The power of a team according to Jeroen Delmee

He still has to make an appearance at The Hockey Site and we’re hoping to make that work soon, but Jeroen Delmee, head coach of the Dutch men, did talk recently on the podcast “The Great Coaches” with Paul Barnett.

Listen to it here on Spotify:

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Ask Jeroen Delmee what turned the Netherlands back into Olympic champions, and he won't reach for a name. He reaches for the group. "I really believe in the power of the team," he says, "and I choose for that." Six words, but almost everything he did as a head coach flows out of them.

Here is how far that belief goes. Heading into Paris, he left the top scorer of the Dutch Hockey League at home. "I kept the top scorer of the Dutch Hockey League at home. I left the best player of the Hockey League at home, because I think without them, I had a better and stronger team." Read that again as a coach and feel how uncomfortable it is. The leading goalscorer in the country, watching from the sofa, because the team was stronger without him.

His verdict on the difference between two Olympic cycles is just as blunt:

For Jeroen Delmee, that gap between "better players" and "better team" is the whole job.

In this piece I want to walk through how he thinks about that, in his own words, and then pull out three things you can take straight onto your own pitch this week, whatever level you coach.

Delmee has shared dressing rooms and touchlines with some of the most respected names in the game. So when he is asked what separates the genuinely great coaches, his answer is worth slowing down for. It isn't tactics.

That is a quietly demanding standard. Plenty of coaches are strong on one thing, he points out, tactically sharp, or good at team building. The ones who endure are the ones who get the connection right. Selflessness, standing behind the group rather than in front of it, is the thread that runs through all of it.

You can hear his own story in this. He grew up in a hockey family, in a village where "the hockey club was the place to go in the weekends." He is the first Dutchman to win gold as both a player and a coach, so he has watched the culture of teams shift across decades. The biggest change he notices is the flattening of hierarchy. "When I started, I was the young guy and I had to pick up all the balls and I had to collect all the bibs after the training session. And there was a real hierarchy in every team." Now? "The whole hierarchy is just almost flat. Everyone wants to get involved. Everyone wants to have input." The captain who simply decides for everyone has gone. For Delmee, that means clarity has to be built differently than it used to be, but it still has to be built.

When he took the Dutch job in 2021, he started not with drills but with conversations. He spoke to everyone who had been to the Tokyo Olympics, and he listened for one thing. "What I was missing in those talks was the 100% commitment and the team cohesion."

His line on that is one worth taping to the dressing room wall:

So he made the hard call. To build a new culture, he decided the old one had to come down first, which meant moving established names aside. "I had to break down the old culture, and to do that I first wanted those old players out of the team, because then it's easier to build a new culture. So we put some players on hold." Of all the big names parked in what he calls "the waiting room," only one came back. The rest stayed on the sideline, because, once again, he believes in the power of the team.

Here is where Jeroen Delmee gets really interesting for coaches, because he is honest about something a lot of us hide. He doubts. Constantly.

Far from treating doubt as a weakness, he treats it as a tool. "Before I make the decision, I hope I have thought about all the possible scenarios."

He tells a lovely story about the week before a major selection. He and his assistant are in the car, going back and forth. "One day he said, I think I go for player A, and he says, yeah, but I think player B. Two days later in the car, they said, yeah, maybe you're right, I go for player B. And then he says, yeah, but I'm now going to play A." That churn isn't indecision, in his mind. It is the price of getting it right. "You in the end make the right decision, that you really have thought about everything, and not just an at random decision."

And the doubt feeds something he prizes even more: transparency. Because he has wrestled with every angle, he can explain himself. "The transparency you need as a coach is really important." He kept talking to the players he had left out, even while they were on hold, "because I don't like fooling them. So they know exactly where they were and in what situation." He went further still, talking to their club coaches "so everyone knew exactly the position of every player at every moment." It helped that results came quickly, and he is wry about that too: "As long as you're winning, you've got a lot of friends."

So how do you turn all of this into something practical? Here are the three I would pull out for working coaches.