USSF C License Course

Like we tell the kids: you are in control of your own development.

The amount of information you learn from something is totally dependent on what you choose to learn. Sure, and instructor can help or hurt, but he can't stop anyone from learning.

 

The C is about teaching principles of play and technique in a small sided environment.

It is not that there is no coverage of anything bigger than 4v4 (5v5 inc keepers), it is that the testing is not done on anything bigger than 4v4.

You have a technical and a tactical topic for field sessions that you are evaluated on. There are a couple of 9v9 sessions included, purely meant to be instructional, and how this sort of training applies to the full system is covered as well. There is also a very brief discussion of systems of play.

I understand why they want to stop at 4v4 for the evaluation of candidates. One can adequately show knowledge of the game and how to teach both principles of play and technique in the 4v4 environment - there are enough players to do it, and it should be relatively easy for those with a good understanding. When you add more players, they are essentially distracters, and more variables to confuse the situation. There are enough who struggle in the D and C in the 4v4 environment that I have seen to make me believe that it would be unfair to ask many of them to try to prove themselves in a game any larger and more complicated than absolutely necessary.

Extend the same logic to the B, and the 9v9 functional training that they are looking for, and the logic makes sense. Here is my problem with it. It assumes that testing is the most important part of the course, rather than teaching.

Sure, they do try to teach. However, with the time and monetary investment of all the candidates, the instructors are sensitive (rightly so) to the desire of everyone to pass, so they spend too much time teaching how to pass the course rather than focusing solely on learning the game and how to teach it more effectively.

The courses are not horrible. If you attend with an open mind and put forth your best, you will learn. If you expect to learn everything you need to know in 6 days (remember, two days of the course are purely testing), then you will be sorely disappointed. You are taught some building blocks, and then you must take them back and figure out how it all applies to your age and level of play. You get a little help on how to build it into a full system, but remember that the real focus of the C does not pertain to the size of the game necessarily, but to teaching technique and small group tactics.

Good luck have fun.

 

Great post. Don't take this the wrong way, but from dozens and dozens of others posts of yours that I have read, I had no idea you could write so well. Kind of fascinating, actually.

 

I think it all depends if I am posting off the top of my head or not. How tired I am if you notice most of my posts I make are at three in the morning. How fast I am typing or if am pasting an old post. For some reason I can't always do it from my iPad. I can do it off my desk top. If the spell check is off or on. Not bad for a guy not born here originally.

I also write lousy Italian and German. My daughter always corrects my English yet she graduated from Columbia university and she does not have to pay a school loan because I paid it.

 

Hi, I'm new to the forums, I was just browsing when I saw this and had to register in order to respond.

Nick, I won't quibble with the overall message here as you have good advice to give but you're not accurate about the format of the course. I took it last January at a USSF national coaching school and the C/B courses are undergoing major overhaul. I think it's fair to describe my course as a transitional one but for every single session we were asked to run built to a 9 v 9 game. There is new emphasis on functional training and the mantra of the course is "how to connect the lines" in all phases of play; by stage three of four your training session had better look like some fairly large slice of the big game (having two lines represented by the team being coached with players in actual positions from the big game) or you won't pass.

OP, if you have more questions feel free to ask them and I'll answer as best as I can.

 

My experience was the way I posted it but that was some time ago.

What about the B that was about 9 v 9 and functional training

 

The way it was explained to me is that the new C course resembles much of the old B, and the B is now concerned with building to 11 v 11.

There are other changes planned for the coaching courses that I gathered from other USSF events. They plan on splitting the national licensing into "Youth" and "Pro" tracks. They will be adding a Pro license above the A like UEFA did. They plan on adding things like a technical director license. They will be going to something more akin to a UEFA model on the national licensing, so that you'll take the course, coach your team through a season while logging your sessions and receiving mentoring online, and then return for evaluation (I think the D license already has something like this). So like I said, my course was definitely a transitional one and I think it is going to change even more in the near future before it is all said and done, as are the rest of the courses.

