DerbyRam54
26 Sep 2007, 01:06 PM
My girlfriend and I have started coaching a U-14 boys travel team. Most but not all of the players also play on their middle school team and have practices 5 days a week. The pitch at the middle school is rock-hard and with three weeks of the season gone we started getting complaints about sore ankles and general fatigue.
Since I can't control what the middle school coach does I decided to change our next practice session. We'd noticed that their heading skills left a lot to be desired, so off we went to a riverside beach (my girlfriend is a certified lifeguard, so I felt comfortable with the waterside environment) where there is a beach volleyball court. I had them do some warmup exercises tossing the ball to each other and heading it, then we played a wonderfully chaotic game of throw-head-catch followed by a game of volleyball where you could use any legal surface of the body to keep the ball in the air and eventually back over the net (keeper was allowed to box the ball).
One of my parents who is very critical of our coaching (you don't do enough coaching while they're playing etc) no doubt was close to having a meltdown as he sat and watched this free-for-all. But....they had fun and by the end of the volleyball game I was starting to see some pretty good heading rallies. What I will see in the next match will be interesting, but I felt it was good to let them blow off some steam and relax.
Any other ideas for "stealth" practices?
Since I can't control what the middle school coach does I decided to change our next practice session. We'd noticed that their heading skills left a lot to be desired, so off we went to a riverside beach (my girlfriend is a certified lifeguard, so I felt comfortable with the waterside environment) where there is a beach volleyball court. I had them do some warmup exercises tossing the ball to each other and heading it, then we played a wonderfully chaotic game of throw-head-catch followed by a game of volleyball where you could use any legal surface of the body to keep the ball in the air and eventually back over the net (keeper was allowed to box the ball).
One of my parents who is very critical of our coaching (you don't do enough coaching while they're playing etc) no doubt was close to having a meltdown as he sat and watched this free-for-all. But....they had fun and by the end of the volleyball game I was starting to see some pretty good heading rallies. What I will see in the next match will be interesting, but I felt it was good to let them blow off some steam and relax.
Any other ideas for "stealth" practices?