A conversation with USMNT U-20 head coach Mikey Varas (Part I)

Courtesy; Top Drawer Soccer

It’s a busy rest of the year for the national team programs and the men’s U20 National Team  has the unique task of attempting to qualify not only for the U20 World Cup but also the  Olympics – a competition that the U.S. has been absent from since 2008. 

In November, 2021, Mikey Varas was named head coach of the U.S. U20 Men’s National Team. 

Varas is a native of San Francisco and played at the University of San Francisco over four  seasons. 

He coached youth soccer at De Anza Force and the Sac Republic Academy (where he was  named U.S. Soccer Development Academy West Conference Coach of the Year with the U14’s). 

After rooming with Luchi Gonzalez while taking his U.S. Soccer “A” License, he was eventually  summoned to FC Dallas where he started as head coach of the U16’s and then joined head  coach Gonzalez as a first team assistant. 

In Part 1 of my conversation with Varas, he talks about his coaching influences in Northern  California, Argentina, Italy and Spain and how that has shaped his teaching methods. And his  use of yoga, visualization and performance breathing for himself and his teams.

GC: I want to get some of your influences. I mean, you're a bit of a NorCal legend now growing up in the Bay Area. You’ve talked about Fiorentina and a Fiorentina professor. 

MV: I guess the story has to start with NorCal Premier Soccer, which was the league that was predominant when I was coaching youth down there. What I loved about the league was that its emphasis on coaching education was really, really high. They would always bring international high level international clubs, [coaches] from academies, and they would do seminars and Fiorentina came three times a year for a good 5-6 years in a row. And they taught the “Fiorentina method”, which they started implementing their own courses along the way. What I loved about the experience in NorCal, was if you’re hungry to learn and you’re willing to attend, they made it free for coaches at the time. And you could have international influence in your backyard on any given weekend. The professor at Fiorentina is a genius - I believe he's in another Serie A club now. He opened up our eyes in terms of the intentionality of working with players from a psychomotor and coordination perspective at the really young age groups. The hypothesis that they came up with was street football is disappearing - pure unsupervised activity in the streets - not even just football, [but also] climbing fences, climbing trees, exploring neighborhoods is disappearing. So there's a deficiency in terms of our fundamental motor skills. And in the young players, everything is very structured from a very young age now. And so [Fiorentina coaches] work a lot on things that you would think are not football related, [such as] dribbling a ball with your hand and dribbling the ball with your foot at the same time.The first 20 minutes of their training, it looked like a jungle gym circus out there. But it's really important for really young players who need a variety of different motor movements.

GC: Who knew climbing a fence would contribute to your ability as an athlete? But it totally makes sense.

MV: 100%. That's why there's the long way of development, which is just putting a young person in an environment with a task, and letting them figure it out, and it takes a really long time. But at the end of the day, you'll probably have a very coordinated person. And then there's the short way, which is very structured, and you try to you try to get it done in a much smaller amount of time. And it's a bit more linear. And what happens is, you have players who can do things, but maybe they're not as adaptable. And so, generations that grew up running, swimming, playing multiple sports in a unstructured manner, climbing fences, climbing trees, these people have more adaptability to their coordination abilities.

GC: What age group are you focusing your attention on these motor skills?

MV: Well, the younger the youngest age groups are the most important for the fundamental motor skill. So pre-6. But what you find is when there's a deficiency, you need to extend it up until probably 12. Then they hit puberty, and puberty messes them up. Then you stimulate it again during that period. So it's pretty much pre puberty and a little bit during puberty.

GC: Frans Hoek is someone you've also mentioned as an influence of the earliest stages of your coaching development. What did you take away from Frans?

MV: I took away clarity - clarity in terms of the structure that you need in order to be very intentional with learning. Frans brought the Dutch model of seeing football in phases, having principles within those phases, and really structuring your ideas. Before that it was like, “OK, I have this feeling of how I want the team to play; we're going to attack like this, and we're going to defend like this.” But having the structure that Frans brought - he’s been with the Netherlands, he's been with Barcelona, he's been with Manchester United - his structure and his clarity with it was really huge.

GC: We know that you prefer to have the ball on the ground. Especially with younger players, how do you make sure that your team doesn't get caught up in something that looks like in game rondos when maybe something more forward was present, and we could have attacked that earlier? Over the years, you see teams that want to keep the ball. They've got 65% possession, but what do they do with it? So how do you manage that?

MV: I think there's a misunderstanding. When you decide you want to be a football coach who has the ball on the ground, sometimes you lose a little bit the sight of the ultimate purpose, which is to score goals. The intention should always be to be vertical to score goals. An adjustment that Barcelona had a huge influence on my vision of the game was that the idea should be to play forward as often as possible. And the first place you look should be far. If somebody asked me, “what's your ideal build up when the goalkeeper has the ball?” Well, the goalkeeper picks his head up, sees the center back is on the wrong side of the 9, not paying attention. You can ping that ball and behind and your nine goes one on one with the goalkeeper and scores.

GC: 1-on-1 with the keeper is a good situation.

