Since joining the Lindfield coaching set-up in 2000, Danny Hurwitz has overseen a remarkable growth in player and coach development.
“When I first arrived at the club, we had only four accredited coaches,” Danny explains.
“All of the other coaches were simply volunteers, parents who had landed in the role without much experience.”
“We’ve now reached a point where we have a pool of 40 or 50 coaches across our teams.”
Danny has been the Director of Coaching at Lindfield since 2010, and has created a focus on encouraging players within the club to get into coaching at a young age.
“We’ve really focused on getting the players between 16 and 24 to get involved with coaching,” Danny says.
“It offers them a source of income while they are at school and university, and starts to build a culture where a player is involved with a club for life once they hang up their boots.”
“If you look at clubs in Europe like Barcelona and Bayer Leverkusen, they have a history of bringing players through as coaches or administrators in the club, that’s what we’d like to emulate.”
Having started coaching as a 16-year-old with long-time mentor Rob Forrai, Danny’s passion for coaching has been the driving force behind his work at Lindfield.
“I’ve always been passionate about the game, but once I got into coaching I knew it was made for me,” he says.
“I’ve always wanted to give these young coaches the chance to find the same joy and passion that I’ve gotten through coaching.”
The key goal of Danny’s work is to create an internal system of succession within the club.
“We have a large majority of our First Grade players coaching within the club, and from providing we hope to get the players that they have worked with to become interested in coaching,” he says.
“Once those players get into coaching, hopefully the have a similar effect on their players and so on.”
“We have developed a large pool of coaches now, but we still have 30 to 40 teams without one, so there’s still room to grow yet.”
Local Legends is our new segment for bringing you football stories from the northern suburbs region.
This week we spoke to Danny Hurwitz, Director of Coaching at Lindfield FC.
If you have a story at your club you think is worth sharing, please email nick.amies@nsfa.asn.au