Sadao Furunuma’s Coaching Wisdom Reveals the Secret Behind a Team’s Success
Special Interview [Part 1
Six-time National High School Soccer Championship winner and three-time Inter-High champion, he nurtured Japanese national players such as Yasuhito Honda and Koji Nakata and is respected as a mentor by Noritake Kinashi and Machida Zelvia’s coach Tsuyoshi Kuroda.
The team that drew attention in the recent All Japan High School Soccer Tournament was Teikyo (Tokyo), making its 35th appearance in 15 years. They secured a 2-1 victory in the opening match against Kyoto Tachibana (Kyoto), followed by a dominant 5-0 win over Kanazawa Gakuin University High School (Ishikawa) in the second round. Although they were eliminated in the third round after a penalty shootout loss to Meisho Hitachi (Ibaraki), they left a strong impression of their resurgence as a powerhouse.
However, former coach Sadao Furunuma (85), who led Teikyo to a record-tying six postwar championship titles, found their performance unsatisfactory.
“There were good players, and they should have had a method to win the championship. The current coach was my student and served as the captain when Teikyo finished as runner-up in the 1998 tournament (Hiroshi Fujikura), but he still hasn’t experienced true hardships. Even if he has more experience as a player than I did, the number of matches he has watched doesn’t compare to mine. There is always a reason behind becoming the best.”
I was once ridiculed by people who said, “He doesn’t know anything about soccer.”
Today, there is hardly anyone in the high school soccer world who doesn’t know Furunuma, but he originally came from a track and field background. So how did a soccer novice like him achieve such success?
“Teikyo is located in Itabashi Ward, Tokyo, near Saitama Prefecture, where soccer is popular in areas like Kawaguchi and Urawa. Many students from these areas were skilled with the ball. I was able to take the team to the High School Championship from my first year as coach, but while we could win in the preliminaries, we would lose in the first or second round at the national level. Strangely, the teams that beat Teikyo often went on to win or finish as runners-up. That made me think, ‘Damn it, I want to win too!’”
He incorporated direct passes and strategies from other sports, such as basketball and handball. Some in the industry mocked him, saying, “That person knows nothing about soccer.” But when he learned that the coaches of powerhouse teams enjoyed drinking, he would visit them with a bottle of sake in hand, requesting practice matches and absorbing their knowledge.
“I often visited coaches like Minoru Nagaike of Fujieda Higashi (Shizuoka), who won the championship four times, and Shu Nishido, who led Narashino (Chiba) to its first title in his fourth year as coach. Since I had never played soccer myself, I had no hesitation in talking to these great coaches, and they, in turn, would generously share their knowledge, saying, ‘You don’t even know that?’”
