advice needed please!

[tsunami1717]

hey all -

im a u-14 girls player from iowa and i will be attending a boarding school next year. i've been involved with ODP for three years and train about 20-30 hours per week all year. my club team isn't very good.. a result of not having a wide pool to choose from in iowa, but my club offers opportunities for dedicated players to play pretty often. my goal is to play college soccer.

my school only offers soccer for one season next year and i will try to play on a club team at school. if this is impossible, i will of course need to train by myself while im not playing (i'll come home and train in the summer). is it impossible to play college soccer during this schedule? i'm also looking for suggestions on things to do to elevate my game while training alone. thanks.

[scsurge22]

If you do a lot of training and playing over the summers such as leagues, tournaments and camps then you should have a pretty good chance of playing in college. Also the fact that you played some ODP helps too. As long as you play whenever you can you'll be fine.

[goyoureddevils]

To be honest, as a coach and former college and semi pro player, I would tell you to relax, enjoy life a little, and worry about college soccer in a couple of years when you are a junior in high school. Now is the time to develop your game, but don't look quite so far ahead - you have a lot of goals you need to achieve before then, and if you have your attention focused too far ahead, you are going to miss your opportunities to achieve them, let alone end up missing out on alot of the fun that you should be having before entering the dog eat dog world of grown-up-dom.

Concentrate on improving your speed of play through learning balance and precision with your skills and techniques. This takes alot of practice by your self and with a partner if you can find one. Work on your ability to think 2 or three passes ahead by playing alot of 5v2 and 4v4 keep away games with teamates. If you can learn to start thinking faster and have the technical ability to pull it off, then you will be just fine when it comes to playing college ball. But you will need to develop these skills now with an eye to making your local teams first, then odp, then whatever comes next. Before you go stressing about all of that though, let me tell you a little secret...... I never played a moment of odp, and never had a proffesional coach until I played semi pro. If you are good you will make it, trust in that and work hard, and you will be just fine.