Kwan Brown

I first carried out this interview on behalf of Hockey World News but, with the Pan American Games just a week away, I thought it was worth renewing and recycling.

Barring injury, Kwan Brown will play out the final chapter of his international playing career in Lima, Peru at the end of July. With more than 320 caps to his name, the 41 year old will be representing Trinidad and Tobago at the 18th Pan American Games, looking for a fairytale end to his long playing career.

The fairytale ending would be qualification for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games but, of course, this is a fantasy too far. Trinidad and Tobago would need to beat the current Olympic Champions Argentina, plus higher ranked sides such as Canada, Chile and USA in the process. For Brown, a good showing at the Pan Am Games would be a fitting end to his career.

Not that this is the end of Brown’s hockey career – far from it. He is a top coach, working with England and Great Britain men as well as top club side Hampstead and Westminster. Just this season he led the London team to their first ever qualification spot for the EuroHockey League.

And it is not just hockey players in the UK who benefit from Kwan’s input as a player and coach. Despite leaving Trinidad some 20 plus years ago, Kwan has never forgotten his roots and has been a major force in hockey development in the Caribbean island.

In fact, if anyone is seeking the reason behind Kwan’s passion for the game, his integrity as a coach and player and the incredibly high standards of behaviour he demands of himself and his players on and off the pitch, they need look no further than at a childhood spent living among a family of sporting women.

The female members of Kwan’s family were hugely influential in his early sporting career. As a four-year-old, Kwan used to go with his mother and aunts to cricket and hockey matches and training. Five of the family, including his mother, played cricket for the West Indies women’s cricket team and another four aunts played hockey for the national team.

“To stop me running around and causing havoc at my aunt’s training sessions, the coach at the local hockey team gave me a small hockey stick and set me the challenge of dribbling along the lines,” recalls Kwan.

Once Kwan reached eight, he was invited to join in club sessions. “I absolutely loved it. When I wasn’t at training, I would be dribbling anything that moved, marbles, rolled up socks, stones.”

The secondary school that Kwan attended didn’t have a hockey team. At the age of 11, in his first year, Kwan approached the headmaster and said he wanted to start a hockey team. Rather than turning the youngster away, the headteacher challenged him to start a team from scratch. With no resources but some willing friends, Kwan got a team together, took on the role of player/coach and they were soon pitting their hockey skills against other teams, often several years older.

“I persuaded the others to play by telling them that a lot of girls played hockey, so they would get to meet them,” he laughs as he recalls that first venture into hockey coaching.

Alongside the school hockey, Kwan was also encouraged, again by his influential aunt, to join the local hockey club, Notre Dame. He and several of his team members from the school team did so and the club welcomed them in.

Less than two years later, at the age of 14, Kwan was a member of the Trinidad and Tobago national team. As a footnote to this part of his life, Kwan’s aunt, who had been so instrumental in his early success, only saw her nephew play an international when he was 38 years old, 24 years after his international debut.

It was clear that for Kwan to reach his potential he would need to leave Trinidad and Tobago. And so when he was 19, Kwan left the warmth of the Caribbean for the cold, wet and dark English hockey season.

Despite the cultural and climatic differences, Kwan slotted into life in the UK easily. “The hockey was amazing. I was training with top quality players. I was coming from Trinidad where the domestic league is not great to find myself in a place where I was training with players from Australia, South Africa, lots of Great Britain players.”

Kwan was an instant success. In his second season playing in the National League, he moved to Canterbury and won Player of the Year. He was studying law at London Metropolitan University (LMU) and was selected for the England training roster as one of 30 players receiving National Lottery funding.

It was at this point that Kwan’s sense of loyalty and integrity made its first noteworthy appearance. He was on the England roster, in receipt of Lottery funding and with a clear opportunity to press for selection with a national team that is always likely to be at the Olympic Games.

But that didn’t sit well with Kwan. “After three months of being part of the Lottery funded squad, I decided that I could do a lot more for the game by playing for Trinidad and bringing players over to the UK. I asked myself: ‘How can I make sure my time in the UK has an impact on hockey in Trinidad and Tobago?”

The next few years provided him with the answer. The university, with Kwan on a scholarship and acting as player coach, won the sixth division of BUSA, the annual competition involving all universities and colleges in Great Britain.

