It’s been over three years now since Derek Young returned to Pittodrie to work with the up and coming players in the Aberdeen academy. Working as the Under 16s coach, he is responsible for schooling the next crop of payers who we hope will be emulating Scott McKenna, Dean Campbell, Scott Wright and Connor McLennan by pushing for first team football in the course of the next few years. But just how has Derek taking to coaching after a long career playing the game?

“Playing is a lot easier I would say. When you’re a player you’re just concentrating on yourself, making sure that you are ready to play and have taken in what the manager has told you. When you’re a coach it’s about looking after 15/16 year old players, trying to make sure you’re doing everything right in training, especially at the younger age groups. Going into coach kids under 12s to 15s, I need to rewind back to what I was like at their age and remember what I knew by then! It took me a while to get my head round that, trying to think not everyone is full-time and not everybody is at the top level, they’re kids trying to make their way.

“When you’re playing, you get more immediate enjoyment, it’s more directly personal I think. Coaching, you get your enjoyment when you get a win or you see kids kicking on and maybe playing in the level above. With Scott Anderson being around the Under 18s with Barry Robson, he already knows the boys in Under 16s who are doing well and a lot have had the chance this year to go on and do that.”

Any player who crosses the line from player to coach suddenly gets a better understanding of just what his previous managers had to go through. Looking back on his career, Derek is very clear that, “My best manager was Jimmy Calderwood, at Dunfermline and Aberdeen. The thing I liked about him and his staff – Jimmy Nicholl and Sandy Clark – were training sessions and drills were built around games coming up. There’s a lot of managers who it will come to the Friday and only then will they maybe do something towards the game on a Saturday, but with Jimmy, it was all geared towards the game you were playing at the weekend. I liked that a lot, it set it out for the week.

“I feel he was the manager that got the best out of me, although he did play me in many positions around the park! I like to think that was maybe because I had a decent footballing brain and could play different positions and see us through a game. He saw that in me early at Dunfermline and he played on that. His man management filled you with confidence and made you think, “Yeah I play there,” then the next week he’d be asking me to do him a favour and fill a different position to cover for an injury. I was always playing. It might not have been in the position I wanted but I was still playing.

“I think the whole package was there, the two Jimmy’s got the best out of me. Their training throughout the week was exciting, at pace. If it wasn’t at pace or wasn’t done right, you were getting it! If you couldn’t play at that standard you were going to be sitting on the bench, so you were quickly made to work. A couple of training sessions here and there and you’d be getting hammered for losing the ball but it was part of everybody getting together. Dunfermline and Aberdeen were both tight and had a good family feel about them and everybody was prepared to run over the top of people to try and get the victory.

“The man management side is something that’s big for me but another thing I try to make sure of is explaining why we do something, why it’s good. A lot of coaches I had came in and did so many different drills and before you knew it, your head is full of all sorts but no one actually explained why! A big thing for me and Scott at the Under 16s level is they need to be ready to go right into full-time football as soon as Scott, Barry and Simmy decide who goes forward.
We need to have kids in there who know everything is 100 mph. You need to be making sure your passing is right, your movement is right, your positional stuff is right and we make sure of that in the Under 16s and 18s teams through the drills and coaching sessions, so that it is in their heads and they know it’s happening for a reason. Why are they making the movements, as a lot of the time on a football park you’ll make a lot of different movements to make space. You might not be getting the ball right now but in a few seconds time you might be on the ball because you’ve come out a hole for someone else to play the ball in, allowing you to spin away, so it’s trying to explain that to the kids.

“Kids think every time they make a move they have to get the ball but if you take them aside and break it down for them, they’ll understand everything is for a reason. We might have the central midfielder on the ball and the right winger cuts inside, but only to take the defender away for our right-back, who is the fastest guy on the planet, to get into space so he can get down the line and play the ball into the box and create a goal. That’s something that’s always stuck in my head for years from the man management skills from Jimmy Calderwood, Jimmy Nicholl and Sandy. They had respect for every player.

