This former Sporting KC favorite is sharing soccer knowledge as SKC Academy head coach

When he was younger, Benny Feilhaber would lace up his boots every Tuesday and Thursday evening and head to practice with his youth team, the L.A. area’s Irvine Strikers.

He’d play in games for Irvine on the weekends, but that was the extent of Feilhaber’s organized soccer experience in his late-teen years. Any further development of his skills was left to his own creativity and intuition.

“For me, it was more of an activity that I did because I loved it,” Feilhaber told The Star. “Not as a means to an end to become a pro.”

But become a pro he did, walking on at UCLA before carving out a 14-year career in Europe and the United States, including six seasons with Sporting Kansas City.

His playing career came to an end in March 2020, but the 36-year-old former midfielder couldn’t stay away from the game for long.

Less than a year later, in late August, he was named the new Sporting KC U-17 head coach at the Sporting KC Academy.

Now, he’s out on the field running practices with his squad four or five times a week, coaching games on the weekend.

“It’s quite a bit different,” Feilhaber said, referencing his own experience as a youth. “But it’s exciting and it’s great to see the sport kind of evolve and grow, and I’m just happy to be a part of it right now.”

The role is Feilhaber’s first in head coaching. He spent a short amount of time as an assistant coach at his college alma mater before joining the Sporting KC coaching staff.

For months since returning to Kansas City, Feilhaber described himself as an “intern” who was simply learning the ropes. He split his time between coaching with the first team and the SKC Academy teams.

“It was mostly a job of kind of learning the organization as a whole, and for me I think Peter (Vermes) really wanted me to understand how the pro-player pathway works and what he’s looking for in terms of the players coming out of that system,” Feilhaber said.

That period of learning has come to a close now. Vermes, Sporting KC’s head coach and technical director, offered Feilhaber the position of U-17 head coach over the summer, during the youth soccer teams’ offseason.

“I’ve known Benny for a long time — I know what his passion is about the game,” Vermes said. “I know how he thinks about the game. I’ve spent a lot of time with him, and the other (thing) is he has an incredible enthusiasm to at least try this profession.”

But Feilhaber’s addition to the academy coaching staff isn’t just a matter of Vermes giving a job to one of his former players. The hire is part of a trend of additions to the coaching staff of both former and current KC players who understand Vermes’ philosophy and ways of coaching.

Paulo Nagamura, who played for KC from 2012-16, has been the Sporting KC II head coach since 2018. Current players Ilie Sanchez and Roger Espinoza have also both recently taken assistant coaching roles in the academy as they fulfill their “B License” coursework requirements in the U.S. Soccer Coaching Education program.

“He understands the style of play and the positional characteristics we have for all the players in the different positions they play, all those things are advantages to him because he’s been in the locker room, he’s been around this team, he’s won with this club,” Vermes said.

“So all those things are advantages, but they don’t necessarily equate to being a really good coach or somebody who can do it.”

Like every academy coach, Feilhaber must abide by the consistent curriculum that runs throughout the SKC Academy. But that doesn’t stop him from sharing some of his own experiences and intuition.

“You want to apply the player’s strengths to how you utilize them,” he said. “So not every team is going to have a Johnny Russell or an Alan Pulido, so how do you take the players that you have and find good players for them and put them in places where they will find success within the structure of the team itself?

“I think that’s what, as the coach in the academy, those are the moments when you can kind of take your ideas as a player when you played and now as a coach and translate them into success at the personal level for each player and also the team level.”

Conveying his coaching points and tactical analyses is one of the hardest parts of the job, Feilhaber said. But unlike his youth years, when he’d only practice a couple of times a week with other teenagers who simply loved playing soccer, Feilhaber knows that every player in the SKC Academy is knowledgeable about the sport and yearns to learn more.

“It’s been a wonderful experience,” he said. “I’m still learning, but it’s very interesting and I’m still very much enjoying it.”

This story was originally published September 14, 2021 at 1:09 PM with the headline "This former Sporting KC favorite is sharing soccer knowledge as SKC Academy head coach."