 

From my (really really pathetically awful) experience with the D and what others have said, I've learned one major thing: The USSF courses lack consistency. I see one person posting about how they focused more on testing than teaching and I think, "Yup, that was mine and why I didn't find it useful" to someone else saying they had it more of a mentor session and in small groups. That was DEFINITELY not mine. I'm also noticing where people take the test and seeing a trend. Again, the consistency. I do know this from my experience and conversations with other local coaches: Don't do USSF courses in Missouri. Up north seems to do a better job of them. If had the more teaching courses I would have enjoyed and taken more from it, but that's a personal preference.

Do take it with a grain of salt because I'm still butthurt from spending all that money only to have the evaluators know their National candidates first day based upon who they knew...two years later...I don't let go very well. haha

 

Back to lcstriker11 - here are a few bits of advice.

1. Don't try to reinvent the wheel with your training sessions. You will not get dinged at all if you do exactly what the instructors did on your topic, or take someone else's session you liked and seemed to go well and use it yourself. If you are having trouble with your plan, ask other candidates who seem to know their stuff for ideas. This is not the time to show your innovative side. That doesn't mean you can't use your own favorite sessions or tweak them to fit the theme of the course, but make sure your sessions jive with the expectations of the instructors.

2. Make your session look like soccer as much as possible. The two main takeaways from the course are functional training and "connecting two lines," so you will not go wrong if your second stage activity involves one full line from the team you are coaching and build from there. EG, if your topic is "coach your team to press high up the field," start with your forward line and build the activity from there, and then add the midfield line in your third stage activity. Once you get to 9 v 9, you're just typically adding 0-2 players and should maintain the shape you've established along the way. So in the pressing example, assuming you're coaching your team to press in a 4-3-3, your 9 v 9 formation should be 2-3-3.

3. Keep it simple. I heard instructors say several times that the more rules, restrictions, complications, etc. you impose on the game, the farther away from real soccer you get. Lots of times you saw the exact same setup (numbers, dimensions, objectives, etc.) for two different training sessions on two different topics, just with different coaching points.

4. Make sure your session is engineered to generate maximum reps for the team you are coaching while still maintaining natural endpoints. For example, if your topic is switching the point of attack, you don't want the attacking team to be out of possession and chasing the ball all over the place, so don't have the defending team attack a big goal, counter goals, etc. Just give them a simple objective like "return the ball to the coach" so that play can be restarted for the attacking team.

5. In my course, once you got to the 9 v 9 fourth stage, they limited coaches to one "freeze" of play each. When you freeze play to make a coaching point, the instructors are looking for moments where you can (properly) correct as many players as possible. Don't use a freeze to correct a single player's technical error or poor choice; look for big picture moments where there's a more systemic breakdown and you can move a lot of players around.

6. Have fun! The whole experience generates a lot of camaraderie between you and your fellow candidates as you grind yourselves into a pulp playing in all the sessions for several hours a day and stressing out about your practice sessions and exams. I met a lot of really great people in my course and learned as much, if not more, from them than I did the instructors.

Any questions feel free to ask. I realize you're not going for a while but I hope this helps.

 

That a good move by the USSF long over do. Then maybe when American coach goes to another country and wants to coach in that country they won't laugh in his face.

 

on freeze play I was doing that before I ever got a coaching license. To me it is just a common sense thing to do sometimes. So they can see something they did not see in the moment. Wait until later they won't know what your talking about because that moment in time and space had passed. They were trying to phase out using freeze play.

 

"Freeze" is the most intrusive of the tools in the coach's toolbox and therefore the least preferred these days. They emphasize coaching during the flow of play and quick points at natural stoppages. There are moments where "freeze" is necessary; the trick is making sure you get a lot of bang for your buck when you deploy it.

 

Freeze was big in ours. Some people were having a hard time with it because they forced it. Others (like me) don't like using it constantly. I like to give credit to more experienced players and assume they know what they did incorrectly and thus, I don't need to step in if I see it in a player's reaction. A few candidates had a hard time because there were no reasons to freeze anything and the evaluators didn't appreciate it. If you are lucky enough to watch others before you are evaluated, just get a feel for how much they want. One guy was even told he should find a reason (legit or not) to stop play. Seems awkward but you gotta go through the motions.