The team was promoted and the university was delighted. The reward was to offer two more members of the Trinidad and Tobago squad scholarship places. They then won their league the following year. A restructure of BUSA saw LMU promoted to the second division. Three more scholarship places were on offer. By the time Kwan left LMU, seventeen places had been taken by Trinidad and Tobago players and LMU won the BUSA Championships, beating the likes of Loughborough and Bath.

The legacy that this created was a plethora of coaches and players taking all they had learnt in England, both at university and in the club league, back to Trinidad and Tobago. The impact was immediate. Trinidad and Tobago moved to an all-time high of 19th in the world rankings. They also qualified for the 2007 Indoor World Cup.

“For me, that was a lot more satisfying than trying to make the England squad,” says Kwan. He still returns to Trinidad and Tobago every Easter and Summer during the school holidays to coach the various national teams. He also still plays for the national team and will be representing Trinidad and Tobago in the Pan American Games later this year.

When he considers the state of hockey in Trinidad and Tobago, it is with real emotion that he says he feels hugely frustrated.

“I can’t tell you how sad it makes me feel that we can’t get a break. Every time a moment comes where we can cash in and qualify for ether the Olympic Games or the World Cup, something happens that stops us achieving our potential. In Trinidad a lot of the players have to work, so we are never in a position where we can take our strongest team to a qualifying tournament.

“For 25 years, we have been trying to qualify for the Olympics and we can never get our best team together for a block of training and competition. We have to find a way that players can get that time. We have a few players in the military who can train when they want. But there are so many other players who have to go to work and can’t make these tournaments.”

The frustration is borne of the fact that, given the chance, Kwan knows his team can cut it with the best. When money was plentiful, as in the 2007/8 season, Trinidad and Tobago were training non-stop and enjoyed test matches against some of the best teams in the world. One of his own great moments came when the team beat Belgium – currently the world number one team – on a tour of Europe.

Away from the playing side, Kwan has always been a coach at heart. Even as a young kid, his natural dispensation was to take a leading role in the team. At 11, he taught his friends how to play; at 19 he coached his college team; in his early 20s he took up his first senior coaching role with East Grinstead men. And along the way, he has developed his own coaching style and philosophy, much of its based on observation of other coaches, both in hockey and a variety of sports.

“I still watch as many other coaches in action as possible,” he says. “I watch how teams score goals, where the goals come from. I watch how coaches communicate with their players. I am currently very, very lucky to work with the coaches in the Great Britain set-up. John Bleby, for example, I learn so much from watching his coaching style.”

Despite constantly modifying his own coaching, there are some precepts that are set in stone. One is time.

“Time is very important to me. I expect my team to always be punctual – it is something that is simple but can set the tone for everything else. I understand things can happen that mean you can’t stick to time but the way you communicate that is also very important. It sets the right tone and environment.”

Kwan gives an example of how this golden rule is never broken. “At a play-off game, two players were late for the team meeting with no reason. One was my goalkeeper and one was my main drag flicker. That didn’t matter, they didn’t play. If you don’t stick to your rules all the time, then they become questionable.”

A second rock solid rule is equality within the squad. Kwan says he has seen many coaches in many situations show preference to some players. They might be from the same club, they might be perceived to be the ‘best player’. For Kwan, everyone is equal and worthy of equal attention. “I have seen players never turn up for training and still they get selected for the squad. That is so very wrong in my book.”

It was when Hampstead and Westminster were in a battle for the league title that Kwan’s approach was validated. He explains: “Every team I have coached know that if you miss training, you can’t play at the weekend. At Hampstead, I had three international players who all had to miss training for one reason or another – all valid reasons. Our next match was a top-of-the-table clash against Surbiton. All the other players were thinking: ‘This is big game and could affect whether we win the league or not’. But I had to stick to the ethos. Those three players who weren’t selected were there supporting and helping. My decision to not play them had been accepted by everyone. It was one of those moment whens I knew that we had created the right culture. Those moments are what makes it all very enjoyable.”

Currently, Kwan is enjoying coaching at all levels. He coaches at St Lawrence College, Ramsgate, where his children are at school. Since his arrival, the school’s hockey reputation has grown and grown. The school now wins national titles on a regular basis and has a number of youth internationals in its ranks.

For now Kwan says he is very happy with life as it is. he would like to see his own children through school before taking any further steps along his own career path. But the ambition is only on hold. This is a player who wants to push his coaching as far as he can and that means a national team – Great Britain would be high on his wish list, but there will be many national associations who would relish the chance to give this talented, principled and immensely likeable coach a chance to cast some Kwan magic.