3four3:You Can’t Copy a Style of Play. . .

Great topic.

The essay is long on rhetoric and short on support. (Individuals have varied experience and ability, therefore they have specialties and would be ineffective outside their special niches.) In other words it sounds good, but doesn't fit with my views.

First off let's take the field of industrial engineering: in general the learning curve for learning most jobs is 3 years. Apart from Sir Alex and a few college coaches, who keeps the same coaching job for more than a couple years?

Second lets take the definition of coaching: he does not give one.

IMO coaching is like engineering--you are more concerned with the practical than the theoretical. It is important to have a vision of the objective and a plan to get there, but, especially for a professional or national team coach, the need for success despite limited resources requires compromises to achieve your goals. Development coaches have to assess what is the best training for individual players. Senior coaches have to assess how to field a winning team with the players they have.

If you want to talk about coaching specialties, specializing in a particular event or sport or specializing in a particular aspect of coaching (technical, tactical, physical, mental, individual or team training, youth development, game management, team and club management) is a speciality. But saying that coaches specialize in coaching styles of play ignores the fact that coaches are not working in isolation or dealing with fungible items-they are leading and training groups of individuals of varied experience and ability.

Every individual whether coach or player is going to have different abilities. But saying that new abilities cannot be learned is to deny that coaching is possible.

 

Thank you for sharing elessar78, and good reply rca2.

There's too much to address in one essay.
One can't possibly cover all angles ... and so the strategy is to slowly layer in all the ideas over time.

 

Quite understandable.

Regarding the second linked article, while I agree that what you describe may be common in youth soccer, I disagree if you are suggesting that is the way players must be trained. My experience is that a coach, who understands coaching methods, can tailor training during team sessions to the players' individual requirments by requiring specific movements and imposing different conditions on the individual players. This works in every phase of the training session, from individual work through full scrimmages, in tactical, technical and physical aspects. If a coach doesn't make individual adjustments then, as you point out, training for some players is going to be less effective.

I have personally done this in both technical and tactical aspects with groups of 17+ players (U10 to U12) of mixed novices and intermediate players.

As Elessar78 points out, I don't know how to solve the problem with match play created by unbalanced teams. I can't pass up the opportunity to complain that this problem is entirely caused by the league/team structure. (Which is why I wanted to comment on the second article.)

gklieban, I enjoyed reading your articles. Please keep them coming.

 

When reading through the entire blog post, the Narrowing the Distribution part of the post is so important. Yes, you can do a lot of coaching where you are pushing the top players to refine their skills while bringing up the novices, but that only works for a certain amount of time before you are not actually pushing the top players any further. If you have done your job well though, by the time that point is reached, the novices have brought their level of play up to the middle tier players.

Once this narrowing the distribution has occurred, then you should be able to really push all of the players. I'm currently at that point with my U10 team. Most of the players have been with me for at least 2 years now.

At the beginning there was such a huge gap in ability that I thought I'd have to design two separate practices - one for the upper half and one for the lower half. Instead of doing that, I started with using the stations approach for bringing up basic skills and then distribution of players for SSGs - grouping players by their level. We took that approach for a year and it significantly narrowed the gap in the players. I essentially have about 3 very good players, 3 weaker players and 6 in the middle. The 3 weakest players are able to beat the 3 best players in 1v1 battles from time to time and even our weakest player scored a hat trick last spring.

This narrower distribution really provides a lot of freedom now with coaching to design practice plans that push the entire group. Our biggest struggle now is to become more efficient with breaking down the bunkered in defenses we face every week. Considering few of the coaches here have a huge choice when it comes to recruiting players, I think the take away point should be to focus on narrowing the ability gap in your players. Once that is sufficiently achieved, then look to really push the whole group.

 

I think that the reason we disagree in our conclusions is our starting premises.

For training purposes I don't believe in comparing players to other players. I believe in measuring progress of a player against his own prior performance.

I also don't believe the youth coaches objective should be to raise players to match the level of their teammates. I believe the goal should be to prepare players for the next level, i.e., U10s for U12, and develop their playing to their individual full potentials using the LTAD model. Talking about chronological age groups may be confusing because for example elite U10 teams may well have players whose soccer age is U12, and should be doing U12 training. (I will come back to this thought later.)

I don't think competitive matches between organized teams are necessary for development before U14, the level when team tactics are introduced. I don't see success in breaking down a bunker as an appropriate training objective for U10 or even U12. This is an example of where pressures for match results collide with player development.

I see advantages in training mixed groups together, academy style, when the object of the training is to develop fundamental skills and individual and small group tactics as preparation for U14 training.

I think what we are really describing is an extreme situation where a coach is given players of soccer ages U8 and U10. To use something easier to illustrate let's use U12 and U14. At U14 the training is significantly different than U12. U14 introduces team tactics and strength and endurance training. Technical and tactical training are combined. None of that is true of U12 training. If you train U12s as U14s, they miss two years of fundamental skill training. Obviously a bad thing. If you train U14s as U12s, you are holding them back for two years. Another obviously bad thing.

When I am saying a coach should be able to deal with variations in player abilities, I am assuming players are appropriately classified. If different age groups are mixed on organized teams, rather than in an academy situation, it is an impossible to solve coaching delimna unless you can field sides by soccer age. I will note that it is generally considered that relatively weak players will improve faster if playing with better players, but this assumes that they are actually trained. For example someone who only plays CB or keeper, and doesn't train attacking skills is not going to benefit from the experience.