USA Team Handball’s Strategic Planning is listing to the side; It’s time to right the ship.

The previous parts of this series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) raised some questions in regards to USA Team Handball’s plans to establish residency programs and full time coaches.  This installment sets aside the plan itself and takes a look at the planning and decision making processes that were used to develop it.  And finally some suggested actions going forward.

It’s easy to critique a plan

As I’ve spent the last several parts of this series highlighting some shortcomings with USA Team Handball’s plans for its National Teams I think it’s appropriate that I also acknowledge the basic truism that it’s relatively easy to sit on the sidelines and critique a plan.  This is especially true when the plan is tackling a difficult problem or objective.  And trust me, as someone who’s thought quite a bit about what could be done to improve the quality of our National Teams we’re talking about an incredible challenge.  Just about any plan could be picked apart by naysayers.

It’s not so easy to critique a plan developed through a structured process.

But, maybe the plan that’s been developed, while flawed is still the best plan that could be conceived.  A plan that was first compared with other options and possibilities and stood out as the best option to pursue; A plan fraught with risks, but one that still makes sense to pursue; A plan that’s designed to meet the clearly articulated goals and objectives of the organization.  When confronted with a plan that maps everything out, the critic can’t help but see the rationale for the course of action chosen.

What I’m alluding to here is Strategic Planning.  This Wikipedia article provides an overview, but in simple terms, Strategic Planning can be described as the process of figuring out what you want to do before you go off and do it.  It involves determining your goals and objectives and then assessing the feasibility of different options (tactical plans, if you will) to achieve those goals and objectives.

While this seems like an inherently obvious first step all too often it’s given short shrift by many organizations.  This happens for a number of reasons.  Sometimes organizations think they already know exactly what they are trying to accomplish.  And, all too often it’s human nature to want to work on the solutions because it’s more concrete and tangible.

USA Team Handball’s Goals and Objectives: Do they exist?

Let’s first consider the possibility that it’s readily clear what USA Team Handball is trying to accomplish.  At first blush, it’s pretty clear.  Take a look at the Federation mission statement:

The mission of USA Team Handball shall be to develop, promote, educate and grow the sport of Team Handball at all levels in the United States and to enable United States athletes to achieve sustained competitive excellence to win medals in international and Olympic competition.

Just about anyone involved with the sport in the U.S. will agree with these very broad goals.  But, if you start to break that one sentence down piece by piece consensus will quickly disappear.  For instance, which is more important developing and promoting the sport at all levels or enabling athletes to win medals?  Which part gets more resources/funding? What’s the timing involved?  What are the lower level goals objectives?  etc., etc.  To the best of my knowledge USA Team Handball has never clearly identified lower level goals and objectives and their priority.  Perhaps it’s been done at some point in the past, but I’ve never seen that sort of documentation.  Instead, best that I can tell USA Team Handball has always made a beeline to implementing initiatives, activities, action plans (whatever you want to call the different things that have been tried), without spending enough time assessing whether those efforts make sense in the grand scheme of things.

This is not to intimate that those efforts were a total waste of time and resources.  On the contrary, very few efforts had no value and if even if there were negligible results there usually was some rationale for trying.  The question, however, is not whether an effort has value.  The questions instead are how well does that effort map to goals and objectives and how does that effort fair in terms of “bang for buck” against other competing efforts.  Because rest assured when the Federation makes an announcement that there is “no funding in the budget” for a National Team trip what it’s really stating is that other budget items were assessed as a higher priority.

Or, at least one hopes that such a comparative assessment was done.  The troubling reality is, however, it can’t really be done without something to “grade” the effort or plans to.  Without clear goals and objectives you’re flying by the seat of your pants.  Deciding what efforts to pursue becomes largely intuition or even worse a yes/no on the first plans presented without an in depth exploration of other possibilities.

