Thanks for sharing. I think about this from time to time-at young ages we coaches spend a lot of time training our kids what to do with the ball-it’s necessary. But do we train enough about what they should do do without the ball?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqSPH7WU4AEgiZr.png:large ran this drill last night and it was great. At first they were forcing every pass but soon learned to swing the ball on the outside to create better passing lanes. Definitely using this again next week.
Saw Ian Barker post a similar drill recently. It's a nice rondo drill. I think the discussion around it was creating a progression to it. Stage 1: everyone outside the big circle, unopposed activation-level drill Stage 2: make it into a big rondo, add 2 defenders in the middle Stage 3: add target players like you have in the small circle.
had to make cuts for our spring 19U team yesterday. it's always a bummer to do, but this year we decided to keep a few "training players" so i only had to cut cut three kids. the training players will train with us and be reinforcements during game days if we're really shorthanded. that gives us 22 players so we can run full sided scrimmages if everyone shows up (not often) or at least run 9v9 scrimmages to work on issues. there's nothing worse than running a 19U training session in mid-april cold with 11 guys. hopefully we can avoid that this spring.
Whats the training players incentive? They are never going to see the field. Why play with you when (atleast around us) the U19 numbers drop way-off as kids are hanging up their cleats left and right and preping for college and moving on.
It is a training and playing opportunity (albeit not playing matches with this team). Asking this question makes it sound like you don't like playing soccer. I hung up my cleats at 64.
At u19, unless you are very high level and kids are playing to be seen by a college or pro scout, I think with a roster of 18, you’d be lucky to get 13 to show up each week. My 04 team had 18 players. Between injuries and lame excuses, we had an average of 13 per game this year.
my situation is a lot different from most being at a small club in a rural area. our 19U team is the only high school aged travel team within a 30 mile radius. the regular team is going to be a mix of kids born in 2000, 2001, and 2002, and the kids we offered positions as training players are freshmen and sophomores. the incentive is for them to have a team to train with instead of doing nothing in the spring. last spring we had good turn out most of the time, but we also only had one senior. this spring we're going to have a handful of seniors so i expect to encounter more of @Timbuck's "lame excuses". if our regulars aren't showing up for training or can't make a game for whatever reason, we'll let the training players dress for games. i have an everyone plays philosophy for league games and friendlies so if they're dressed, they will get to play.
List of girls 2004 lame excuses this year: 1. I knew one of my 18 players wasn’t able to play on Sunday for religious (Mormon) reasons. Not a lame excuse, but when our league schedule came out, we had. 6 out of 10 games on a Sunday. Strong player and we missed her on the field. I had one family get upset that they had to miss (Christian) church due to so many Sunday games that they skipped a game near the end of the season to attend church. 2. Private school has a school volleyball league in Fall. Many of their games happened to be on the same night as our practice. So 1 player missed a lot of training. So she didn’t get on the field as much as players who always attended practice. 3. One girl is having some mental health issues. Not a lame excuse, but I had planned for her to be a big part of our team this year. She made it to 2 games. 4. Mid-season weekend vacations. I can’t fault a family for taking time off for family stuff. But this is competitive soccer. If you are planning to miss 20% of the games because you are going to your dads college homecoming one weekend and your moms the following weekend- there’s a rec program that you should sign up for instead. 5. Girl participating in a school play. Missed a lot of practice due to play practice. Missed 1 game due to dress rehearsal. And each week we had at least 1 girl with an injury (foot stress fracture, concussion, mouth surgery). I’m going to try and carry 20 next year.
Sounds like others below your response matched my original question. It wasn't about not playing but knowing that around me the teams that have U19s (Sr's in HS struggle to fill a roster with kids moving on and I was wondering why those training players wouldn't just move to another club where they would get playing time. Knowing the OP is in a rural area and the U19s are not straight 19s but 16s, 17s and 19s it makes perfect sense for the young ones to get experience.
I just looked at your profile page. It is cool that you are interested in soccer and coaching. FYI. 1. All U19s are "young ones". Players are not considered fully developed until mid-20s when full physical maturity arrives. 2. For competition purposes, these "training players" are not on the team roster so are free to join other teams. Competitions have rules restricting players from playing on multiple teams in the same competition; USSF has rules restricting some of their players from playing on multiple teams; and some coaches have team rules restricting their players from playing on multiple teams, but generally players are free to play on multiple teams that don't compete against each other. 3. For females, USSF defines "boys" teams to allow females on the roster. But females unable to make a U19 female team are unlikely to be good enough or confident enough to play with and against adult men (males over 18). (For unaffiliated leagues and tournaments, the rules of competition can vary widely.) In stphnsn's case, the unrostered training players could join another team in the league, but then I suspect that they would lose their training spot because of competitive concerns.
