Anyone have a good summer workout plan for their teams to follow? We'll still be practicing 2x per week. We'll take a 3 week break in early July. But I want my girls to take it upon themselves to train on their own some more. Sure- I could send them to a speed/agility trainer, but I don't see the need to spend the money if they hold themselves accountable to being active for 30 - 60 minutes per day. These are girls that will be freshman or 8th graders next year.
I forked out $40 or $50 for Renegade Soccer’s Evolution of Touch and my daughter has been loving it so far. She’s going in to 5th grade so, depending on your girls’ skill level they may be looking for something a bit more advanced. I’d shoot them a link to the free 2k Burst workout on YouTube and see what they think. We also got pretty good mileage out of BeastMode’s free videos on YouTube, but they get pretty redundant when you do them daily.
We're planning on renting out field time and doing a pickup game every week for the girls. There's a pool at the complex, so the parents think of making it a team-building thing of sorts. Play soccer then go swim. But they're young (8). I'm still debating how much training I need to undertake with my 8 year old this summer and what type. I feel I can put her through the paces of speed and agility pretty well. I actually think she enjoys that stuff.
If it were my kid-- 20 minutes a day with the ball goes a long ways. Lots of variety rather than lots of reps. You can toss balls to her for the first touch stuff. Look at what Tom Byer did with his own kids at much younger ages. Lots of unorganized play--not practice. Playing is fun, good experience, and good training without seeming like work.
Yeah, I'm a fan of what tom byer is doing with "Soccer Starts at home". It rings true. I'm using that stuff with my 5 year old. we do fun stuff like arrange her dinosaurs or stuffed animals (instead of cones) and we play games through them. Most of the games are designed by her—so she leads it. We even do goalkeeper stuff that's just catching.
Everyone knows that at the most basic level Coerver, BeastMode, Renegade, "anything else" is all the same stuff, right? Just repackaged.
I don't believe in engaging players with video. I believe in engaging them with a ball. Maybe its a generational thing, but I have been successful in engaging people of all ages and skill levels by giving them a ball to play with.
this is incredibly short-sighted. my coach told me to "go play with a ball" over the summer as a teen. i did that, but it's not easy to come up with exercises yourself. i didn't get as much out of that as i would have if we had youtube, apps, etc. available to draw from. if my coach would have given me a Coerver 99 Skills to Ball Mastery app and said "work on 5 of these each week over the summer", i would have had something that was akin to a training plan to guide me. saying "just give them a ball" misses a whole lot of opportunities that are out there to help our players develop their games.
@stphnsn Your comment surprised me. Training and engaging are two different concepts. The latter precedes the former. One of the classic coaching objectives of U-Little soccer should be to teach them how to practice on their own. It is perhaps the most important objective. That is commonly done through introducing ball mastery drills, striking exercises (with walls or rebounders) and small sided games. Current thinking includes even allowing players to organize some SSGs themselves. I have certainly talked enough about Dennis Mueller's 1000 touches drill and linked a handout in the past that some readers here should remember. I never had to think about this with my own children because they saw me practicing and I introduced them to playing with a ball at 6 months as soon as they could sit up. In my experience this is what soccer families do.
Here's what I think I'm gonna do. My roster has 16 players. School is out for 10 weeks. I'll get the team into pairs. Each pair will plan out 1 week of summer training. We'll track it via google. Looking for 3-4 "activities" per week to be planned. Things like ball mastery, yoga, running, pick up soccer. I'll let you know how it goes.
i guess my point was if a coach gives a specific instruction and makes it easy for the kids to engage themselves, they're more likely to do so. going out and playing is great, but if the intent is to improve a specific part of their game, you can give them a resource to target that aspect. i played with my friends constantly over the summers growing up, but there was a lot of skill-building work that i could have been doing in addition. unfortunately, i didn't know what i didn't know so i never developed to reach the full potential i might have if i'd had the information. btw, my 13 month old has a goal in our living room and is constantly improving her goal-scoring celebrations. yes, we are one of your "soccer families". that being said, my family and those like us are the minority. if an app will help engage my non-soccer family players with their balls and disengage them from fortnite, that's a positive thing.
I was talking to an old coach about a decade ago who was in his 60s at the time, he was super irate that I would even suggest soccer video games as an educational tool. They were pretty good back then IMO, and now even better. FIFA captures a lot of the game and basic concepts pretty well. It's pretty interesting from an experienced coach's perspective how I can see things like proper passing angles, playing between the lines, the diff. between passing to feet vs passing in front of the receiver. Seems like the game designers had good consultants or understand the game to a nice degree.
@elessar78 I find it amusing. Here is the problem: no learning transfers from playing a video game to playing soccer. At least not any significant learning in the athlete development sense. Playing video games will improve the ability to play video games. Real life example. A table tennis world champion's skill at returning table tennis serves does not transer to lawn tennis. His table tennis practice didn't improve his lawn tennis play. Similar rules, similar tactics, but it doesn't meet one of the basic principles of athlete development: specificity. To promote development training should be specific. The same movements, not somewhat similar movements. Do you train your players by having them jog laps around the field? I realize you are saying it is a pretty good model of the game. What do you get from that model that you wouldn't get, perhaps better, from watching good soccer? You can learn from bad play too. While I played winger in an adult competitive match, I learned an important lesson about how to play striker from watching my team mate repeat the same tactical mistake (bad positioning) 3 times in a row. It has been 30 years but I remember ten minutes of a match like it was yesterday. I was that frustrated with my striker. But then that striker didn't learn anything. He made the same exact stupid run at the same exact stupid time 3 times in a row in about 10 minutes of play. If someone is not going to learn from playing the game, I don't think they are going to learn from playing a video game. For me personally, I learn a lot better watching a game in person than watching a TV broadcast. The TV view is just not the same as from the sidelines. Not even close. Much less the same as from the field. For me watching a video game is like watching TV. It just isn't real enough. It is a moving picture of something real. Would you suggest that playing the same soccer game on manager mode teaches someone how to be an EPL manager? Modeling has its uses, but it isn't a substitute for the training field. Sorry for being long winded, but I think understanding specificity is important.
games are great for visualization. the overhead view of a video game shows the spacing and movement on the field. you can see the gaps in a dimension you don't get in real life... you can't get that perspective when you're actually playing. there's a reason big clubs are using drones at their training sessions now. showing the foosball angle is really useful.
