VIU has its women’s soccer coach just in time for the season.
Vancouver Island University’s athletics department announced last week that Kevin Lindo has been named the new coach of the program.
Lindo, also the Vancouver Whitecaps FC Academy’s Vancouver Island coach, said he was immediately interested when he learned about the position.
“With the timing in my career, I’ve been looking for a high-performance environment to put my training and my development into,” he said. “I’m very excited. I know the program is ambitious, I know there’s great people in place.”
Lindo acknowledged that “it’s late coming in” at this stage of the off-season, but he met with players last week and said they’re excited, enthusiastic and ready to go.
“We’re looking to try and build on what has been done,” he said. “It’s already a successful team, so we’re looking to build on that and it’s a great group of girls from what I can see so far.”
His focus, he said, is on getting the environment right within the program. He wants playing for the Mariners to be enjoyable, while also maintaining high standards and expectations.
With the Whitecaps academy he worked mostly with younger players and said while there are some similarities to coaching different age groups, there are also obvious differences.
“With anything, I always focus on the process,” Lindo said. “So I’m a massive believer of putting in the organization and the time into the process and hopefully the byproduct of that will be results.”
He’s a big believer in maximizing the potential of individual players, he said, and he has some ideas about team concepts he’d like to implement.
“I do like to see attacking, creative soccer, so I am a purist, but I’m also a realist and I don’t know what every single player’s like on the team yet,” Lindo said. “So I’ve got to get the squad together, figure out the identity that we’re going to have and then build a philosophy from there.”
Lindo takes over from Anup Kang, who coached the Mariner women for seven seasons and guided the side to a provincial championship last fall. According to a press release from VIU athletics, Kang is “retiring from the Mariners to focus on family and new endeavours.”
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