South African hockey coaches will get a rare chance to learn from one of the sport’s most successful minds this September, when Max Caldas, the reigning FIH Men’s Coach of the Year, runs a pair of coaching seminars in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
Caldas will lead a one-day session at St Stithians College in Johannesburg on 4 September, before repeating the programme at Rhenish Girls’ High in Stellenbosch on 11 September.
The seminar, called “Coach the Coaches,” is being organised by events company Repucom M.I.C.E and is capped at 150 coaches per city. Tickets cost R3 350 per coach, excluding VAT, and are available at https://bit.ly/MaxCaldasCoachtheCoaches.
It is a significant coup for South African hockey. Caldas, who is Argentine-born but also holds Dutch and Italian citizenship, was named FIH Men’s Coach of the Year for 2025 last November, his second time winning the award, after guiding Spain‘s men’s team to a EuroHockey Championship bronze medal and a strong season in the FIH Pro League.
His coaching career stretches back two decades. After a playing career as a defender for Argentina at the 1996 and 2004 Olympics, a career-ending injury pushed Caldas into coaching in the Netherlands, where he took charge of Amsterdam‘s women’s team and later Bloemendaal‘s men’s team.
He was appointed head coach of the Dutch women’s national team in 2010 and won Olympic gold at London 2012, the first Hockey World League title in 2013, and the World Cup on home soil in The Hague in 2014.
He then moved across to coach the Dutch men, taking them to fourth place at the Rio 2016 Olympics and winning back-to-back European titles in 2017 and 2021. Since 2021, he has been in charge of Spain’s men’s team, a period that culminated in last year’s Coach of the Year honour.
Organisers say the aim of bringing Caldas to South Africa is to give coaches across schools, clubs, and provinces access to the kind of high-performance methodology usually reserved for international programmes, and to use the visit as the start of an ongoing coaching network rather than a one-off event, with an eye on the 2027 hockey cycle.
