First time I ever see this acronym. What is HPV stand for? I am not justifying this line of thinking at all but generally the smaller guys are a bit "shy" of being physical which is why bigger guys get benefit of the doubt. I see this is often mistaken for having more aggressive mentally. I think coaches are mistaken thinking this is something that can't be taught. If you feel bigger you are naturally more confident. This is what I have experienced not sure if its holds up statistically.
HPV = Height Peak Velocity. Some authors use PHV--Peak Height Velocity. Either way it refers to the typical adolescence growth spurt.
This is not been my experience. I bet you never played "pointy" football or ice hockey. You wouldn't be saying this. Organized sports bring out the aggressiveness in players regardless of size. In soccer big guys don't always use their size to beat players. And I see plenty of smaller guys trying to play physical, by holding, elbowing, and pushing. When I played competively I was usually the biggest, strongest player on the pitch at 5'11" and 210 lbs. (I looked about 180 lbs.) This also gave me an extremely low center of gravity compared to the taller centerbacks, who I usually outweighed. I "shyed" away from using my size and used skill to beat players. Opponents would only make the mistake once of trying to play me physically. After I ran through them enough, we got back to playing soccer.
I was 5'11" 130 lbs my senior year of high school. I don't think I would have survived playing pointy ball... If you saw me run you wouldn't think velocity, more like slow motion At 210 lb my friend you are a freight train. Dont' think you will get outmuscled much and 5'11 is decent height depending whether you played against latin americans and some Europeans. I come from the other end of the spectrum. I was always smallest guy until about 22 is when i hit 180lbs or so. What I meant to allude to though was the u8-u12 ages. I agree with you that at high school ages the psychology is different and even if the opponent has a few pounds or inches you won't shy away. Was this your mentally at younger ages though? I don't think its common. I think its something that is learned to compensate. Although, getting into an area, short man complex, (Psychology) that is not my expertise. What I have seen across the board, here in california, is the bigger guy getting picked and using his physical advantage to beat opponents.
I misunderstood. I assumed wrongly that you were talking about U14 and above (the start of ODP). Yes I have seen some coaches do that, but usually it is focused on picking the oldest kids available-- apparently the coach hopes to gain a transitory advantage from having more mature players than his peers have. (In defense of those coaches, somebody has to take the strongest or the quickest, or the most skilled--so why not pick as many as you can.) This only creates a controversy because people (both the "haves" and the "have nots") care about match results. I don't think there ought to be organized teams for U-littles at all. We should be using an academy approach before U-14 that focuses on individual player development. That means that any matches would be played by ad hoc (temporary) teams. No fixed teams so no fixed coaches of teams. No team identity at all. Just like pickup games at the local park. Avoids all the problems inherent in the league/team structure. Problems introduced by adults. This change in approach has to start with USSF regulations which require all registered players to be registered to a team. The alternative of course is to not affiliate with USSF or any of its organizations.
I think for U-littles this concept is great to just hold clinic style practices and then random have coaches pick teams to play on the weekends. One question/dilema though....so if you have say 40 U8s (say 5-6 teams normally) in your organization how do you run practices? If you have 5 coaches do you also move the kids round robin between the coaches and let them get different drills and such by different people? I'm talking about rec. league with volunteer parents as coaches. Some with soccer experience but many without. Wouldn't all the parents of the kids eventually want to migrate practices and games to 1 good coach and avoid the others? The other volunteer coaches will feel either angry or insecure or embarrassed. It would take too much coordination and disagreements in philosophy to have coaches meet and plan sessions together. Just wouldn't work...too many cooks in the kitchen / too many generals. Solutions? In concept I really think our rec. league should do this approach for U6 and U8 levels but don't know how to get it done effectively with volunteer coaching.
You would have central control of the practice by a lead instructor with the others acting as assistants. The allows a director of coaching to control the practices while still allowing the same amount of personal attention between player and coach. The lead instructor can "coach" the assistant coaches providing a learning experience for them too. This puts your best coach into a position that benefits everybody. I would like to mention in an academy setting you don't have to segregate players into separate sessions by age. You can mix and match ages within your exercises as desired. You can assign players of like ability to work together or mix up ability levels to suit your training purpose. To conceptionalize this see page 20 of the USYSA Small Sided Games Manual for a diagram of how to place 6 U8 4v4 "fields" on a single field (48 players with no rest or 72 players with 1/3 resting). See pages 27-30 for a description of how to organize "street soccer" style matches in lieu of organized teams. With older kids you might include some ball mastery work or other skills training. http://www.usyouthsoccer.org/coaches/smallsidedgames/
And this is what's holding back youth development in America. It's why we've improved to a certain point but stagnated because size and athleticism can only compensate so much for lack of technical skill and soccer IQ. In reality, all other things are rarely equal. Sure you have the occasional exception like Zlatan, but bigger players tend NOT have as good technical skills as smaller players for one simple reason: they don't have to. They grow up learning to rely on their size and strength because that's what makes them "effective" (to use your word) in the short term. Smaller players know they have to use their lower center of gravity and be quicker and more technical if they want to be effective. Who would you rather have on your team big Robert Huth and Peter Crouch? Or little Messi and Xavi? At the end of the day, there is no one answer. "Effectiveness" is really about fitting in to a team's system. If your system is direct or long ball, then yes, bigger, more powerful players will probably be more effective. If your system is based on short passing, possession and movement, then smaller, more technically gifted players will probably be more effective.