The way ahead for U.S. National Teams:  Numerous possibilities

As a case in point, I’ll just list out some possibilities that could be considered for U.S. National Teams and player development.  I won’t go into great detail.  That’s not the point.  The point is to just show the varying options:

– Establish regional Centers of Excellence
– Establish a European based training center in collaboration with the IHF and other developing nations
– Provide stipends for overseas training with clubs to the nation’s top 30 players
– Provide funding to 10 U.S. based clubs to support player identification and training
– Designate one metropolitan area in the U.S. for Elite competition and apply funding to make it happen
– Identify national team coaches for an extended period of time, but pay them only part time wages
– Hire a full time recruiting coordinator and have them focus on expanding the player pool at ages 18-22
– Hire a full time youth development coordinator and have them focus on developing a model program in one U.S. metropolitan area
– Work with a designated school district to implement a sanctioned High School Team Handball League to serve as a model for other school districts.
– Work with the NCAA to identify one Division 1 conference to support a Team Handball League
– Conduct a 10 day U.S. Olympic Festival style training camp for 120 elite NCAA athletes.
– Sharply curtail current expenditure on U.S. Senior teams and focus entirely on Under 21 development in hopes of improving odds for 2020 qualification
– Sharply curtail Men’s National Team funding and focus on the brighter prospects (weaker competition/Title IX) for Women’s team development .
– Sharply curtail funding and resources related to adult club teams and focus efforts on college and youth teams.  (i.e., Don’t waste time organizing competition and national championships for predominantly Expat players or athletes over the ages of 25)

Could I, or anyone for that matter, poke holes in regards to the merits of any one of these possibilities?  Of course.  But, I could also make a case for any one of these to be the best course of action. Yep. The reality is that depending on how you interpret the Federation’s Mission Statement, you can make the case for or against any one of these possibilities.

Right Idea

To the credit of former Board Chairman, Jeff Utz, and Interim General Manager, Dave Gascon, they recognized this problem and set in motion some plans to fix it.  In April of 2012 they organized a Strategic Planning Conference that was attended by around 25 individuals (Board members, USOC Reps, and assorted members of the Team Handball community at large).  As someone who’s done Strategic Planning for a living and has recognized this problem for years I’ll say that the conference was a good start to solving this problem.  The second day devolved way too quickly into the implementation of potential solutions, but again it’s human nature to want to work on something tangible.  The good news, from my perspective at the time was that the work would continue via committees that would focus on specific topical areas.  Here’s an interview with then Chairman Jeff Utz discussing the conference and here’s a list of the committees that were set up.  (Editor’s note:  8 of the 10 committees that were established after the 2012 conference were removed without explanation from the Federation committees webpage sometime in 2013. This Federation news item from June 2012 lists the 10 committees and solicits additional volunteers.)

Flawed Execution

Following the conference, however, for reasons that are still unclear to me the work of the committees towards a Strategic Plan was stopped.  The committees were asked to send their ideas for implementation and then lacking further guidance and direction they essentially ceased to function.  At least this was the case for the 3 committees I was on:  High Performance, Pipeline Development and Event Management.  While I might have thought that the High Performance and Pipeline Development committees would be involved in reviewing the merits of different efforts for Board of Director consideration that simply was not the case.

Instead, several months later I read the following in this posting on the Federation webpage:

“Garcia-Cuesta and Latulippe, as volunteers, as well as Gascon, and Technical Director Mariusz Wartalowicz, have collectively developed a long-term strategy for the development of the USATH High Performance Program which focuses on the recruitment, training, development, and elevating the stature of our National Teams.”

Is it lost on anyone that two former National Team coaches that coached U.S. Residency teams were part in parcel to the development of a strategy that calls for hiring National Team coaches and establishes residency teams?  Strikingly, this reminds me quite a bit of the Vice-Presidential Selection Committee that Dick Cheney conducted for George Bush.

