2018 Coaching Thread

Start making your new coaching plan right after your next game or your last practice until you think it is perfect. But adjust it during your your next practice when you see player weakness or some team weakness. So you might change your plan twenty times or more before the next game or the next practice. I actually enjoyed doing that. Funny thing after I retired from coaching I can’t get myself to do it on coaching sites any more.

I met my wife while I was playing in a game here in Brooklyn. We were married 6 months later. So I know she used to dig the game. That changed when we went to Italy for a week. I was at an invitational in another city for the week and left her in a Rome to shop. Then for thirty years she never seen me during our home games. Because I was watching all our teams home games on Saturdays and Sundays.

Now we are both losing our hearing. Now we never argue I just nod my head ok to everything she says so I don’t actually hear what she is saying I just go with she wants. So she is happy. One of my kids thought hearing aides would be good for us I told her what do you want us to devorced after 53 years together.

 

That is the most important key to athlete development. The practice must be challenging, but not so challenging as to be impossible. Not difficult to manage in individual sports, but in a group training session like soccer the developmental coach is challenged constantly to adjust so that each individual has an appropriately challenging session.

Otherwise the practice sessions will only efficiently develop some of the group.

 

Those are moments that almost can't be coached. It's so easy for kids - even adults (I'm looking at you, USMNT) - to get caught ball watching in situations like this ... to see someone at that age not only see what's happening but know what to do, and to do it even though her "job" is at the other end of the pitch ... that's something special. A keeper's best friend right there, that's for sure.

 

I think they have the statistics to back up their claim, but be careful. Only the first part of the program is a warmup. It is a strength program. Improving strength reduces the risk of injury. You don't want to do the full program as a pre-match warmup.

 

I don't see any value in identifying "weaknesses" and "strengths" to players (like advanced players) when teaching fundamentals. Many fundamentals cannot be worked on independently and those that can--ball skills--everyone should be improving. At that stage training plans are not individualized.

I see it as purely form over substance.

 

Only indirectly related to me, but the 7th grade indoor team that my daughter is coaching is having a great season. They are playing really well and have only lost once.

I hope some of the confidence carries over to the spring.

 

Maybe a little advanced (or a lot advanced) for the age groups many here are coaching, but I found the analysis here very insightful. Being an Everton fan this year has been, well, let's just say an exercise in patience.

http://evertonthat.com/2018/01/21/west-brom-h-analysis-in-pictures/

Perhaps the biggest take-away for me is spatial awareness. Being in the right space at the right time in the right body position is something anyone can do regardless of on-the-ball talent and yet is something that is missed even at the highest levels. Yet there's so much to teach both on-the-ball and off that I don't know how easily you can coach something like this directly.

I've been reading Pep Confidential lately and I was struck at how he worked relentlessly on this type of shape and spatial understanding early on at Bayern and also at how difficult some high-level pros found to learn the concepts. How early is too early to start working on this concept?

Finally, since my brain is wandering just a little bit, I'm reminded of Cal Ripken, the Hall of Fame shortstop/third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles. Even early in his career he knew he was never going to be the quickest player nor the strongest, and those are usually death to a player's career at that position. What he did, however, was study enough to always be in the right place to make what could have been a difficult or impossible play look easy. One step to the right, easy play, one step to the left, clean base hit.

I see this a lot both on offense and defense in soccer: on offense, players insist they have to get completely beyond a defender before they can shoot, when in fact the shot from just outside the defender is the hardest for the keeper to react to (due to reduced reaction time from not seeing the body wind up for the shot); on defense players think that hustling to the ball is the best move when in fact often what they most need to do is trust the closest defender and maintain their spacing. I think seeing this post-facto on video is the easiest way to teach this, but I have to believe there are others.

 

Peter, when you teach fundamentals--including the principles of play--that is teaching positioning. Reading the play comes with experience. The 3 most important things are fundamentals, fundamentals and fundamentals.

"If you keep too busy learning the tricks of the trade, you may never learn the trade." -- John Wooden

My personal belief is that the mental skills are not taught, rather they improve from using them. The smart players at age 25 were also the smart players at age 12. The 25 year-olds are much better players because they have loads more experience and much better athletic and technical skills. I have seen plenty of tactically dumb adult players with loads of experience. I have also seen novices that were tactically smart.

 

Any thoughts on whether there is a benefit to having players use small balls (size 1 or even tennis balls) to develop control?

 

I'd say that's both true and not true. Some people look tactically "dumb" because they simply don't know what to look for; some look so because they're constitutionally incapable of situational awareness. Sometimes kids just need to be shown what to do or look for in a way that's different than what they've been exposed to so far. I do really think that we'll find there's a strong similarity in learning styles for this type of learning as there is to other learning in school.

A lot of the kids I've worked with have started with near-zero situational awareness. Even some of the kids that come to us from club soccer miss simple concepts like letting a ball run rather than knocking it down and then starting from a dead stop in the same direction. Almost invariably (with the exception of a few who I have yet to reach) once you show them the "inputs" ("when you see a situation like this") and "good outputs" ("move here / turn this way / etc.") they learn to apply them to similar but not identical situations. For most of these kids these were not fundamentals they needed to learn, but rather applications they had not yet discerned of fundamentals they already had.

To counter-point the Wooden quote, which is entirely accurate, most of these situations involved less than thirty seconds of instruction. We're not talking about asking someone off the street to make a perfect Cruyff turn, rather "here's a perfect place to use a technique you already know" or perhaps "tweak it just a little and it will be much more effective".

Personally, and this is just my perspective, we give kids far too little credit for being able to absorb and apply. There's a lot of distance between rote foundational fundamentals and informational overload. How we work in that space can make a huge difference in the development, both mental and physical, of these kids. JMNSHO.

 

My response Peter is that if the players understand the principles of play, then you don't have to instruct them on when to use a Cruyff Turn.

I don't believe in teaching dribbling by teaching pre-packaged "moves." The Cruyff turn is a good example of my concern. On the internet I see coaches teaching little kids playing 3v3 with popup goals how to do a Cruyff turn before they learn to cross. There isn't even any wing play. Most of the demonstrations of the turn on the internet omit the fake cross all together. Some of the coaches I suspect don't even know it is a fake cross. Once wing play becomes part of the game, fake crosses are naturally a common occurrence.

Faking on the wing and then cutting inside is really easy since markers always overplay your outside foot in the assumption that it is the dominant foot. There is no reason to identify one right way of beating the fullback. Sometimes they overplay so much you don't even have to fake. The secret is being 2-footed, fundamentals again.

 

As an adult coach I kept different size balls, even a futsal ball, in my ball bag. Not because I thought there was a technical benefit, it was purely for players to have fun with them. I think keeping things fun is an important objective of coaching at all levels. We call them soccer players, not soccer workers.