I don't necessarily agree with this. There's a big gap between Huth/Crouch and Messi/Xavi. There are a lot of tall, excellent technical players between the former and the latter. I watched Chelsea-DC United in the stadium, watched them warm up (pre-game and half time), watched them in the second half when the reserves came in. The Chelsea reserves were very technically capable—even the defenders. A lot of the players on top teams have great technical ability. Across the board we do a poor job developing players and demanding that they be technically better.
That's my point (maybe I wasn't clear in getting it across). Size is just one more attribute along side speed, agility, foot skills, soccer IQ, footedness, heading ability, passing ability and shooting ability. I just don't think it's any more important than the others. I think a lot of coaches in this country disagree. To answer the original poster's point, yes if the final seven attributes are identical between two players and one is bigger than the other, then yes, the bigger player will probably be more effective. But in the real world, how often are two players going to be identical in every respect except for size? Pretty rarely. In the real world, you're balancing all these different attributes with your particular system. In my system, the playmaking center mid is the focal point so size really is secondary to the more technical aspects. Sure, if I get the rare gem like Zidane who has both size and brilliant playmaking ability, I'll take him in a heartbeat. But those players tend to be smaller. If a coach's system is based on a rugged back four or long balls to a target man, then he'll look at the size more. There is no one size fits all answer.
sorry, I missed your point originally. player selection, to me, goes as follows: top 25%-33% and bottom 25%-33% is easy. Make the team or cut. It's the middle of the pack where the "horse trading" goes on. Big vs small, agile vs plodding, good in the air vs no chance, etc—I guess my point is more of advice to the small player: You won't get selected if you're only just as good as the big guy—you have to be better, and MUCH better at that. Coaches are human and prone to bias, we can lament and gnash our teeth about that fact but it will never change. As a player deal with what you can control.
I'll take smarter too. Soccer IQ can go a long way in making up physical defeciencies. We toss around names of small players like Messi and Xavi and say that what makes these able to compete with the more physicaly gifted players is there tremendous skill. Obviously that is partly true. I would go further and say they augment that with very healthy doses of game intelligence. They literally think and act faster than there opponents, analyzing the situation and solving the tactical problem, giving them time to display those beautiful skills. It's often times why they make it look so easy for them. A lot of that is natural. A lot is based on years of experience. It can be trained to some extent but not every player can be as cerebral as these guys on the field. The little guys though almost have to do this.
Pirlo is a great example. Average size, not all that fleet of foot, 33 years old, but as effective as he's ever been, as witnessed during the Euros. Why? Because he's intelligent...always in the right spot off the ball and makes good decisions on the ball. They don't call him "The Architect" for nothing.
Agree completely. Going back to the chelsea example, I'm not exaggerating when I say the reserves were really good and if you can't see the names their indiscernible from a skill standpoint. So game smarts is most likely the main difference. Was watching a high school game before my old-guy's match last night and, again, apart from technically lacking the kids were basically dumb as rocks. 90% of play was gain possession, get the ball forward (not necessarily boot and chase, they'd play to feet), then the attacker would not wait for support. Just start chugging forward. No sense of transition as a group, no sense of waiting, no sense of numbers up/down. SMH.
Agreed and that he can put the ball anywhere he wants. It's the formula: soccer IQ + high technical ability= really good soccer player.
From a domestic perspective, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when it comes to how physical and how much size is revered among coaches. A coach who gets beat say they need size and aggression over technique and skill in order to compete, so they get those players. Then they adjust their coaching philosophy from then on to play more physically and direct, and the cycle continues. As we hear all the time, it's competition that's the catalyst. Sure, by high school age it's as much or more about winning as development, but at the younger ages more emphasis gets placed on winning as many no-name tourneys and unheard of leagues instead of developing those future US Xavi and Iniesta sized players as well as the bigger kids. I read somewhere a while back that if both of them were American, they would have been flushed out of the system long ago because coaches would say they're too small to play the game.
