Freya Coombe: Blazing a trail with Kansas City Current

Working with Andonovski

Freya is a huge admirer of Andonovski, who this year became only the second coach to lead a team to 100 match wins.

 

“He’s unbelievable. I think the biggest thing that stands out is his personality and his values. I think he is a person that sees the best in people. He’s someone that is always supporting and doing things for others, helping develop other people, and if you need anything, like on a personal level, he’s the first one that’s like, ‘Okay, we’re all there,’ and runs the staff in such a together way and such a family. 

 

“He has been in the league for so long and then his time out of the league [as US women’s national team manager] was in a position where he was able to learn so much. He’s very knowledgeable and very collaborative; as staff, he trusts us to not only run what we’re responsible for on a daily basis, but then also really wants our input, whether it’s team selection, whether it’s what we should do in training, whether it’s dealing with a situation that’s come up and what do we think that he should do or that we should do. That’s really important because then everyone’s motivated and it’s very much an ‘us’ culture. It’s not a ‘him’ or ‘the team’, it’s all of us together.

 

“It makes it so enjoyable, and I think that that’s a huge part of people coming into work, wanting to do better each day, wanting to perform, is you want to do it for the team. When someone treats you so well, you want to make sure that you pay them back and you want to do everything you can in the environment because you feel respected and you feel trusted, and that’s a two-way street. So you want to make sure that you’re performing to the best level too.”

 

Freya is one of the Current coaches who are responsible for in possession, working specifically with the squad’s strikers, with Andonovski one of the coaches leading on out of possession: “a big passion of his,” says Freya.

 

“If you look at the way his teams are always set up, is they’re very proud defensively and have great defensive records. That comes from him as a player too and his playing philosophy, and the way in which he coaches defending, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. The details, it’s unreal what he thinks about, it’s unreal what he sees, the buy-in that he gets from the players, even forwards - our forwards work incredibly hard defensively, and that’s because he instils his pride in them, and so that has been fantastic to see because I think even though I’ve been very proud to defend well and defend hard, this has opened my eyes to the next level of detail that it takes.”

 

On the whole, Freya is loving her time in Missouri, describing herself as “in such a good place, physically as well as mentally.”

 

She adds: “I think we have an excellent club. We have an excellent environment. We have clear vision, whether it’s our ownership in terms of what we want to achieve, but also on a daily basis.”

 

She points to the club’s swift development, with top-class training facilities, a performance centre, and the CPKC Stadium – the first privately-financed stadium built exclusively for a professional women’s football team.

 

“It really is the top standard,” she concludes.

How Freya came to coaching

Freya was focused on playing until she tore her ACL when at university studying sports science. Unable to play on a Wednesday afternoon, and missing the camaraderie of being part of a team, she took her coaching qualifications so she could stay involved. It then proved a useful way to earn some extra cash as a student as she coached for Port Vale football in the community, and became a parallel career path when she worked for Reading’s centre of excellence alongside lecturing in a university.

 

“After seeing the professionalism and the direction the game was going in, it was like, ‘Yeah, I want to focus now. I want to be full-time as a coach and I want to spend all my time doing this because I just have so much fun.’

 

“I think the biggest part of it is being part of a team. That’s something that I really enjoy: being challenged as an individual, solving problems, but doing it as a collective and doing it with a group of people that you enjoy spending time with and you want to go to war with and you like competing with, that’s really important. So as much as teaching was great and reliable, I wanted to follow my passion, jump ship, and at that time I came to America to find my fortune!”

 

She makes it sound straightforward, but it was actually a tough decision, choosing to leave the stability of a full-time job plus some additional consultancy, and taking a reduction in pay to get an entry-level role in the US.

 

“Soccer in America is huge on the women’s side, so that was where I wanted to be, I wanted to be part of that industry.”

 

Moving to the USA

She found herself in the right place at the right time when she moved to New York and asked the club then known as Sky Blue FC, now NY/NJ Gotham FC, if she could observe some of their sessions. Just a few weeks later in the summer of 2019, the head coach had been relieved of her duties, and Freya had been appointed in her place in the interim. She was given the job permanently three months later – which she admits now was “being thrown in at the deep end”, leaving her to “sink or swim”.

 

She then took the role of head coach for Angel City FC, leading them in their first-ever NWSL season in 2022 before leaving the job after a poor run of results the following year.

 

Freya had never been an assistant coach before she joined the Current; she had only been a head coach – including two years with NY/NJ Gotham FC and then two years with Angel City. She says now that Andonovski makes great use of the experience he has in his technical team, and she is benefiting from the role as she learns how other head coaches operate, about the best ways to run a high-performance environment, and to strike the right balance between player development and results on the pitch.

 

“I do think that I’ve shifted a lot more towards, ‘Okay, what’s going to make this team win and be successful?’ And that’s not at the expense of personal growth and development, but it’s finding ways where the two can complement each other. Being in this environment for the last 18 months has showed me ways in which you can make that happen, and it hasn’t got to be necessarily one or the other.”

The women’s game in England

Although Freya has spent so many years in the US, she keeps a close eye on the progress of the women’s game in England.

 

“What’s interesting is the Euros have put a really good spotlight on not only the league, but what a great job is being done in England right now with the development of female coaches. I had a great conversation with a couple of colleagues from the NWSL who went over to the Euros as part of a FA study visit. They were just blown away by the support that the female coaches get over in England, whether it’s from the FA, whether it’s from each other within the league, whether it’s just in terms of not [being] in this firing culture that we seem to be in the NWSL sometimes.”

 

And she’d like to see more of that positive support for female coaches in the US as well.

 

“I do think that we have some great female coaches within this league and I’d love to see more of them getting head coach opportunities in the future and the support that it takes to be a head coach in this league.”

Freya’s next steps

The last 18 months with the Current have given her plenty to think about when it comes to considering the kind of head coach she may want to be in the future.

 

“I’m definitely happy here for the considerable future,” she says.

 

“However, I think at some point, everything that I’m learning and developing, there’s going to be a moment in the future where I go, ‘Yeah, I want to be tested again.’ And whether it’s in this league, whether it’s in a different league, whether it’s working on a national team, who knows? It’s not something that I’m jumping into right now. But I do think that I’ve learned so much, it would be a shame not to go and test it.”

 

One thing’s for sure – despite the unconventional career journey, Freya doesn’t regret the risk she took when she left her job to take a chance on coaching in the US.

 

“I love the adrenaline of the week to week in the football industry. I love how hard you’ve got to work. I love the emotion that you go through every week. It’s what living is. I live for game day. It’s great.”