Understanding Jesse Marsch: Princeton, eye contact and a willingness to be vulnerable - The Athletic 8/4/22


By Phil Hay

In his second week at Leeds United, Jesse Marsch’s wife Kim joined him in England. After that, it did not take long for Mitch Henderson to get the call. Come for a visit, Marsch told him. Come and see what we’re stepping into: the city, the club, the religion of Leeds.

Henderson accepted the invitation and flew over from the States for a few days last week, dipping his toe into Marsch’s new world. Marsch’s job as head coach at Leeds was already all-hours but he and Henderson have been close friends for 20 years and they make a habit of meeting wherever Marsch pops up on the footballing map.

“It’s their third foreign country in however many years,” Henderson says. “When Jesse was at Salzburg and Leipzig, I tried to follow him along the way. He and Kim, they’re searching for another life again but they wanted me to go check it out with them.”

A walk through town took Marsch and Henderson by the train station. “We were going past it when this guy shouts, ‘Oi, Jesse Marsch!’,” Henderson says. “That gave me a little experience of what life’s going to be like for him over there. From what I observed of Leeds, me at a distance, there was a friendliness to it. It’s got a working-class feel, I think. That’ll be good for him. He’ll thrive in that environment.”

There are people out there more equipped to speak about Marsch’s tactical and technical brain but Henderson, a coach of many years’ standing in the US college basketball system, is as well placed as anyone to talk about Marsch’s character. They are products of the same university, now in their mid-forties, and they got to know each other inside out after developing a friendship while Marsch was playing professionally for Chicago Fire in the early 2000s. A short drive up the road in Evanston, Henderson was embarking on his first role in coaching.

“It was apparent to everyone around him that Jesse would be a coach,” Henderson says. “We talked a lot about that together when he retired, his path and my path. He had the mind for it. It was going to happen eventually. I think to myself now, I’ve got a friend who’s a coach in the Premier League. How cool is that? I’m so damn proud of him. And I don’t worry about him at all.”

Henderson is up early on the west coast of America, very happy to talk and with time to spare at the end of Princeton University’s basketball season. He studied at Princeton around the same time as Marsch, back in the 1990s, and he has run their basketball team since 2011, immersed in the US’s enormous college scene. He has an interesting background too. As a basketball player, he trained with the Atlanta Hawks without making it to the NBA as a professional. Before going to university, he was drafted by the New York Yankees, dangling the faint chance of a baseball career in front of him.

“I got drafted in 1994 but it was in the later rounds,” he says. “I got a phone call from the Yankees with this gruff New York accent on the other end of the line. He said, ‘Hey Mitch, congratulations, we’ve drafted you. What are your plans?’. I said I’d been accepted by Princeton, to study there. All he said was, ‘Go to Princeton’. There was this click as he put down the phone.”

The Yankees were doing Henderson a favour. Making it in baseball was a long shot, as Henderson could see himself. Taking the offer of a place at Princeton would open more doors. “I’m still benefiting from that,” he says, a sentiment Marsch echoes.

Henderson does not kid himself that college basketball and Premier League football are comparable in terms of standard — “Full disclosure, Jesse’s doing his own thing. He doesn’t need my help” — but there is hardly anyone Marsch speaks to more and their mutual involvement in sport allows for crossovers in the things they discuss. They can relate on the subjects of managing players, controlling training loads and dealing with success and failure (of which they talk about the latter far more, Henderson says). Henderson took to encouraging Marsch to focus more on set pieces, a core part of coaching in basketball.

Henderson thinks of himself as an introvert and says he has been helped in his development by Marsch’s more extroverted personality, improving his own communication. “We’re lifetime coaches and it’s a privilege to have someone like him to draw on,” Henderson says. “I’ve been to enough training sessions of his and he’s been to enough practice sessions of mine to see the crossover in what we do.

“One thing he helped me with was talking to people directly. A few years ago he watched practice and said to me, ‘We need to lock in on your eye contact with the players on the team’. Eye contact, that personal connection — it’s a constant area of improvement for me. I’m a well-socialised introvert, if that makes sense. I have to work at my sociability. Whereas with Jesse, he’s very comfortable in his own skin. It’s one of his defining qualities.”

Marsch has made a big play of communication since walking through the door at Leeds. A few days into the job, he purposely expanded the squad’s senior leadership group, increasing the stream of dialogue between him and the dressing room. Henderson was unable to get to a game during his visit to England last week but he followed Marsch through a day of training at Thorp Arch and watched his interaction with the players closely, observing Marsch’s attempts to engage with them.

“That’s at the core of who he is,” Henderson says. “I know Jesse says that, where he came from, he had zero chance of getting to where he is now but what I’d say to that is I disagree. He’s earned this over and over. He’s reinvented himself regularly which I think is crucial in coaching. At the root of what he does is the need to connect with everyone on the team, everyone in the organisation. You’ll find that runs from security guards to training staff to the medical team. It’s not calculated and it’s not fake. It’s just who he is.

“I saw that in his video sessions at Leeds — positive with each person but with constructive criticism too. At the centre of it all is teaching and the ability to teach. I think that’s what he likes most about Leeds — that he can connect people.”