Setting all sarcasm aside, however, it’s really not that surprising that they went with what they know and one would hope, anyway, an improved version of what they know adapted to current realities.  And for all I know those four gentlemen might actually have spent countless hours reviewing dozens of possibilities, carefully analyzing their pros and cons and presented a full up report consisting of multiple options for the Board’s consideration.  (i.e., the kind of work a High Performance or Pipeline Development committee might do).  If such work was done though, it would be nice to read it.

And, as an aside, I should point that National Team plans is just one piece of the puzzle.  An important piece, but just one piece.  Plans for grass roots development, marketing and fundraising, for example, to the best of my knowledge haven’t been developed at all.

Time to Right the Ship

I think in this series I’ve made some fairly compelling arguments that call into question USA Team Handball’s National Team Plans.  In the end, though, it’s really not about who’s right and who’s wrong.  Nobody’s keeping score and we really all are on the same team.

But, in order to get everyone on the same page and rowing together I would suggest a couple of actions to right the ship:

1. Develop a true strategic plan that clearly identifies some top level goals and objectives for USA Team Handball.   Prioritize those goals and objectives, develop potential options for implementation, then evaluate and select those options for implementation.  Develop those plans and options collectively using the USA Team Handball Staff, Board, Committees and anyone else in the USA Team Handball Community that wants to participate.
2. Do 1) above transparently with the posting of strategic plans, board decisions on evaluation/selections and budget actions on the Federation website.

And it should be pointed that such fixes shouldn’t be too hard to implement.  It’s acknowledged by many that we need a Strategic Plan, the committees are in place and that transparency is important.  All USA Team Handball needs to do is finished what it started.

Team USA’s Head Coaches (Javier Garcia Cuesta and Christian Latulippe): Did it make sense for the cash strapped Federation to hire 2 full time coaches at this point in time?

Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 focused on National Team Residency Programs and whether the time was right for USA Team Handball to start these programs.  This installment addresses the related questions of whether we need full time head coaches and if we do, whether the recent hires have the right skill sets to meet USA Team Handball’s current needs.

What does a national team coach do anyway?

Before I tackle the question of whether it’s the right time to hire full time head coaches for the U.S. National Teams I’ll first try to identify the roles and responsibilities of a national team coach and some semantics in regards to what it means to be full time.  In many respects being a national team coach is like being a coach for any team.  You train players, conduct practices, scout opposing teams and make coaching decisions during a match.  Where being a national team coach is different from being a club coach is that the actual periods of competition are fairly limited and in many nations players are attached to their clubs most of the time.  Accordingly, actual coaching consists of periods of intense activity and periods of relative inactivity.  We could argue about how just inactive the slow time between competitions is, but without a doubt there’s less to do when a coach doesn’t have players to train and matches to prepare for.

Because of these realities National Federations have come up with several different models of employment for their National Team Coaches.  Here’s a short summary of the most common models of employment:

1. The part time coach (with full time employment elsewhere):  Rather than pay a coach to sit around and do nothing most of the year, many nations choose to have a part time coach that spends the bulk of their time working for someone else.  This is currently the most common model use with the national team coach often also being the coach of a club team.
2. The part time coach (with other Federation responsibilities):  Some nations expand the job jar of the national team coach to include other responsibilities that might be related to coaching (e.g., Technical Director), but aren’t coaching per se.  It’s also somewhat a semantic distinction; the individual is a full time employee, they just aren’t a full time coach.
3. The full time coach:  Some nations prefer to have their coaches fully engaged with their national teams year round.  They recognize that there’s quite a bit of down time, but they don’t want their coaches distracted.  I haven’t personally seen the day to day itinerary of these coaches, but they apparently spend quite a bit of their time attending club matches to keep tabs on their players.
4. The full time coach (with a developmental team to train):  Some nations actually do have players that are available for training almost year round- the U.S. when it had Residency Programs, for example.  With players to train on a daily basis a full time coach is pretty much a necessity.

