On Friday morning, I enter Zoom to meet with Joost Dijkstra, head of the Educational Development and Policy cluster. With the weekend ahead, I ask him what he likes to do in his free time.
“I started playing badminton 2 years ago but I’m so bad at it that after 2 hours I’m completely exhausted,” Joost says. He started salsa dancing about one and a half years ago and he is “good at it in a Dutch way. I know the dance steps but look a bit stiff.”
His ultimate hobby then? Being a soccer coach to his son’s soccer team.
Joost started out as soccer coach about 25 years ago. “But at some point it costs a lot more time than you actually have at hands, so then you decide to quit until you have a kid who likes to play soccer itself”. And that took a while. Joost has three sons of 14, 11 and 7. “The first two showed no interest in soccer whatsoever. Whereas some people would go for a third to finally get a girl, we went for a third to get one who would like to play soccer,” Joost jokingly explains. He loves coaching his son’s soccer team. “They’re 11 boys, 10 of whom are in the same class in school, they go to each other’s birthday parties. It’s just so nice to see how close they all are.”
The key to a successful youth soccer team? “First of all, kids need to have fun when playing soccer. And of course you have most fun when you score a lot of goals and win a lot of matches, but fun also means that when you lose you are not sad because you enjoyed playing the game.” And luckily, the kids have loads of fun. Sometimes a little bit too much fun. “They’re seven years old and just upgraded from the kiddy-size soccer field and goals to the youth-size field and goals in which the keepers look extra small. But still, sometimes what they talk about is everything except soccer. Then it’s better to ask at the beginning of soccer practice ‘who has something to share with us?’, because kids sometimes just need to get news out of their system, such as that they got new shoelaces for their soccer shoes.”
With the corona pandemic ongoing, parents are not allowed anymore to watch their children’s soccer practice or match. To make sure the parents still get an idea of how the soccer match went, Joost started writing match reports. He covers who scored a goal, who gave a brilliant pass, who had a nice opportunity to score but in the end did not, and so on. “In a way this is also nice because I can make it all look a bit more exciting because there is no one there to correct me. So I can make that one goal sound a bit more spectacular, and that one missed opportunity to score a tad more dramatic.”
Another advantage of the corona rules according to Joost is that parents cannot get involved in the match and give their unsolicited opinion anymore. “Don’t get me wrong, most parents are involved in a great way and we value them for tying shoelaces, driving the kids to games and for fetching drinks, but I think we should have a sign on the soccer field which you see elsewhere: ‘spectators who coach the players will be assigned as soccer coach of a youth team as of Monday’. That sign would be hilarious and partly simply necessary.”
Of course Joost hopes to be able to welcome parents to the soccer field again soon, but until then, he and his two co-coaches will make sure the players perform well.
