at the current session
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As many as 20 of the 32 teams in the World Cup intra-conference tournament have men as head coaches. This phenomenon reflects the fact that behind the scenes in both male and female professional sports, it is still a male-dominated world, with female athletes
demobilize
Later it is harder to become a team coach, there are fewer resources, and abilities are more easily questioned, all of which also remain real gender issues on the soccer field.
But are male head coaches really any better at coaching?Well...the question itself is hard to measure, but at least in the case of the
women's soccer
international tournaments, here's a surprising fact: in addition to leading Japan in 2011
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Outside of Norio Sasaki, who won the World Cup, the last 23 years have seen him win the
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It's amazing that the coaches of the three major tournament champions are all women! And that includes a female coach who is holding hostage coaching the
the national team
With a staggering 95% win rate in major tournaments, the team is on the verge of winning the World Cup. She is England.
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of head coach Sarina Wiegman.
" "There were no girls' teams then, so I made sure my hair was cut really short and played in teams with my twin brother. " "There were no girls' teams then, so I made sure my hair was cut really short and played in teams with my twin brother."" (Sarina Wiegman, Coaches Voice 2018, via Sky Sports report.)
Sarina Wiegman was born in 1969 and grew up near The Hague in the Netherlands. She grew up playing soccer on the streets, but in those days there was no neighborhood near where she lived
women's soccer
The team was available, so she had to disguise herself as a boy and play soccer with her twin brother at the ESDO club in Wassenaar, Holland. While many girls gave up playing soccer due to parental and public disapproval at the time, Wiegman made up her mind early on and, with the support of her open-minded parents, took her soccer career off the streets.
After she joined her first
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Soon after her team HSV Celeritas, she received the Netherlands at age 16
the national team
and in 2001 became a member of the Netherlands
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First reached
the national team
100 appearances.Wiegman's amazing international career as a player was actually helped by the fact that around the 1990s
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International tournaments begin to take shape. The UEFA European Competition for Representative Women's Teams was transformed into the UEFA Women's Euro in 1991 and the number of participating teams was gradually increased.
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The World Cup has also been organized since 1991, while the Olympic Games have only been established since the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
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Project.
World Cup,
European championship
and the Olympics can be called
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The most important international tournaments have only been around for about thirty years. But when there are international tournaments, they provide a stage for talented players to shine and an opportunity to make a career. In Wiegman's case, she met Anson Dorrance, then coach of the U.S. team, at an international tournament in China and was invited to join the NCAA system in 1989.
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The team, the North Carolina Tar Heels, and this year's exchange completely upended her past mentality of playing soccer.
"In the past in Holland, I always felt that I was different from all the other girls. I wanted to play soccer every day and was considered overzealous." Wiegman said, "But when I came to North Carolina, it was like a haven for young girls to play soccer."
The American system of college athletics put it ahead of Europe at the time, with a more robust environment to develop
women's soccer
A year later, Wiegman returned to Holland. A year later, Wiegman returned to the Netherlands, only to be disappointed to find that Europe's
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The situation did not improve much. She had to continue her education while playing soccer and graduated as a physical education teacher, unable to even imagine the prospect of teaching soccer alone. But Wiegman continued to work part-time as a gym teacher throughout her playing career and early coaching career, while trying to make a living as a soccer coach for
women's soccer
development efforts.
"I knew I couldn't do it alone, but I wanted to make a difference in the parts of the sport I could control. We needed facilities to train every day, good programs, and great coaches. 20 years later, we finally have that system in place." When I was young, women didn't have any opportunities to coach," Wiegman said. But as I grew up, my skills improved and I had more opportunities." It may also belong to her generation that many
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Portrait of a playing career.
