The high-school team I coach just became the recipient of a nice sum of money to be used for the soccer program. What suggestions do you have for equipment I could purchase for training?
For permanent stuff we have four full size goals, cones, speed hurdles and ladders. Standard budget covers balls, bibs, field paint, medical supplies, meals from roadtrips, game day wear for coaches, and other basic necessities. Every other year we get new unis from booster club, and kids buy their practice gear once every three years (that way they only buy once in HS). Anything else you guys have found very useful?
A set of coaching poles. For a big HS squad, two or three sets (of 16). They can easily be used to make multiple small goals, quickly adjusted for size, used for fitness training or obstacle courses, etc. Are your full-size goals portable? If not, get at least one flat-face training goal you can set up at midfield to divide a full-size pitch into two half-size but with full goals. If I had the money and storage space, I'd get a couple of the movable full-size nets with wheels (like this) so field size can be changed quickly.
-Full-sized flat faced training goals. Seems redundant but I find them useful. -slalom poles -free kick mannequins -plyometric boxes (varying heights) -evasion belts -projector (to watch video/game video) and projecting surface -hi-pod to record our games from a high vantage point as you can see, I've NEVER thought of this before.
I used to be the video coordinator at a D1 college, so that above appeals to me. I've seen the Hi-Pod as well as other similar products, and I've been trying to come up with a cheaper alternative. Monoprice.com is coming out soon with a less expensive version of a GoPro (around $100). It shoots 720p/1080p HD with three hours of continuous battery life, and it has a 120-degree wide angle lens. There's also a company called polepixie.com that sells camera attachments that go on telescopic painter's poles. I've seen another DIY version of a setup similar to this, but I think this method might be even cheaper. I plan to try a setup in the future and I'll let you know how it looks.
I definitely like the slalom poles. Two questions: What about very small goals for small-side games? Does anyone use Hudl? Our football staff swears by it, and says we could get a great use. We obviously don't watch the amount of film they do, but would it be a worthy investment? We would get a price break due to football having it.
Small goals? As in PUGGs? I think they are very useful. What is Hudl? I'm very intrigued. I went to the website but couldn't figure it all out. How do they collect the footage?
There are tons of video/data analysis tools out there. This is one for iPad that I saw recently that is primarily for soccer. Expensive though. http://performasports.com/ This topic might be better split off into another thread.
Hudl is a great resource, but you really need to invest a lot of time to really get your money's worth out of it. We use it at the college level, and it's a great resource, especially with the online storage. Once our coaching staff edits the footage our players can access it through the internet and watch their sessions on their smartphones or on their personal computers before training. It's really a valuable software, but it is expensive and it takes time for someone to code all the film and make it useful. I got this free software from another forum (http://longomatch.org/). It was a useful software for coding and made watching film easier. Transferring film to a digital file however was a bit of a hassle and that's why we finally went to Hudl. But I wold recommend it if you just want something free that you can do a little editing and coding. Film is a great tool, but if your time with players is limited than it can be a very expensive and time consuming process for not much gain.
Here is how I've heard of using Hudl. You upload the game film, do your normal analyses, then mark your comments on the film using text, voice, telestration, whatever. Then the players can access the film from their computer, phone, ipad, whatever, and get your feedback. Our kids say they have a lot of down time at school near computers, and this would be a great time to supplement the "study" of the game. Plus, my staff could cut down the hours spent in front of the projector.
This is a great article by Vince Ganzberg on doing something very similar to what you're talking about. It perked my interest, and it's something my staff and I are going to try this upcoming spring training. We'll see how well we do with editing film before practices, but like you mentioned, we live in a media driven culture now, why not use it to help with our development of the sport?
Ah, I've been trying to get something like this into the hands of my parents and youth players—instead of talking in the abstract I could point to real situations. Although I am in the fortunate position because of my "real" job that I work with video editing software regularly and can voice it over. Main hurdles are time, like you said, to cut and annotate the footage and getting reasonable quality footage. Usually I have a mom videotaping the game (from a decent, elevated vantage point) but really misses on staying with the relevant framing of the action. but this would be a GREAT way to disseminate all that stuff.
Battle ropes and weighted sled to add some fun to conditioning and maybe some full size portable goals. Players and equipment aside - maybe your own education too?