I am a H.S. soccer coach. This season most of our team has played some form of club soccer and we have many returners that play year round. In this first week I come to realize, as usual, that what I expect a player to know based on "experience" is way off. This leads me to wonder... 1. What is the objective of club soccer? 2. While I understand the different levels of club soccer, do they not all operate on the same premise throughout the age groups in their respective organizations? Granted, my season at this school I was spoiled. We had a good number of high level club girls and all we had to do was teach them a system and keep their skills sharp. The past few seasons, not so much. These "experienced" girls lack 1. Ball skills (slightly understandable) 2. Defending principles (unacceptable!) - They do not understand pressure, cover, balance. 3. Spacial awareness (also unacceptable) - They believe the "formation" and "grid" is the be all end all. 4. Work rate (IDK) is it a requirement to work hard at the club level? Do they not emphasize transition, recovery runs, etc? This is not at all a knock or dig at clubs. I believe I need to understand in order to make corrections.
I believe the problems are 1) an erosion of understanding of the game and how to coach, and 2) an emphasis on winning and team tactics during the fundamental stage of development. I suspect that some coaches accelerate the pre-teen curriculum to gain match results now at the expense of long term player development. They spend more training time on team tactics at the expense of fundamentals. I don't know what effect the modern SSG format has, but players typically only have 1 year of 11v11 experience before high school. At the very least, it will make 11v11 play more confusing initially due to lack of experience. Just out of curiosity, if the players don't understand zone defense, how are they at 1v1, tackling and marking? I suspect from what you say the players all are poor 1v1 players. This might just be a local problem due to declining interest in youth sports or a failed club or two.
I never even considered that these girls may not have any or much 11 v. 11 experience. Yes, they are terrible in 1 v 1 scenarios also. Most, even the best, will just dive in or kick shins. They do not have an awareness of when to come to balance, jockey or which foot/side to pressure.
A big factor in some of your issues, and I’ve seen and heard this echoed by other coaches-including Anson Dorrance (credibility name drop haha), is girls/women don’t really watch soccer. I don’t think there’s enough insight into the game just from training. I make sure my kid watches a few minutes of highlights every few days. Sometimes I give comments. And I believe it’s helped her with spatial awareness and shape and formation is more about.
I'm struggling with how to teach work rate to my kid. Over the past few weeks, she's grown into this thing where she can take over a game. But it also involves a prodigious amount of running from her. I don't think highly of Jordan Henderson types who run a lot. Not putting her in USMNT class, but the men's team is always one of the top teams in distance covered (when they do qualify for the WC) and it's a negative. What am I doing about it? I'm going to shut up for now and not try to coach her in either direction (run more/run less). This is an instance where I think the game may teach this aspect better than I ever can.
1v1s can be incorporated into every practice. My buddy coaches a women's college team and he WISHES more of his players were better 1v1 coming out of high school. Invest the time—it pays dividends.
"club soccer" is a broad broad term. Some clubs do it well, some don't and a lot of clubs are in between. A LOT, probably the majority of it, depends on the individual coach. Clubs that win a lot may not necessarily be good about teaching those things and clubs that DON'T win a lot may be excellent schools for teaching those things. Sadly, you can probalby tell what the coach/club is like based on an aggregate of the players.
why don't you get with the club coaches and ask them these questions? if i was the HS coach, i'd try to get all of my feeder programs aligned to my philosophy or at least ask them to work on specific deficiencies you see when the girls get to you. personally, i don't see the lack of 11v11 experience being an issue. coaches should still be teaching the same principles of play. you just have fewer moving parts and less space. if adding a couple more players to a 9 girl team causes the problems you're talking about, they don't know what they should be doing anyway.
I’m the coach on the other end of the spectrum. I coach a U10 boys team and I wish the HS coach who is winning state titles with the majority of his team coming from our club would acknowledge our existence. In the same community we just had our HS basketball coach run a 2 hour class for youth basketball coaches on his philosophy and how to coach his offense for grades 3-8. Common terminology, common goal, similar drills. As a coach on the youngest team I’m not going to do all that he asked but I now understand what he wants at the HS level. Frankly he tells us that our club is to teach the fundamentals as he doesn’t have time to install an offense and defense. He has less than 9 days from first official practice starts to first game. Soccer is the same (they have 2 weeks but before school starts). I’d guess that your issues stem from the local club teams focus on winning at all costs from a young age. I’ve got parents and kids wanting to quit mid-winter and find a different team because my team is by grade (based on parent feedback that kids want to play with their friends) but it means half my team is playing up and we got beat badly all fall. We played 2 other teams like us (by grade) and those scores were 0-2 and 4-4. Those teams lost to the other right age teams at similar scores to us. I’ve got parents asking me not to play other kids as their kid hates losing even though this is rec. I’ve watched other teams do this to win at U9 and U10. (the treasurer wonders why we lost that kid and their family forever but the coach is thankful that the end of his bench got better by getting shorter).
As my players arrive to practice I always have a question for them to show that I care about them outside of the game. I sometimes use the answers as a way to split teams. Questions include favorite class in school/color/etc. One of my last practices I asked them what they want to do when they grow up. What was interesting is that 8 kids said play professional sports (all were basketball and football). I asked why not soccer and one kid said there is not professional soccer in America only in Manchester, Barcelona, Madrid and Arsenal (that is a city you know). Therefore he wanted to be a pro-kicker in the NFL. My kids know all the formations of football and generally how to play and what success looks like because its on TV (even if they really don't watch it). I watch a highlight show of the Bundesliga each week and my kids have now picked favorite teams but the US missing out on the World Cup hurt these young ones.
See what happens when a professional player, a right back for instance, who has decades of playing experience, moves to left wing. They adjust, but its a learning curve because everything looks different at first. This is why it is so important for young players not to specialize in one position during development. Youth SSGs play on smaller fields with different systems. It is not just the numbers. Yes some clubs are better than others at planning and coordinating a progressive development curriculum. Some, however, in practice don't have a progressive curriculum.
The club coaches here would run us off the field. Every year during H.S. soccer letters are sent to us from the girls clubs about over training, "priority", our role (or non-role) in the development of the players, etc. It's basically a "stay out of our way" letter. Girls from the upper level teams are discouraged from playing at all. The girls play H.S. soccer to have fun, they play club to compete.
I see the same dynamic as @Coach Stew although without the official letters. I had to pull one of our players off the field after he followed a double scissors move with an attempted rabona ... none of which were necessary or appropriate given the location and situation. His response was, "this is the only time I get to practice those" - because his club coach would bench him for trying inappropriate flair moves during a game. So...yeah, some of what should be our "best" players tend to play badly because they see our games as play time and teach our other kids bad habits. We won't talk about the game last year where several of them decided it was "who can succeed at a rainbow first"...