What employment model is right USA Team Handball?

In recent years, USA Team Handball has gone with a revolving door of part time coaches being selected in conjunction with qualification tournaments.  And when the U.S. had Residency Programs, full time coaches were hired to run the programs.  But, setting aside history what makes sense right now for USA Team Handball?

Well, first off let’s clearly establish that at this point in time it makes little sense for the U.S. to hire full time coaches.  The U.S. cannot afford the luxury of having someone 100% focused on its National Teams (model 3) and it also does not have Residency Programs in place (model 4) that would necessitate a full time coach.  So unless USA Team Handball can find coaches willing to work for pauper’s wages part time coaches will be the reality.

The part time coach (with full time employment elsewhere) certainly has its limitations.  It can be challenging for a fully resourced coach in Europe to take professional athletes and organize them into a cohesive and competitive team in a short period of time.  To expect a marginally resourced coach with amateur athletes to do the equivalent is asking quite a bit.  Certainly, the U.S. National Team results in recent years haven’t been very good.  I would argue, however, that poor results in recent years have had little to do with the coaches being part time.  Instead the poor results are more related to the quality of our players and other systemic problems related to a very thin talent pool.  As further proof, it should be noted that the U.S. has also piled up quite a few losses against other developing nations with part time coaches.

The part time coach (with other Federation responsibilities), could be a beneficial arrangement, particularly if that coach is also well suited for “other responsibilities.”  In effect, such an arrangement becomes a great “two for one” deal.  During the “down time” the coach can spend the bulk of his time taking on other tasks and still remain engaged with National Team related responsibilities.  Then when competition and training camps ramp up the coach can smoothly shift their focus to the National Team without the start/stop problems that a coach employed elsewhere has to deal with.

But, this only makes sense if the coach is well suited for the other responsibilities.  Otherwise it can become a “half for one” deal.  In other words, the Federation gets a part time coach for the cost of a full time employee.  And even worse, that part time value of “half” might not be the right fraction.  If the Federation has a lot of tasks that are not coaching related and the employee keeps finding ways to work on coaching related tasks that they are more interested in doing the Federation might even end up getting a 1/3 or 1/4th deal.

The recent USA Team Handball hires:  Huh?

With funding in short supply I would argue that it would probably make sense in the near term to stay with part time coaches that still receive the bulk of their employment income elsewhere.  There’s just too many other things that the Federation could fund or focus its efforts on.  But, perhaps if the right multi-talented candidates can be found a case could be made to hire them as full time employees to take on coaching and other responsibilities.  As this is apparently, what USA Team Handball has decided to do so here’s a look at the “High Performance Coaches” and whether they are a good fit.

Coach Javier Garcia Cuestas: The perfect coach to run a Residency Program; If only we had one

If one looks at USA Men’s National Team Coach Javier Garcia Cuesta’s career resume one cannot help but be impressed.  Not only is he arguably the most successful National Team coach in U.S. history, he’s also turned around programs in Egypt and Portugal.  He was never my coach, but I’ve heard dozens of friends and former players speak highly of him and his ability to understand the psyche of the American athlete.  Give him the talented raw athletes and the resources and he’s proven that he can assemble a competitive team.  If USA Team Handball starts up a fully resourced Residency Program similar to the one that was at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, he should be the first coach interviewed to head that program.

Problem is, of course, we don’t have a Residency Program in place, it’s not certain when it will start and it’s doubtful that it will be resourced as well as the program Coach Garcia ran so well in the 1980’s.  Taking this reality into account in then becomes a question as to whether Coach Garcia is the right hire to take on the “other responsibilities.”  As anyone who’s followed or been involved with Team Handball in the U.S. knows there is no shortage of things needed to be done to further advance the sport in this country.  I haven’t seen the list of responsibilities in his contract, but the hiring announcement does indicate that Coach Garcia as well as Coach Latulippe participated in the development of a long term strategy focused on the “recruitment, training, development, and elevating the stature of our National Teams.”  A follow up email from CEO Matt Van Houten further indicated that he would be “focusing his efforts on collaborating with the USOC Coaching Education department to develop several different projects for athlete identification and coaching education” and that he would “also be conducting athlete identification clinics focusing on bringing in new talent.”