Anecdote: My U12 rec girls team was slicing through their competition during the season with two games left. The head coach got us a scrimmage against a local U12 club team. As expected, the club team played a physical game and while we played decently, there were obvious holes. This was done to prepare them for our last two games against teams we knew would be as big and more aggressive. The head coach wanted to focus a little too much on like for like, trying to match their aggressiveness. The only problem was 80% of our team didn't play that way and wouldn't despite us showing them. They were a good passing and spacing team. When we tried to play the opponents' game we didn't do well. When we stuck to our guns and played our game we were more successful, despite the opponents' size and aggression.
It's an arms race and there's a finite amount of bigger/faster you can get to because we all have limited player pools. And, I truly believe, that smaller, skillful (not necessrily across the board) can compete with bigger IF we implement the right system. 50/50 balls do not favor smaller players, so we have to eliminate speculative passes. Play more like Barca, which is why they play the way they do—their key players cannot compete if they just send 50/50 balls in. It's a reason I don't like high school because there's not enough time to install a ball possession type style.
I have to disagree there. We have managed this just fine. Although we work together as a program, not as individual teams. We basically get kids for 6 years starting when they are in 7th grade. More than enough time. Now if your HS teams/coaches operate as single entities not cooperating across levels then you are probably right. 10-12 weeks makes it tough if the players are not knowledgable enough to really establish this and be successfull on a competition basis.
Never said it was impossible but I can guarantee you're the exception and not the norm. In my own corner of the world, our 7th grade, 8th grade, jr high and sr high teams are all run independently. They're supposed to be coordinated but that's loosely (very)—(they wear the same uniforms) and each coach is trying to win to keep his/her job and there is no emphasis on a unified system so you can imagine the outcome.
I think we get caught up in the physical aspects of players. The "can't teach speed or high" mentality can cripple all of us. (I'll even admit to it) But what we forget that in the sense that we cant teach physical speed, we also can't teach mental speed. If you ever run across a young player with soccer IQ and mental capabilities, sign him instantly. With soccer being the chess game that it is, having a player that's thinking a step ahead is the difference between a talent and a soccer player.
I don't agree. We can improve speed including decision making. But what is not used won't be improved. Speed and agility training should be included for even U-Littles. Maybe especially for U-Littles. Decision making should be included in drill design. As for height, this is not basketball with the goals 10 feet above the ground. Any attacking player above 5' 6" (66 inches) is not going to be disadvantaged in finishing with the head. The soccer goal starts on the ground and goes 8 foot (96 inches) in the air. That means that the ideal service is going to be less than 8 foot in the air when played. Any normal adult male athlete can through training increase his vertical leap to 30 inches. A 26 inch vertical leap is quite ordinary for adult male athletes. On defense the circumstances are different. Being able to jump higher than 8 feet is an a defensive advantage allowing defenders to make clearing headers before the service gets to the attacker. So every extra inch of height allows the defenders to clear more high crosses out of the box.
yeah, the can't teach speed might be applicable to straight sprints, but not the stop and start speed typical of all team sports. That type of agility is very teachable. The thing is, there is a fair amount of technique to agility, you have to learn how to stop and cut quickly, at young ages just playing tag, etc. is fine, but eventually you need someone who can teach some technique and work the necessary strength.
This is the point I'm talking about (not to be condescending). We value the speed and agility at an age where they play a huge factor. Any U-little with decent size can muscle his way through a back line, but it's the players that can use their soccer skills and sense that we should be focusing on. At some point everyone's going to plateau physically and the smarter will survive.
I think you might be minimizing the value of physical height in the game of soccer. All things being equal, height is always an advantage in the game of soccer. Why? Because soccer is designed to be a “4-D”, not a “3-D”, game. Like most sports (and warfare), the most fundamental objective of the game of soccer is to control the dimensions of time and space better than your opponent does. And there are currently 4 known dimensions of time and space: 1. Time 2. Length 3. Width 4. Height The rules of the game of soccer state that the game is to be played within 3-dimensional, not 2-dimensional, space. The playing space is not limited simply to the length and width of the field. The playing space is also the “height” of the field, and the “height” of the field is infinite… Put another way, the game of soccer is designed to be played within a cube of infinite height, not merely along a plane. Consequently, the game currently benefits taller players because, all things being equal, taller players control more space than shorter players, even before they step foot onto the field. So, until the rules change regarding the height dimension of the playing area, all things being equal, height will always be an advantage in the game of soccer.