When I used to coach select youth teams I can't tell you how often I dreamed of having a machine like this at practice to help the kids develop their technical skills with the ball:
True but it looks like the feeder which they slip onto the launcher at 0:23 could just be made taller to hold more balls.
They now have a website running and it has a page for the "LA Galaxy Soccer Center" so this looks to affiliated with the team somehow. It looks like this could just be another piece in the steady growth of the LA Galaxy culture, system, infrastructure, resources, megaplex, whatever, etc. Just like the Academy starting to crank out high potential home grown players like Villareal and Zardes is a piece of the puzzle. I like what I'm seeing from LAG over the past three years or so and I don't just mean the team. Man U watch out - we are coming after you! (Ok, it might take 20 years, but still....).
On the website they say it can hold up to 50 balls. That would be pretty cool. How much do you think one of those would go for?
That's the 64 thousand dollar question. Hopefully 64 thousand dollars isn't the answer. Seriously if it costs $300 or less (unlikely) I think these would sell like hotcakes to both teams and individual players who are serious about their games. If it costs 1k or more I the market would be largely limited to pro teams. I'm guessing the cost is somewhere between these two extremes but closer to the 1k mark. But then I always underestimate costs.
With all the technical wizardry with the iPad like features, I'd guess it costs way more than $1K. Maybe like $10K.
I don't see these selling well at all. This machine can't do anything an assistant coach can't do with a decent foot. At the end of the day, most youth clubs are spread thin with finances and can barely stay afloat as it is. Buying a machine doing something a human can do, well, it's not feasible and it's redundant. I watch coaches do this all day long, same accuracy. With that said, yes, very cool, and I'd love one at our club, but there's so many more things clubs need before this.
As a longtime coach I disagree. Some skills - for example side volleys for forwards - can only be ingrained into muscle memory by dozens of reps each practice, practice after practice, week after week until the player is adept at this very difficult skill. Then it has to be refreshed from time to time throughout each season. Coaches and assistants don't have the time to provide the hours of service needed. Nor do they have the skill needed to serve the ball over and over at the same trajectory & velocity which is really helpful to players learning a skill and working on timing. There is a reason good tennis coaches bring ball servers to practice. In fact one of the discouraging things about US soccer development is that even today few US players have a great 1st touch which is vital to the playing the game at a high level. Why don't they? Because they don't get in the 10's of thousands of reps that "youths" from other cultures get from playing endless hours of pickup soccer after school and on weekends. I don't see how we can change our culture so our often suburban kids start playing pickup game on a daily basis. So our kids are going to have to get their 10's of thousands of reps some other way. Machines like this would at least help toward that end.
The training machine kinda reminds me of what Borussia Dortmund just built last year the "Footbonaut".
Cool. Same idea with the advantage of automatic recycling of balls and built in targets that are likely automatically scored. Disadvantage is it can't be used outside or for longer, more elevated serves. Btw, the Dortmund player demonstrating the device should spend more time with the machine - his touch was just OK at best. I looked up his nationality and it is Australian - that explains it! I wonder if a typical pro at this guy's level could ever develop the 1st touch even close to that of the typical Barcelona player, given hundreds of hours of rep training? Or does the difference in innate talent + childhood learning make closing that gap impossible? I'm not asking if you could turn this guy into an Iniesta quality player (obviously not!) but just whether such a player could ever learn one skill - to have the exquisite soft 1st touch approaching that of players like Iniesta, Fabregas, ...?
BTW Terrence Boyd used the "Footbonaut" a few times at the end of last season and Junior Flores will be using it when he arrives at Dortmund next year.