These are certainly logical areas that need to be addressed by the Federation and it doesn’t take much investigation to determine that the U.S. is really lacking in the recruiting department.  This problem can be attacked in a number of different ways either through short term fixes, (primarily through cross over athlete identification) or through the slower development of grass roots program.  (This article provides a top level overview of issues related to recruitment/development.)

What’s highly debatable, however, is whether there is anything in Coach Garcia’s background that suggests he has the right skill set to take on recruiting challenges in the U.S.  Don’t get me wrong; give him the players with the raw talent and I’m sure he can evaluate their potential and develop them fairly quickly into decent Handball players.  He’s a proven quantity in those areas.

But, asking a Spanish National to navigate the American sporting culture and develop an effective recruiting strategy?  That’s a tough ask and this huge challenge might actually even suggest someone with a strong understanding of the U.S. sporting landscape and only a minimal knowledge of Team Handball.

This skepticism doesn’t mean that Coach Garcia can’t become the recruiter extraordinaire.  Just that I don’t see that as his strong suit.  From the outside looking in, I can only think why didn’t USA Team Handball just wait and consider hiring this outstanding coach when it would truly need him.

Coach Christian Latulippe:  How bad a record do you have to have in order not to get a 2nd chance?

Unlike with Coach Garcia there are some very pronounced question marks with Coach Latulippe’s record as a coach.  In particular, his stint as the USA Women’s coach from 2004-07 was downright dismal.  They were routinely beaten by many other developing programs in the Pan American Federation and couldn’t even win the Quebec Women’s club league.  Depending on your perspective Coach Latulippe was either fired or resigned his position under a cloud right before a second chance qualification tournament for 2007 PANAM Games.

Following this departure Coach Latulippe got some experience as an assistant and head coach for several women’s club teams in France.  But, again the record here is mixed.  Coach Latulippe’s current club, le Pouzin is leading its pool in Division N2 with a 16-2-1 record.  All well and good, but he left his previous club, La Motte Servolex, before the end of the season.  A season in which La Motte Servolex ended up with a record of 3-22-1 and resulted in their relegation from D2 to N1.  Further, it should be noted that the two clubs are on significantly different levels as N2 is down two levels from the more prestigious and professional D2.  Or to put it another way, there are 48 coaching positions in France above N2 and 48 coaching positions at N2.  To be sure fully assessing the coach’s culpability in club performance is an inexact science especially when your research consists of club records and a few articles on the internet.  Still looking at these results they are nothing to write home about.

There’s also no denying that Coach Latulippe’s program at Cortland was a shoe string operation and he deserves credit for holding it together.  Still, results are results.  It’s not credible to look back at the Cortland years and state anything along the lines of “Look at what he accomplished with negligible resources; Imagine what he could do with a real program.”  Instead, there’s almost nothing to show for.

And, on top of all this poor W-L record there is still no Residency Program in place so the issues highlighted with Coach Garcia also apply to Coach Latulippe.  Further, if one looks at the recruiting that took place during his years at Cortland it should be noted that very few high caliber players were identified.  So, there’s even hard evidence to suggest that recruiting is not Coach Latulippe’s strong suit.

Does all this mean that the 2nd time around can’t be different?  No it doesn’t; and on the plus side Coach Latulippe surely has some ideas on what needs to be corrected.  Still, one has to wonder at what point does such a poor record preclude the opportunity to get a 2nd chance?

Which leads to the next part of this series; Just how exactly did USA Team Handball make the determination that residency programs were the best course of action, that the time was right to start them and apparently hire coaches to run them? Part 6