decision-making. In matches, the coach only acts on specific times (timeouts, half-time, before the match…). It cannot, therefore, take action on the field immediately when the need arises.

In esports, and especially on Overwatch, this is even truer. As communication can only take place after each map, it is not possible to lead players in real time. Shouting from the “edge of the field” to give a piece of information is not an option at all.

Coach’s role is therefore not to lead all the time but to give the tools that will allow players to adapt and make the necessary decisions when the time comes. The player must not be dependent on the information provided by the coach. A good coach should be able to gradually make his players independent to such an extent that he is no longer essential to the proper functioning of the team.

Coaching isn’t about what you know or what you can put on paper. It’s about what you can get players to do on the floor. — Stan Van Gundy

Stan Van Gundy — NBA coach

3 — Pros and cons to be a former player

It’s no secret that the experience of being a player is something that is valued when it comes to transitioning to a coaching position.

And that’s not without reason. First of all, having experience as a player in the discipline in question makes it easier to establish your legitimacy in the team.

“He knows what he’s talking about, he’s lived it” is a phrase that comes up often when we talk to the players. If not 100% true, this has at least the merit of immediately establishing a relationship of trust between the players and their coach. Confidence that is the basis for the communication needed in order to perform as a coach.

Be careful, however, with blind trust: many professional players still have significant lack of game sense (often compensated by mechanical skills) and that is why there are in-game leaders, better known as point guards in basketball.

On the other hand, a players experience necessarily brings an understanding of the game and its constraints from a mechanical and strategic point of view. Spending time on a discipline makes it easier to grasp its ins and outs, no one can contradict that. Finally, being a former player also makes it easier to understand players feeling, whether it is in terms of stress or frustration management, for example.

But is it mandatory to play the game to understand these things? Will try to answer this question in the last part.

Despite these advantages, being a former player also brings its share of difficulties.

First of all, on the relational aspect, it is not always easy to move from a supervised player role to a supervising coach position who have to make choices and ensure that they are respected.

The neo-coach can no longer communicate with his players in the same way as before. Adapting your speech is not easy, especially when it comes to communicating with former teammates.

Former players are also likely to have a very “tunnel vision” experience and therefore a not global enough understanding of the game.

However, this remains uncommon at a high level, on a game such as Overwatch, where collective strategy is essential and must be understood by all to be performed.

The last point concerns the management of a group in general. Even if one considers that player experience is an asset in the development of analytical skills, what about all the other aspects of the coaching role outlined in the previous section?

Doesn’t all this time spent practicing on the game itself lead to a delay in the development of other skills?

Some roles, such as captain or in-game leader, allow these skills to be developed in parallel, but this is not the case for all positions. Additional work at this level will, therefore, be necessary.

“How can you teach a player something if you can’t even reproduce it yourself?”

The question is whether or not it is necessary to be able to do something in order to explain it. If this were the case, the former player would naturally have an advantage on this point.

However, the question of level of game can also arise for a former player, and even more in esports where there are a multitude of different characters and roles in many forms.

Using the example of Overwatch, is a player who has only played support legitimate to coach a DPS on his play style? Almost no former player can today claim to have played all roles at a professional level.

And if you consider that your coach must necessarily be better than you mechanically to teach you things, it means that he should be on the field instead of you.

4- The experience of high level and professional world

In the end, most of the benefits of being a former player are more related to the high level experience than to intrinsic and mechanical skills as a player.

To be confronted to the highest level helps to understand the requirements of it, and the efforts needed in order to perform at this level.

Not having been a professional player does not translate into not being aware of these obligations. The high level exists in sectors that are sometimes much more elitist than esports. For my part, it is my experience in sport that has allowed me to understand the requirements of the high level, and it is common for me to mention it when I want to describe a situation to a player or when I try to put myself in his place.

Others could just as easily rely on their experience in high-responsibility sectors such as finance or medicine, for example.

5- Conclusion

“Is it mandatory to be a good player in order to be a coach?”

I started this article by stating that this question no longer exists in traditional sport. There are many examples of coaches who have marked the history of their discipline without having any past experience as a professional player.

In basketball, we could mention Gregg Popovich, emblematic coach of the Spurs and 5 times NBA champion, or Mike “Coach K” Krzyzewski, the most successful coach in the history of American university basketball and former coach of the Dream Team.

In soccer, we can note the names of Arsène Wenger, coach of Arsenal, or José Mourinho, whose practice as a player has not gone beyond the minor leagues.

Last but not least, Bill Belichick’s example. The football coach was considered as the “Weak Link” when he played at an amateur level, and just walked a little on the university grounds. That didn’t stop him from becoming the Patriots’ head coach and winning the Superbowl 5 times.

Belichick, Popovich, Wenger, they don’t even have enough game time at the pro level to allow Hqrdest to charge a graviton (and that doesn’t require much time).

It should not be forgotten that coaching is above all about adapting to the needs of the team and at a high level these needs are rarely of a mechanical nature.

Zidane did not become the coach he is today thanks to his ability to demonstrate the perfect execution of the “roulette”.

We have seen that having a past experience as a player can sometimes ease your way into coaching, but that there are also disadvantages. Whatever the past experience, and it is not a surprise, the solution always remains to work to improve weaknesses and cultivate strengths.

With that in mind, it is not mandatory, in my opinion, to have a past of a professional player to be a good coach.

The only mandatory thing is to have the required open-mindedness to learn and question yourself. If the experience of the field cannot be learned only by watching games, it can be learned by constantly exchanging with the players and accepting that they have as much to offer us as we have to do for them.

Even when we talk about individual or specific work with a player, the notion of exchange occupies a crucial place. Today, there are many tools available to illustrate and explain points. It is often from the coach’s reflection confronted with the players’ practical knowledge that the best strategies are born.

Coach’s job is not to know everything or even to be the best in all areas, but to coordinate everyone’s talents and make the most of them.

Whatever your level of play, you will constantly have to fight against a priori and it is up to you to defeat it. I will always remember a discussion with my former player Pipou (now Samsung Morning Stars Coach): 2 weeks after beginning working with the team, he came to me and confessed “When I heard about you at first I thought we will have a cheap ESL caster as coach but it only took me 2h of practice to understand that you know what you are talking about and that you will help the team”.

To conclude, I would say that it is better not to focus too much on everyone’s past experience, but more on their ability to deliver and adapt when it is necessary.

I would like to thank all the people who took the time to respond and comment on the Tweet I posted before this article (about 6800 responses), as well as all the players with whom I had the opportunity to discuss this topic.

Once again, it is only my opinion influenced by my own experience but I hope that this feature will help you to build your own.

Twitter : Féfé