A tool for match analysis is not the same as a training tool. Areial footage won't work as a cue. While beneficial generally, training about soccer in an academic sense is not athletic performance training, which is what the principle of specificity applies to. "you don't get in real life..." means it is not specific. The most effective method to demonstrate something to a person, having trouble thinking abstractly, is to walk them through the situation on the field. Different people have different abilities for spatial recognition. The key point here is the objective is to train players to recognize spacing in real life, not in the abstract. Training coaches is different. I also question the thought that playing a video game aids in visualization to promote successful execution. (Visualization in this context means as an athletic performance enhancer.) Nor do I see it as a pre-match confidence booster. I do agree that having fun is useful, but you can have fun a lot of ways.
Lots. There's an instant feedback that the game player's action(s) have as well as ideas about the game. -If I hesitate or am slow playing a penetrating pass, my teammate will be offside -If I try to force a pass into a tight space or tight angle, possession is likely lost -If I hit penetrating ball too hard, the goalkeeper will get to it first -If I try to rush the build-up or do the same thing every time the artificial intelligence catches on and I lose the ball -how to break down a 5-3-2 vs a 4-2-3-1 (how to get past that defensive block) -what happens if I overdribble -what happens if I rush in too fast as a defender There are many more too. All simple things, but IF you just watch very high level soccer the players just don't make these mistakes often or repeatedly. Or you may not appreciate what you are seeing because you're only a passive observer of the action. -The player can use different formations, how does that affect available passing angles? You can't have that control group relationship experience watching a game -The games have modeled players so well that you can learn what different attributes bring to the table
There is lots to see on TV. Personally I like watching the tactical cameras on the internet for big matches (Foxsports.com, ESPN3) that are upper deck cameras behind the goal. That is my favorite spot to watch a match, especially at these new small MLS stadiums like Red Bull Arena. Great view to watch play develop and watch defenses work as a unit.
This is like learning to play soccer by reading a book. I picked your first bullet for an example. I have never had a player who didn't understand that late passes result in an offside whistle. Even if there was value in using a model of some kind to teach the concept, it would not improve athletic skills. Why do I say that? Because the model doesn't provide any useful experience in seeing the field and making a timely and accurate pass to the runner. The model teaches how to play the model. It doesn't improve athletic skills. Let me give you another example. This is about teaching typing. I learned to type by an instructor calling out letters which we would type one at a time. I got pretty fast and accurate at typing what I heard. The skill development did not transfer to typing what I saw (i.e., exercises in a typing textbook). For that I had to start back at zero skill and improve my skill from there. The type of cue matters. Dortmund has a fancy multi-million dollar first touch/passing drill machine indoors that uses flashing lights or a bird whistle as cues. Using the machine will improve certain parts of what is being done, but it provides no useful training in reading cues. Flashing lights are not the sights and sounds of a match. Despite the mismatch in cues, Dortmund still built it because that is as good as it gets with the current technology. Some training value is a lot better than no value.
That's certainly one opinion. I'm not changing the outcome of a book by reading it. Further, there are many different learning styles and players learn from different vantage points. If a player can learn by watching a game on tv or in the stadium, they can certainly learn in an interactive environment. Watching a game on TV doesn't improve athletic skills, but I encourage all my players to do just that. And while it doesn't improve athletic skills (maybe) it can improve their understanding of the game.
I'm sorry but this is just plain wrong as a general rule. Perhaps it applies to some or even many but it's not even close to a hard and fast rule. Remember, in part, our experience colors our judgment, and kids these days perceive the world differently due to the amount of content they consume through a screen. That means many of them have internalized the ability to translate from 2-D screen to 3-D life that many of us older folks just don't have. As a ferinstance I refer to my own son. He watches a ton of high-level soccer and plays FIFA frequently. In "real" soccer he plays in goal so never really works in a lot of the situations that you would say he has to experience in person to process (remember, he came to the game late and hasn't gone through the full club experience, and the formation he did have was far less structured than many here would advocate - just throw N players on the field and let them play a game). Late in the season this year since we were up by 8 goals our head coach let him play in the field. Despite only seeing the attacking third of the field from the far end and on the television / XBox screen, he was picking out passes and making runs better than many of his teammates who had all that time as a field player. When we chatted about it after the game he pointed directly to the time he's spent watching the game played at a higher level and being able to see where is the right place to be and the right way to strike the ball. That's where the higher angle viewing becomes advantageous - you can see the spacing and the lanes and mentally translate those into what you would see on the field. Now, all that said, I will grant two points: 1) not everyone can translate from the screen to the real world, although with a little effort in teaching the kids how to watch the game as it's happening I do believe the percentage who can is very high; and 2) knowing intellectually what to do or where to go does not train the ability to actually do it - there is zero replacement for practice time alone or as a group / team for this part. If I could get him to spend nearly as much time doing the latter as he does the former who knows how good he'd be...