Two coaches in my club tested positive. It was in the in-house program, club president is allowing those two age groups to continue. We are 11 days out and no one other than those two coaches have reported illness/infection. Dodged a bullet. I would've been more cautious. Other clubs in similar situations have shut down either age groups or programs.
My daughter is the same. When playing on a boys team, she kicks it up a level. I wish she'd do that with the girls. I THINK with the boys she wants to show them up. As I've known for a couple of years now, my kid plays based on what's going on in her headspace. I wish it just wasn't so tied to that.
Yes. Last spring and this fall we returned fees for the cancelled seasons or gave families the option to forward their fees to the next season. I think we kept $10 from each registration for finance charges and supplies already purchased, but of our $200 19U fees, we gave back $190. We're all volunteer with no facility costs so that makes it easier.
Nice. I need to check around here but the travel and rec club fees are comparable. Pay to play tuition is $2–3K per year. Not sure how each club handled it.
Going to watch A HS playoff game tomorrow with at least ten of my former players. Should be fun. I'm rooting for the winner.
Our HS state finals are this weekend. I went to one of my school's sectional games as a scouting/recruiting trip. It was fun to see some of the boys I've had from rec league, middle school, and up to my 19U team playing in the tournament as seniors. Unfortunately they lost in the sectional final later that week.
Follow up after watching a HS playoff game featuring a bunch of kids I used to coach. So questions/reflections I came away with after the match... Is there a point to teaching team systems or tactics around 9–12? The best players on the pitch today were also the best dribblers when they were 10 years old, and now they were the best dribblers AND the best passers. They could pass now, but their dribbling had a lot of impact. A good case for multisport athletes. Both of the best players on each team are multisport athletes. Both played baseball. One, I know, plays baseball, basketball, track, and soccer. <---- This one makes a strong case for best player in the area as a 10th grader! My old club "discovered" him when he was prob 7 and he was already a "natural" despite having very little soccer coaching. So we can claim our intensive ball mastery and 1v1 training made him what he is but chances are he'd still be really good. Is there a point to teaching team tactics at 9-12, because once in high school they may end up on HS team that uses NONE of that. Whatever tactics/team concepts may not be used at the next level. So we should focus on "portable" skills. But there's also a valid school of thought out there that says we OVER-focus on technical that our young players' brains don't develop well enough early and that's why the gap opens up between our players and the rest of the soccer world. Both teams played 4-3-3 but the phases of play were really underdeveloped. Particularly the attack-to-defense transitions phase. Back line players need to be ballers. To get out of trouble but also if they are just defenders and not distributors, it really limits the attack.
From what I've seen of my former HS team over the years, I'd say yes. Their technical skills are good enough, but they don't know how to play together. I believe this is from not playing competitive, organized soccer in the preteen years. I saw the same thing with my middle schoolers I used to coach. Some of them had the technical skills, but when I put them on the field with 10 teammates, they didn't know how to work together. It was always the clumped up, "I'm gonna dribble my way out of this" park ball. I really think that if my school's players had grown up playing organized soccer, we wouldn't be looking at a sectional drought since 2009. We have players with good skill. They just don't have the experience to play as a team.
Principles of Play are fundamentals. Small group tactics teach players how to play together. That is what 9 to 12 year olds should be mastering. In my view "team" tactics are game plans. If players know the principles of play and have mastered small group tactics, then they will do very well even if they don't have a game plan. Traditionally basic team tactics are taught at U14. The players should be quick studies on "team" tactics, game plans, at U16.
Anyone have a link to a good full match of a team using 3-5-2 that I can have my players watch for match/player analysis. Tried watching a few Juve games on YouTube but everything I have found has them in a 4 back set.
DC United used to play 352 and some of their matches are probably on Youtube. Such as the championship finals. My other thought would be Argentina world cup matches.
http://www.zonalmarking.net/2012/06...pain-start-with-no-striker-italy-use-a-3-5-2/ This one is tougher to find because of the finals being a rematch, but it's worth digging up. If you're really going down the analysis path, sign up at footballia.net they have a huge catalog of games.
A THREAD! 👇 Gian Piero Gasperini's work at Atalanta has won plaudits from all over the globe. Our coaches have taken a look at what makes the Italian team so dangerous in attack and why their attacking movement is difficult to defend against 🔵— The Coaches' Voice (@CoachesVoice) November 3, 2020 Check out Atalanta 3-5-2 approach. Their manager is very attack oriented so that's a good thing.
My fall season is over. The HS girls played in our post-season event today. We went with small sided (7v7) games on a 1/2 pitch (roughly the width of the full size field. My girls put on a show with 17 goals and only allowing 1 across the 3 games. But the amazing thing from a coaching standpoint was 1/2 time of the 3rd game I did my traditional move of giving them the 1st minute to talk amongst themselves, made my coaching point. When I was done they took over and for the rest of the half talked strategy and tactics for the 2nd half. My co-coaches and I just watched and realized that our job is done and we've taught them well.