A couple of those aren't exactly lame, as you pointed out. But I do feel your pain. When they are younger, you still feel obligated to play them as much as the others despite there being no discernible commitment to the team sport.
@elessar78 Look at it this way, you cannot get them to love playing soccer if they aren't playing soccer. I think rotating players through different positions contributes to the fun factor. Marginalizing a player's participation by, for example, having them play only in the back line and forbidding them from ever attacking is the surest way I know to create haters of the game. I don't care if they say that is where they want to play. You can't learn to swim standing on the pool ladder. Not saying that any coach here would do this, but I expect we all have seen it happen some where, some time.
Is the kid considered weak relative to the teammates? If they all progress at the same rate, then that kid will be considered weak for the rest of his time on the team. Would this limit the growth of the player?
@pu.ma Kids progress unevenly and at different rates. Both in terms of skill development and physical and emotional development. Effective coaches always monitor progress. The farther along in player development the more individualized the training needs to be. In the beginning general training plans work because every player needs to develop everything. Individual priorities are not needed. I also expect elessar78 was speaking tongue in cheek. He and I share the same views on player development even if at times we might debate the fine points.
I don't feel so bad after reading some of the reasons players don't show up. About 3 or 4 years back, nobody showed up for the last practice except my son. we ended up joining with other teams. As a matter of fact, there was a team that only had 2 players show up for a game, I had to lend them some of my players. I had a player who just flat out decided not to finish the season. We won most of our games, but just by chance I think we lost some of them when he actually showed up. His sister was on the team and told me he just didn't want to play. He was one of our best players, but our team was loaded anyhow. I think he didn't like being just another player, rather than the star, I can see how some coaches would have used his talent to attempt to run up the score and dominate. Not my style, we had 10 out of 13 players score over a course of 7 games, for a rec team, that's not bad.
On my U9 team last year I lost our best player due to him choosing Karate. 4 nights a week and all weekend so that he could be a black belt by 10 or something crazy. Saw his Dad last week while we were waiting to pickup from basketball and asked how the kid was doing. Wanted to quit Karate as he was burnt out. Dad made sure to tell me that he was done with soccer and was going to just do flag football next few years and then tackle in 6th grade. 5 minutes later he comes up to me and asks how our team is doing and asks me when practice starts in the Spring. Told him my team is full but if he wanted to get 5-6 more kids who played football in the spring our club could try and cobble together a Spring team as my U10 (7v7) has 14. (I'd love to split in 2 groups of 10). He was all excited. Dad steps in and reminds him that he quit soccer for Karate. Kid complains that he'd rather play soccer than football. Dad walks them out of the gym. Kid is the smallest kid in class and fast. He'd be a great wing and he has the work ethic and disposition that would make my whole team better. I grew up playing 30 years ago and I figured now most kids would have 1 parent who would have played but of my 14 kids only 4 of them had parents who played the game. Shocking too see the old stereotypes still pop up.
Take the good with the bad. Parents who've played the game think they know something. But the way the game was taught then and the way it's taught now are very different. Some parents are more attune to the "evolved" way of thinking about the game, others are not.
Absolutely tongue in cheek. In SSG, there's really no where to "hide" players anyway. Even in 7v7, every player is essentially involved in play. You put a weak player at full back and you can't build out of the back, at center back and you're bleeding goals, at center mid fuhggedaboutit, on the wings and you can't build through the midfield, at striker and you basically can't advance deep or well score goals.
I tend to give a lot of reps to my so called weaker players to build up their confidence. I mean, I'm coaching rec, if the other team doesn't have similar players then we're going to lose comfortably anyhow.
My coaching theory was to improve everyone so that there were no "weak" players for opponent's to exploit. It actually works well with 8 to 12 year olds, because the learning curve is fast early on and its prime time for learning motor skills. I don't think coaches and parents realize the unintended messages that they are communicating to kids. Kids will live "down" to meet negative expectations. It happens all the time.
This actually made me think about what I see. What does everyone play for 7v7 in your area. We and all the teams around us are 2-3-1 and at 9v9 its either a 3-3-2 or 2-1-3-2. When I started I tried 2-2-2 or just a 3-3 and then went to a 3-2-1 but quickly realized that our better teams do a 2-3-1.