While physical resources play a significant role in a team’s success, the MUT Sports coaches hired for the 2025 academic year will have more than just resources to rely on. They will also call upon the vast information they received from one of the most successful soccer coaches in the country, Manqoba Mngqithi, the current coach of Lamontville Golden Arrows, a Premier Soccer League club. Mngqithi won nine trophies with Mamelodi Sundowns. These include winning an Africa Champions League trophy.
On 28 March 2025, at the induction of 38 staff members, Mngqithi shared his journey to stardom with the coaches. He told them that the journey is a litany of successes and failures, in some cases a result of his ignorance, but he learned a great deal from everything that happened to him as he progressed from one level to the next. Here are some of the many lessons that the MUT coaches got from the very astute coach. “Be fair to all that you work with, particularly your players. When you coach a team or a club, your team is determined by your personality. You give it character. I chose to dominate the teams I was playing against. But I needed players that would make the plan possible,” Mngqithi said.
Mngqithi said coaches should be educators who would have planted something and watched it grow. “If you have planted something, you will be a good coach. As a coach, you have a responsibility to nurture talent,” he said. This very quiet professional, born in KwaZulu-Natal’s Mzimkhulu on the border with the Eastern Cape, said he realised that it was important to be professionally competent. “This means that coaches should have a firm grounding,” he said. Mngqithi believes being a football coach is about being a leader, which is why he reads leadership books. One of these is by John Maxwell, titled How Successful People Lead. He recommended that the coaches read this book.
Another vital lesson that Mngqithi imparted to the MUT coaches was that they needed to be mindful that sports coaching is a highly competitive business. He told them that coaching football is a short winter blanket. There is always a possibility that things will go bad.
The session was supposed to take 90 minutes, from 1.30 pm to 3 pm, but it finished towards 6 pm because Mngqithi had a lot to say, and the coaches were very interested in his presentation and asked a lot of questions.