 

Hah, this is an interesting question because when I was preparing for the course, the C license info website at USSF had "videotape a session or write written summaries of three sessions" as a pre-course assignment. USSF staff sent materials for another pre-course assignment a month before the course (which I will talk about in a second) and I followed up with them asking if we were still required to do the "videotape a session/write summaries of three" thing and they said that we were. I wrote summaries of three sessions and when I got there the instructors were like, yeah, you didn't have to do that.

Anyways, the ACTUAL pre-course assignment they had us do was a technical summary of a match. So they sent a link to a video stream/download of a game and a form to fill out with a series of questions about the game. The game and summary served as a reference point throughout the course. Instructors referred to it in their lectures and training sessions when talking about soccer problems they were trying to solve and it was helpful to think about that game when we were devising our own sessions. We turned in our technical summary at the beginning of the course and got it back a couple of days later with some comments. We then got a chance to revise it and handed the finished product in when we did our oral final; the exam questions were based on the game as well. So the pre-course assignment was really a way to get everybody thinking about the same game for purposes of grounding all of the elements of the course in real world application.

They also sent out the laws of the game test ahead of time - it isn't difficult.

As far as advice on the technical summary (if that's what they end up giving you) I'd say just give it your best shot and don't sweat it too much since you'll be given a chance to fix it later. Overall they're expecting you to be far more critical of the US team than you'd think, especially since they ask a couple of questions about what strengths the team had. By the time you do your revised version you'll have a pretty good idea about what the staff sees in the game and if you incorporate that and the comments they make into your final version you should be pretty well prepared for the oral exams.

 

The Federation is undergoing some major changes in all of the coaching licenses. They are in the process of increasing the hours for each course, making the courses more tactical in nature for the more advanced coach, and straight up trying to weed out the coaches who are not invested in their coaching career to take a more labor intensive course that demands more time and more money.

I feel a lot of the changes that have been implemented like mentoring and time with your club team between sessions is very valuable and makes the courses more applicable. But the changes are very drastic from what we've been used to.

I'm on my local state instruction staff and we've even received a "revamped" version of the E license for the third year in a row, let alone the D and the new C/B/A licenses. I know that the C license is definitely 9v9 in nature and focuses on connecting the lines with each other in tactical elements. The B and the A are both set up in an 11v11 format. All national residential courses are set up with a match analysis theme to them. Meaning every candidate watches a match, writes up an analysis, and that analysis and match are used as the blueprint for the entire course to connect all the elements of the course together. Oral test questions are related to this match analysis, and the Federation is getting really big into how coaches read and breakdown the game. There is also a major push to educate coaches about the exercise science component of coaching. This is directly related to Klinsmann's personal focus in the sports sciences.

All this being said, the content has changed but the principles of what you need to do have remained the same to pass. Figure out what the instructors feel are the important elements, learn what they are looking for in your practice assessments and in their example sessions, and give that to them in the final testing elements. The tactical elements and subjects of training sessions are more complicated because they involve more numbers, but to be honest the skill of passing these courses remains the same.

I agree with the comment made earlier that NSCAA courses are more geared toward TEACHING you to be a better coach. I'm also on the national staff for the NSCAA and I enjoy the philosophy much more when I'm conducting one of their courses as opposed to the USSF courses. But ultimately the NSCAA courses are similar to the Federations where you need to give the instructors what they are looking for. It's just at NSCAA courses the instructors will sit down with you and talk that out.

 

I am taking the "C" very soon, and in their pre-course packet they send out, they require a game analysis. Does anyone have any insight to this game, or have taken this course recently and can comment on this?

The game analysis is for U17 USA vs. France.

 

I am actually working on the technical summary
any insight will help

 

What kind of insight are you looking for? They should have outlined what kind of information they are looking for from you. The packets are pretty specific and indepth for what they want.