Henderson and his family are so close with Marsch’s family that Marsch and his wife are godparents to Henderson’s youngest child, Archie. What Henderson likes about the Marschs, or admires most, is their willingness to seek out challenges and “make themselves vulnerable”. Marsch took on his previous job at RB Leipzig despite Kim being diagnosed with breast cancer. After a break of a little less than three months, he jumped into another high-pressure position at Leeds, in the middle of a Premier League season which was going wrong.

Marsch joked with The Athletic in an interview last month that he was “used to a change of scenery; probably a little too used to it, and my poor family as well!”

He and Kim married shortly after leaving college and have been together for more than 20 years, covering half of his time as a player and the whole of his coaching career. “So much of what Jesse is, he gets from Kim,” Henderson says. “I often say that if you want to know Jesse well, you’ve got to know Kim. She’s like a blinding light from heaven and they’re great friends, very loyal.

“There are obviously challenges (in a job like Leeds) but every step of the way, the two of them have looked for challenges. They’ve almost created those challenges. They’ve got a willingness to be vulnerable, which isn’t easy. It’s one of my favourite things about them.”

Football management is cut-throat in England and especially cut-throat in the Premier League but American sport is no picnic for coaches either. Growing up in the States, both Marsch and Henderson understood coaching as a here-today, gone-tomorrow profession in whichever sport they pursued: basketball, baseball, ice hockey, gridiron, football. Henderson, as it happens, has been managing Princeton’s basketball team for more than a decade but it is evident to him that the higher a coach climbs, the more volatile the work is. Leeds replacing Marcelo Bielsa proved that even an era as brilliant as the Argentinian’s did not make him bulletproof.

Marsch spoke to Henderson about Bielsa when the two of them were together last week, filling him in on the scale of Bielsa’s impact. “In any situation, you have to prove yourself,” Henderson says. “Jesse’s from a culture and a country where the head coach is the pivotal figure.” And where decisions about coaches can be every bit as ruthless. “Absolutely. So much so that it’s part of the noise all the time. If you have a thin skin then it’ll get to you quickly but he’s far enough along the line to know that it’s part of it all. He has his approach and you’ve seen it: a sense of humour and a willingness to joke. He likes the give and take.

“He’s all-in at Leeds and 100 per cent thrilled by it. I think he’s pleased with how it’s gone. When he says that he doesn’t think too much about what’s going to happen down the line, he means it. He’s very good at being in the present. He doesn’t get, as I would say, in front of his skis or over his skis. He can say to himself ‘I can’t worry about that. This is what matters today.'”

One of the things Henderson learned from Marsch was the importance of controlling the training load placed on athletes. “Football coaches have been leaders in that field, far out in front,” Henderson says. “In basketball practice you cover about two miles. In a football game it’s more like six. You have to measure perceived exertion against actual exertion and understand when to taper down in advance of a match. You know in football how they bring the goals in to make the pitch smaller? Jesse would talk to me about doing that in basketball, to create useful training methods. But unfortunately, the baskets are rooted to the floor!”

Henderson is a basketball fanatic. He grew up in Indiana, a state where every yard has a hoop in it, and on the tactical front, set pieces were a topic on which he and Marsch could chew the fat. “In basketball you get so many sideline, out-of-bounds plays,” he says. “For us it’s something we do all the time, something that’s worked into every training day.

“I remember saying to Jesse years ago, ‘How come you guys don’t practise corners all day?’. He told me you can’t do that but it was something we talked through.” And as it turned out, football clubs began paying more and more attention to that aspect of the sport. Leeds briefly appointed a set-piece specialist, Gianni Vio, in 2017. Aston Villa are one Premier League side with a dedicated set-piece coach, Austin MacPhee, on their current staff.

“Jesse’s been animated on that front, I think,” Henderson says. “I’ve been really impressed by what he’s done with his set pieces over the years, different fakes or ways of getting the ball in. I’ve picked up on things they’re doing (at Leeds) now, throw-ins with angles and so on. One guy faking this way while the ball goes the other way. Any way you can create an advantage has got to be good.”

More essential for Marsch in his first few weeks at Elland Road was engaging the squad in a way that made them go with him and play for him. Performances have been patchy but seven points from five matches mean Leeds have a very realistic chance of avoiding relegation. Marsch’s man-management, on paper at least, has produced results, edging the club clear of the bottom three.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to Jesse and other coaches about (man-management),” Henderson says. “There’s no playbook for it. Every year is different and every team is different. Jesse’s just the same as I first remember him, engaging and charismatic, but he’s wiser and improving. We can talk about anything, the highs and the lows. At Princeton we won our basketball league this year, we had a terrific year, but with Jesse, we don’t talk as much about the successes as we do the things that challenge us — how to manage through them and navigate new things.

“But the dressing room at Leeds, they seem like a really connected group. That will suit him. Some of my basketball players ask me, ‘What does it feel like to play at your best?’ and the answer is, ‘Like you’re just not thinking about it’. Jesse is all about trying to get the best version of you. That’s what he’ll aim for.”

After a short time together last week, Henderson said goodbye and flew home to America. He hopes to be back in May, to attend a game and find out how another month in the job has treated Marsch. A couple of days in Leeds and Henderson could feel himself getting the bug. “We’re watching all the games and I came home with a load of Leeds gear for my kids,” he says. “We’re on the front line, man.”

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