Faces in the Crowd is a regular feature that provides a detailed and intimate look at the coaches, student-athletes and staff people that encompass Lincoln Memorial University athletics. Today's feature focuses on the philosophy and coaching style of Sean Fraser, who was selected to take over the women's soccer program in January, 2017. 

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Since the very beginning of his coaching career, winning has followed Sean Fraser.
 
In 2008, his first season as a graduate assistant coach at his alma mater, Bethel University, the Wildcats captured the NAIA National Championship. Fraser also established and developed the Paris Danger Soccer Club during his three-year tenure in Paris, Tennessee. In his next stop and first opportunity as a head coach, Fraser guided the Midland University men's soccer team to a 53-25-6 record over four seasons and made four consecutive appearances in the GPAC Tournament championship game. Most recently, the Durham, England native spent a season as the assistant men's coach at the University of Charleston, who went 19-3-2 and appeared in the NCAA Division II National Championship game.
 
For Fraser, sustained success of that magnitude is not merely a product of talent and hard work with a little bit of good fortune mixed in, but the result of a deeply-rooted passion bordering on obsession to create a style and strategy of soccer that is beautiful in its relentlessness and effectiveness.
 
Fraser began assembling that style and strategy in earnest, scribbling ideas as they came to him in a journal that he still uses to this day. Those notes eventually turned into a plan for building a program in his image and, with the help of his wife on a drive from West Virginia to Cincinnati just a week after the National Championship game loss, started to take shape before his interview for the head women's coaching job at Lincoln Memorial.
 
"I wanted to show that I'm passionate about it, not just that I like soccer. I wanted Matt [Green] to know that I had plan, core values, that went from a style of play I believed in, a recruiting strategy, to player profiles, and then hopefully that translates into a team that fulfills the excellence piece of our core values on and off the field," Fraser said. "You can click on YouTube and see that everyone wants to be possession oriented or be a high pressing team or whatever. Everyone says the same stuff, but there's never a how. How are you going to do it and what's the strategy behind it?"
 
To start answering those questions, Fraser established the program's core values, principles to inform the day-to-day actions of both the players and the coaching staff. Those values, which adorn the walls of his office and the locker room, are commitment, organization, responsibility and excellence. But in Fraser's mind, the latter value is simply a by-product of the three before it while also conveniently completing the acronym CORE.
 
Commitment, organization and responsibility are all linked. Fraser would rather have players that are committed to doing the right things everyday than players that are motivated, which he sees as a fleeting feeling that can fluctuate on a day-to-day basis. He strives for unfaltering organization to create an impenetrable unity that can answer any of the infinite questions asked on the pitch. And Fraser wants to cultivate a commitment to individual responsibility for the greater good of the team. Those values also seep into the classroom, which Fraser notes as a telltale sign of an individual's character.
 
"The game all should link and what you're doing should all link," Fraser said. "Whether it's the core values, the training or whatever, it's all one big circle. The whole picture is like a snowball as it builds."
 
Though the philosophical tenets form the foundation of the program, the strategic and tactical elements are what excite Fraser the most as a coach. From that standpoint, he focuses on the most important thing on the field at any given moment: the ball. Simply put, Fraser wants the ball and he wants it all the time.
 
That desire dictates a possession-oriented style of building through the thirds that involves every player on the pitch, including the keeper. Using a base space that takes advantage of every inch of the field, Fraser wants his team to maintain possession, move the ball with penetrative passes and eventually expose the cracks inherent in opposing defenses to create scoring opportunities. Fraser envisions a relentless and persistent style that can systemically wear down teams. It is also a team-wide approach that is not predicated by a flash of individual brilliance.
 
"We don't want to be the team that ends up winning games based off of one individual just smashing one in the top corner. We don't want to be that team that has one special player that just wins it for us," Fraser said. "We want to a team where we can score goals from all over the place, all over the field. We want to be infectious."
 
Of course, it's not entirely possible to have the ball for every second of a 90-minute match, but Fraser has an answer for that as well on the defensive end of the spectrum, which relies on an organic, flowing system of building a wall. That tactic of block defending asks a lot of each individual defender, but it can lead to counterattack opportunities and comprised defenses on the other end of the pitch if executed properly.
 
"Our players understand how hard it is defensively. When we don't have the ball, you have to work harder than when we do have it. If you do that, we will have it for 60-70 percent of the game and you won't have to do this for as long."
 
Even the smartest and most productive strategy can be upended if it isn't presented to the players in a way that resonates and cultivates. That's where Fraser leans on his educational background as a major influence. With an undergraduate degree in physical education and coaching, master degrees in teaching and strategic leadership and an MBA on the way, Fraser values his own continual educational and actively seeks to understand the wide variety of individual learning styles on a roster of over 25 players.
 
Shortly after Fraser was hired, he tested all of his players to discover each individual's unique learning style, whether it was kinetic, audio or visual. From that, Fraser learned the most effective method of distilling information to each player and the team as whole. The strategies, tactics and principles that were formulated prior to his arrival at Lincoln Memorial can then be instilled and nurtured much faster.
 
Fraser's reliance on the power of education, as well as the core values of the program, is also manifested in his unerring stance in the nature versus nurture argument. Simply put, he doesn't believe in the idea of talent and takes offense to the word itself, as it discredits the work that it takes to reach the highest levels of a profession. For Fraser, physical literacy can be taught and improved, particularly in a sport like soccer.
 
"I don't believe in talent at all. People talk about God-given talent like you're just born with a gift. I don't believe that one bit. We are all born equally. Obviously we have different body structures but that's it. In technically difficult sports, how can you have a gift that makes you better than someone else? I hate the word talent.
 
"The best people in every sport are the ones that have worked the smartest and have been obsessed with it. They've been obsessed with their own development and let it consume them a little bit. You can teach somebody physical literacy, but they have to be obsessed with it."
 
From Fraser's standpoint, physical literacy can be learned in many ways. The first goes back to the learning styles, but the tactics that are taught are executed by developing awareness on the pitch. Fraser wants his players to play on the half turn, always thinking a step ahead and analyzing what they see to make decisions. Players should be asking themselves questions the entirety of a match, which then forces opponents to do the same.
 
"If you're asking yourself a question, then you're asking your opponent at the same time, too," Fraser said. "They have to make a decision."
 
Physical literacy can also be improved by creating a competitive environment on a day-to-day basis, which Fraser hopes to do through the use of GPS units to measure physical capabilities and specific achievements, such as longest run or top speed reached on a given day. Players are also committed to the idea of "collecting coins" based on pass completions and percentages.
 
With carefully defined roles through detailed player profiles that outline the specific roles and responsibilities of each player on the team, the creation of a competitive atmosphere, a concentration on the values of the program and a unified system of play that relies on every player equally to realize excellence, Fraser believes chemistry can be created organically.
 
"When you have a culture where you've added all of these pieces in that are different but contribute to the jigsaw puzzle equally, it all blends together better than just having star players."
 
So far, the results speak for themselves. The Lady Railsplitters went 9-0-1 over the course of 10 spring matches. It gets going for real on August 31 when Lincoln Memorial begins the Sean Fraser era at Erskine.
 
The process will remain exactly the same, though, and that's something Fraser has been working towards since his coaching career began nearly 10 years ago.