– You need a crazy person for that, and a crazy person was found.
That’s what Jonne Virtanen commented when he was hired as the head coach of Mikkeli’s Jukurien SM league team.
Those who follow the men’s main league in ice hockey get to know Virtanen well as a player. “Monsterimon” became a professional hockey player against all odds. Virtanen was clumsy and bad at skating, so he relied on his fists at first.
Virtanen’s first nickname was “Teurastaja”. The player’s career took a new direction when Risto Dufva took Virtanen into the ranks of JYP. In the end, Virtanen played a total of 626 SM league regular season matches and won the Finnish championship.
If you look at the new coaching staff from Jonne Virtanen’s point of view, it looks pretty good. Virtanen gets to where he wanted to go: in the SM league to coach. It must be a dream come true for him. Few hockey coaches ever reach the league level, even for a short time.
But when you look at Virtanen’s recruitment to Mikkeli in a broader perspective, something completely different is revealed.
First, bad sports management is revealed. Finnish ice hockey has gotten used to it over the years.
Hiring a completely inexperienced coach at the league level at this stage of the season is a catastrophically bad decision on the part of the Jukurs. What can Virtanen bring to the team in a few weeks?
Would a person with no work experience be hired as the director of a large company on the verge of bankruptcy?
There is less than a third of the league season left. If a miracle doesn’t happen, Jukurie’s place is cemented at the bottom of the series. In Mikkeli, we are waiting for a series of matches, where the team that finished last in the SM league will meet the second last.
The loser of that pair plays for the league position against the winner of Mestis.
Jukurie’s development manager Mikko Hakkarainen justified Virtanen’s hiring in the club’s press release as follows:
– We want change and we know Jonne can bring it to our everyday life. With his own expertise and charisma, Jonne brings posture movement to training and playing.
What is “Jonne’s own expertise”? Virtanen has coached Tutoa Mestis for more than a season and a half, with little success. Before that, he coached one season in the Finnish series, where the coach’s biggest concern is whether enough players can be brought to the match.
We know what Virtanen’s skills were as a player. Hairing, grating, creating spirit, sometimes fighting. As stated, he managed to play a confusingly long and successful career considering his starting points.
But that doesn’t say anything about Virtase as a coach. For a season and a half, Mestis doesn’t accumulate “own know-how”, at least not the kind that could help the players of a team in a desperate situation.
Hakkarainen said that he also trusted Virtanen’s charisma. That’s probably where you’ll find the “posture movement for training and playing”.
What is coaching?
If Finland had listened to the coaching legend decades or even a few years ago Alpo Suhonen thoughts, the pool world in Härmä would be different.
But when we didn’t listen, we have to go back to the basic questions again and again in order to understand even a little bit what the whole fuss is about. Or should be.
What is coaching?
At all times, coaching is not nagging, beating the players or giving orders.
Coaching is primarily management. And good leadership is, among other things, guiding, listening, supporting and helping. Emotions are allowed to run wild in a profession of passion, if you feel like it, but no good leader is guilty of low-style behavior towards his subordinates. Not even in hockey.
Unfortunately, based on what I’ve heard – and partly also according to his own words – Virtanen’s coaching has relied on something completely different from the above-mentioned theses of good management.
I don’t know how Virtanen plans to coach Jukurei now. But I hope it doesn’t include yelling, teasing the players and everything that was commonplace in many football teams at the beginning of the millennium. That is, when Virtase became a league player.
It is not Jonne Virtanen’s fault that he was made a league coach in one day. It’s the fault of the Jukurs. And at the same time, recruitment tells a harsh language about what coaching is thought to be.
You don’t need a crazy person to be a coach. A coach needs a person who has the ability to lead and help players.
Watch the latest episode of Paasi ja Nättinen: 5 minutas series. The standard sounds of the hockey round include the expert Top Nättinen and editor Jussi Paasi once a week, talk about the SM league in five minutes.