“Even if the player was having a tough time they would help them out and make sure they are still part of the squad even though they were maybe miles away from getting a game, because you’re going to need people at different times. That happened to me under Mark McGhee. I wasn’t getting a game but I kept my head down and just stayed right, did my training right and I knew there would be a chance at some point. That happened, and thankfully after that I managed to stay in the team. Being ready is so important because you never know when the call might come – we saw that with Ryan Duncan a couple of weeks back.

“He’s a kid that I saw two or three years ago in the Sports Village and the way he was going about things, I said to someone that night, “That boy has got the biggest chance out of everybody that I’ve seen.” Just with his ability, his attitude, he was listening to his coaches. I watched him the next few months, his left foot was unbelievable and it was good to see him kick on. We took him to Portugal last year. Ryan was playing with the 16s and the 15s had a tournament. You were allowed to take one player over the age to the tournament so we took him. He can stick the ball anywhere, he works his backside off, he can play anywhere on the pitch as he has got a footballing brain. He had a great tournament, we had a great tournament, and he’s come back from that and kicked on, especially since he’s come in after summer. Scott and Barry have got him flying and he got a chance because a few boys have missed out because of Covid. That’s what happens, people get injured, people get suspended, nowadays people get Covid, it opens doors for people and he’s got himself in the squad with two or three others, got a few minutes on the pitch, so it’s looking good.

“Attitude is so important. If you’re getting the chance to go and play professional football, the attitude should be spot on. Players with a lot of talent have gone sideways, they’re playing Boys Club, Highland League etc. These are kids that have maybe been Player of the Year for a couple of years in the Academy because of their ball skills and they can get past people and they are a bit bigger then some of the other boys at their age group. But when it comes to the nitty gritty, you’ve got a checklist of what they need – can you coach them, will they listen? The penny needs to drop at some point. You can have all the talent in the world but you need to listen and adapt to make certain parts of your game better. If you don’t, you’re not going to kick on and get your chances.

“If a kid like comes into our team now, say it’s an attack minded player, it would be a case of, “Can we trust you to go on that pitch?” We need to know that they can defend. We know you can go forward, you may be one of the best in Scotland at it, but if you can’t go backwards when we haven’t got the ball or if we play a team that’s better than us with the ball, that leaves them sitting on the bench because the only thing they will be useful for is to come on if we need to nick a late goal and we don’t care about the defensive aspect at that stage. Managers and coaches need players with the all round package.

“All the opportunities are there for the boys now with Cormack Park especially. It’s now down to the kids to kick on themselves. We had a lot of success throughout the years without this training ground, so now the success needs to kick on again and have even more players come through. We’ve got the AstroTurf, we’ve got the floodlights, we’ve got everything we need. We know training sessions are going to be on and there isn’t a shed load of kids missing out because the weather’s terrible. It’s been hard to juggle it all but we’re glad to be back and making use of it and hopefully in the near future it’ll be even better.

“This club is a great developer of young talent. You look at the amount of international players that the Club produces through all the different age levels. One of the Scotland teams not that long ago, there were eight players included in the team that had come through the Aberdeen youth system. They might all be playing in different places now, but their background was Aberdeen. There’s teams down in England who are always hovering, looking to see what kind of players Aberdeen’s producing. Ryan Fraser was in the team for a little bit, did great, and then he was away to Bournemouth.

“The young talent is there. It’s the club’s job to try and get them playing and make sure nobody else gets them before we get them signed full-time. There’s talent there. We like to think the coaching set up is good and progressing every single year. We all try and get better as coaches. Cormack Park can only make things better, as long as the boys don’t get ‘big time’ and think that because they’ve got a £12 million training ground that they are going to be the best player ever, because it doesn’t happen like that. If they’ve got the talent, that will look after itself. They need the will to work hard and listen.”