MV: That’s not a situation that comes up very often, so how do we how do we create principles and philosophies and habits that allow us to play through different types of pressure? The game is about scoring goals and attacking, not about having the ball more than the opponent. If having the ball more than the opponent creates a lot of meaningful scoring chances and limit the amount of scoring chances the opponent creates against you, that is the ideal setting. And that's something that I think a possession-oriented coach should be looking for. Because if you have 65%, but they have seven shots on target, all from inside the box, and you have 2, that's not a good equation.

GC: You mentioned Barcelona, I read where you studied clubs in Argentina, Italy and Spain. And I wonder if you could just share some of the things that you picked up in, in that observation, you know, just kind of hanging out, watching training sessions, whatever it was.

MV: With a friend of mine, we started a company called Football Abroad where we were going to take players to Argentina - he's played professionally in Argentina had a lot of connections there. We went to this place called Stefano, where out of contract players could get training, do scrimmages with professional teams, and they would latch back on. And they had a youth club. And this is about the moment when Messi came up at Barcelona. So Barcelona had Project Messi, which was to find the next Messi. They partnered with this facility, gave them the full curriculum, and they became Barcelona Lujan, and so we brought a team there. I spent two weeks watching our team train with them, then I spent another three weeks on my own, where I just videotaped and took notes. And we did this for about two or three years straight. The level of intensity in training was something that I had never seen or experienced. And I realized, okay, intensity as a starting point is a must - coaches should not be more tired after a game than after training. That doesn't mean they're screaming and everything. But just the amount of focus the amount of detail, the amount of energy, they have to go to get the training going the right way, but then also the players. The other thing was about details - understanding when you go into a training session, what is not only the team details that you want to get across, but little individual details that can really help a player, open their eyes to a whole full context. And I came back a totally different person and much more motivated to say, "okay, I'm really gonna go for this - but if I'm gonna go for this, I need to learn a lot."

GC: How do you bring intensity into an individual player and team that maybe has grown up with more things in their life, not worrying about expenses, maybe to the level of other parts of the world, which might be one of the reasons why they were competing so hard?

MV: The American culture is a very hard-working culture. The intensity is up to the coach - the environment that we create is either going to promote intensity or it's going to dampen the intensity. And there's a few things that we have to do as coaches. One, the training has to be enjoyable. If the training is boring, it's no longer an activity that players feel like they have a lot of control over what they're doing. When we see trainings with young players with long lines, a lot of waiting and a lot of talking from the coach and a lot of listening from the players, the coach's intensity is going to be high. But over the course of time, the players intensity is going to be just there. It’s our responsibility to make it enjoyable, make it a fluid training session, provide details at the right moment where the players recognize, "wow, what we're doing here is making me better at what at playing the sport," the intensity starts to drive itself. If the player feels like they have some autonomy, they feel like the coach cares about them. The trainings are fun, and the environment is helping them improve.

GC: You have a degree or a certification in yoga. And you've made it a point that this plays some sort of role in your philosophy. Tell us about that.

MV: There was a point in my career where I was very interested in becoming a community college professor and coach. And the idea was going to be to teach PE classes in one of those classes, I really wanted to find something that would be worthwhile teaching. I did a yoga certification, the first level, the 300 hour level, to see if this would be a good fit for me. Yoga is one of four or five things in my life that had made abrupt changes. Where you feel like you're going in a direction, and then something hits you and you, it opens a whole new dimension of your life. I've always been a motivated person, I've always been a hard worker, but I would run at a million miles an hour, and sometimes do nothing. Yoga really helped me understand the idea of letting go of things you can't control, focusing on things you can, being mindful and doing things for the sake of doing things. Coach this practice for the sake of coaching this practice - don't coach this practice because it's going to lead to your next promotion, or you're going to win that next game.

I believe strongly in working with players in performance breath and teaching them how to follow their breath - whether that's before taking a penalty kick or before a game or visualization techniques. I don't spend a lot of time with this stretching and pose aspect with players, I leave that to players who want to want to explore that on their own. I'll ask players, "Why are we working so hard?" And a lot of times the players will say, okay, "because I want to be a pro." What happens when you finally become a pro? Are you gonna stop working hard? No. We do our best all the time because we enjoy doing the best on all of our time, you know, and the consequences or the rewards, they come. I was still coaching very young age groups at an amateur club at that time, I said, “I'm going to be the best U12 soccer coach there.” I had no thought of where life was gonna take me. Five years later, I'm coaching as an assistant on a first team level. So it helped shape me a lot. But I've also tried to help ingrain that and in the teams that I that I'm fortunate enough to lead.

GC: A player I coached, Carli Lloyd, missed a penalty in a World Cup final [in 2011]. A few years later when she had a chance in the next World Cup in the semifinals against Germany. She took this deep breath, and then converted the penalty. She admitted that she was thinking about the 2011 miss, but that deep breath helped relax her. Is that a performance breath for you?

MV: Yeah. There's a lot of now a lot of research coming out on performance breath. If you watch NBA basketball players when they take free throws, it's the same idea; you see them taking these big diaphragmatic breaths. It's no guarantee you're gonna make it. But it helps you control of the situation, and then things slow down for a second. Even as a coach, I practice this a lot before games. Just to remember, like, “this is beautiful, where I am right now.” I need to recognize where I'm standing, take these deep breaths, and then be as clear as possible for the players.