Former Argos star begins head coaching career at Northwestern
BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS
Sports Editor, RTC
Northwestern High School post announcing Spencer Van Der Weele as their interim head coach on June 19, 2024
Spencer VanDerWeele has found the middle ground.
VanDerWeele is from Argos. Playing for his father Todd, he is a 2016 Argos grad and a star player on teams that won four straight regional titles.
He has since served as an assistant coach at Argos, including the 2019 Class 1A state championship team and the 2020 state runner-up team.
He lives and works in downtown Indianapolis as a legislative assistant at the Indiana House of Representatives.
So where is right in the middle between Argos and Indianapolis? It might be somewhere near Kokomo, and that’s exactly where he has landed as the interim boys soccer coach at Northwestern for the upcoming season.
Aaron Longgood is the permanent coach at Northwestern, but he cannot coach the team this season due to a military deployment that runs from Aug. 1-Sept. 30.
Practice starts statewide on Aug. 5, and sectionals begin the week of Oct. 7, so Longgood told Northwestern administrators of his deployment and that he cannot coach this season.
Typically, interim coaching hires, regardless of the sport, are handled in-house, but VanDerWeele said that one assistant is battling colon cancer and that another is younger than he is.
So Longgood approached VanDerWeele.
“He had reached out to me,” VanDerWeele said. “We had played them a couple times the last couple seasons at Argos and in the summer, and I guess he had had a conversation with my dad about if I was interested in being a head coach one day, and my dad said yes. So when the opportunity came up and he needed someone to step into the role (at the) last second, he approached me about last January-ish and asked if I was interested, and I thought it would be a great way to start my career as a head coach and get my feet wet and see if it was something I liked.
“Having a passion for coaching, so far I’ve enjoyed it.”
VanDerWeele, 26, is inheriting a program that has won 11 sectional titles, including back-to-back sectionals in 2022 and 2023.
“I knew that we played them last year, so I knew they were senior-heavy,” VanDerWeele said. “I knew that they were defending sectional champions. And I knew they were very athletic. Other than that, he said it was a young group, but it was a very coachable group with a good work ethic, but there was going to be a lot of inexperience and probably some technical work (necessary), but he said that you’re not going to have any problems with attitudes. They’re a good group of kids that will work hard. You’ll just have to kind of get them to build their experience a little bit and just recover from how many seniors they lost last year.”
VanDerWeele said he met his players for the first time in May when he held a callout meeting. The first summer practice was June 4.
VanDerWeele is trying to impress how much faster the game is to his new varsity players. He has also held “small-sided games” during practice, which might be six-versus-six or a four-versus-four activity with a certain touch limit.
“So a lot of technical work and a lot of passing and touches on the ball,” VanDerWeele said of what he has been working on with his players. “Obviously, sitting out a year from last fall, you’re going to have guys who are rusty, especially with a lot of younger guys. They are used to that junior varsity level where maybe the pace is a little slower and the physicality is a little lower, but we’ve done a lot of technical work, a lot of touches to start practice off, a lot of small-sided games, a lot of passing combinations and then obviously finishing with some transition from offense to defense – quick scenarios like that that will help us translate into a game and just stay competitive with whomever we play against.”
Todd VanDerWeele missed the last part of the 2023 season due to health reasons, which included Argos winning a sectional title under interim coach Damon Binkley.
Spencer VanDerWeele said his father is doing better and prepared to resume coaching at Argos this fall. Spencer said that his father encouraged Spencer to “branch out” from Argos.
“That thought’s been with me, obviously spending some time away from him,” Spencer said. “We had some good talks about it and decided it was a good thing for me to branch out and try this new opportunity and not to worry about his position and his health as he was improving.”
After graduating from Argos – he is tied for the school record with 49 career assists and he added 41 goals during his prep playing career – he played at Marian University Ancilla, which then was called Ancilla College. During the spring of his freshman year, he was a player-coach on a 19-and-under team. Vinny Stone, a 2017 Argos team, helped coach with him, and the rest of the team consisted of 16-year-olds.
“Chino Roque and Owen Nifong were all freshmen and sophomores, and me and Vinny were the old heads,” VanDerWeele reminisced about his first taste of coaching, mentioning players that would star on Argos’ state title team in 2019. “That kind of sparked something in me, and I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed being around a team again. Obviously, it had been a couple months since Ancilla, and it was nice to be around the Argos program again. … We had good success in that spring.”
VanDerWeele then transferred to IU Indianapolis, which was then known as IUPUI. By transferring, he had ended his playing career.
But with soccer out of his life, he found that he missed it. So he got a job as an assistant at Argos in the fall of 2017, and he observed both his father and assistant coach Elmer Roque. That motivated him.
“As a student of the game, it kept me wanting to learn more and still be a part of a team and a program,” VanDerWeele said.
VanDerWeele got a degree from IUPUI in December 2020 in sport management. He had an internship lined up with the South Bend Lions club team, but due to the pandemic, that season did not happen, and the internship fell through.
But Thiago Pinto, the Lions’ technical director, is also the men’s soccer coach at Bethel University, and he encouraged VanDerWeele to come to Bethel and get his master’s degree and be a graduate assistant coach.
He said his priority was Bethel, but he was also still helping out at Argos in the fall of 2020 and 2021.
“So I went ahead and did that for two years,” VanDerWeele said of coaching at Bethel. “Our assistant coach, he went and got a head coaching job, so me and the other graduate assistant coach got promoted to reserves coach, which was like the second team, which I thought was awesome. That was a great experience. I owe a lot to coach Thiago Pinto. The program up there he’s running is amazing. I learned a lot about how he runs things and the success he’s had up there.”
VanDerWeele said he did some “remote coaching” the last two seasons while living in Indianapolis.
But there cannot be anything remote when one is a head coach.
VanDerWeele said he will drive about an hour and 15 minutes back and forth each day from where he lives to the school.
“My only issue with the drive is just traffic on 465, but that’s about it,” VanDerWeele said. “Once I hit 31, it’s smooth sailing. So there’s not really too much of a difference between traveling from Argos and traveling from Indianapolis.”
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