If you are going into your offseason, what are your goals for coach development this winter? For me: I've spent almost all of the past decade on technical and tactical. My main focus for the next 5 months of the winter is to: improve how I handle and coach via the psychological aspects of the game improve my ability to connect with my players this was an objective for last winter, but barely got into it—learn how to build and implement team culture
I don't have any goals as such, but I am in the process of re-reading through Legacy, the book on the New Zealand All Blacks' culture and how they got to where they are. I'm taking notes and hope to be able to assemble the notes into an outline and guide for building culture the AB's way according to how things are presented in the book. With your point about building team culture, that book would be a good start if you haven't read it. If you have read it, re-read it with the idea of taking things that may be useful for your team. Obviously, you'll have to adjust things based on the players' age. Over last winter, I worked on teambuilding with my 19Us before we started training in March. It was mostly a new team who went to various schools and didn't really know each other, let alone played together. I made up some worksheets for them on why they joined our team, what their goals were, team values and standards and all the buzz words and those types of things. We also got together as a team for a few activities. We went bowling. We went to BDubs to eat and watch an EPL game together. I feel like laying that groundwork had us all ready and excited for the spring season, and then the world stopped.
I'm reading the exact same book right now. First time through. Let me know your takeaways and how you are implementing/adapting the concepts to your situation.
I'm chewing on an idea about rec coach development in general. I had a conversation with someone that said, "Our 1st graders that get you, XX, YY or ZZ have a very different experience than those who get the random parent that gets drafted at the last minute," So my idea is thinking about coach education at the younger ages with a focus on club culture, club goals and not as much the kind of things our technical staff will teach them. Not sure where it it go but that is what I'm chewing on
This is a great idea. I made up a curriculum for our rec league coaches that is more generic ideas than a specific technical checklist. One example is for our 6Us (who play 2v2), it's get the ball, keep the ball, score the ball, and get it back quickly when we lose it... fairly simple ideas, but they're a foundation to build on. I made these revisions over the winter last year right before Covid happened. We haven't played since so I have no idea whether it will take hold with our parental volunteers. My more specific technically focused curricula weren't being used so I thought it was worth trying this.
For our rec program, we train the whole age group together. The best coaches are appointed lead trainers for that age, with every other volunteer coach helping and (hopefully) learning. We don't assign teams, so no drafts. We assign players to a field randomly for Saturday's. Further, we hire "professional" coaches to run our skills training multiple nights a week. It's open to anyone in the club. So kids who want more training or, possibly, higher level training have it available to them. If you can't make it on the night age group practice is scheduled, just go to these skills trainings. It's our philosophy that, at younger ages, teams are not super important. The individuals matter so we try to focus our resources on that. Also recommend looking into Funiño. 3v3 to four goals. Apply things like "KINS" (Kicking is NOT Soccer) or New Ball! (Instead of formal restarts, coach just throws out a ball, it keeps things moving along). Loose boundaries is another one—if they go over the touch line, let 'em play until it's ridiculously out of bounds. Again, increases the amount of play. As far as club culture, I don't have clear answers, but 99% of players won't play in college and 70 percent of kids quit sports by age 13. Most clubs need to find a way to serve the 99% better. More fun, better character development, more exercise.
A soccer educated future parent base goes hand in hand with all the other good stuff towards remedying the existing pay to play/race to nowhere environment we have now...
Agreed. I believe clubs should be MORE focused on coach development and less on player development. If you nail the former, the development will take care of itself. I like that you used the phrase "race to nowhere".
Thanks for the suggestions. We've talked in the past about age group training but it hasn't gone very far, Roughly how many kids do you have in an age group? At the 1st grade level we have over 200 in each gender so I think we'd have to have a couple of different sessions. The culture issues I want to work on are exactly what you raise: 1) it isn't about winning 2) focus on player development both from the soccer side and the character side 3) focus on making it fun while doing #2 My long-term goal is to create life-long soccer players that look back fondly on the experience and if XX years from now they get a call from their club asking them to coach they are willing to help
We have roughly 40 in each age group. It seems like a challenge to scale it up, but I would think your area has more qualified coaches—space to hold 200 at a time, may be more of a problem than coaches. Also, we have to stop thinking of coaching ability in terms of: former player. That helps. But there are other aspects that make up a great coach. I think destroying the team-based structure has put us on a path of de-emphasizing winning (note: it does not de-emphasize COMPETING). We don't do FUNINO yet as a club , but I have used it multiple coaching capacities now and kids really enjoyed it. Character development needs to be a focus, it's tough because many of us aren't trained to do it. The best way, I can think of doing it right now, is instead of constructing a session around technical/tactical objectives (i.e.: improve ability to make a push pass), set the session objective to be something that is character/psychologically based (i.e: improve players' ability to for using positive self talk after a negative event). One of the things we started with my team is to let the players take over—they did halftime talks, input on positions. In the spring, my aim is to let them take over coaching more, let them do their pre-game and halftime talks (instead of us). In my reflection, I realized I learned more about the game when I started coaching and had to learn to teach it to players. I'm gonna let them run with it next season. I'll still set-up the sessions, but I think I can walk them through giving the coaching points or how to learn about the coaching points, so they can provide them.