Hi all -- 5th year coaching, 2nd year at u12B. Our club is strongly player development focused -- equal playing time, multiple positions, letting the players make many of the decisions in matches. Depending on the players I get, this has worked from reasonably well -- to being extremely frustrating. I am looking for some advice on subbing in matches. We tend to play players multiple positions and combinations in a game, and have played both a strong string and a weaker string, as well as mixing them up. (Sometimes the weaker string players play better when they don't have the "stars" to depend on. But, then you have some extremely -- um -- vulnerable moments out there on the field.) As you know, it is very hard to manage this strategically, and often we lose games we could have won if we had just loaded the field and played Johnny 55 minutes and Sam 5. But, I guess my problem is more logistical -- when you play players in multiple positions, do you keep them at the same position for a while (like, a few games? a half a game? a quarter of a season?) and how do you balance the stronger/weaker players in a match? I have this niggling fear I am doing "player development" wrong. Now, the players we have had for a few seasons are damn good players who can, truly play multiple roles well. So, I know it works in the big picture. But, the short term is so painful sometimes. We lost 10 straight games last season, to have it come together for a few games, and then fall apart again. Anyone who can offer experience/perspective is appreciated! Thanks.
This is not hockey don't sub like in hockey. You can make 2 subs let them play with your strongest team. You want to give them their best chance to look good. Give them enough time to get into the flow of play. Take them out after ten minutes is not enough time to get them into the flow of the game.
Whether a team wins a match depends on a number of things, some of which the coach doesn't control. Generally speaking you want the team to play well, which means execute the system well using fundamentals. KISS figured highly in my approach. But "subbing" should be driven by your development plan, not by the match circumstances. If you let match circumstances change your subbing plans, you are telling everybody that you lack confidence in some of your players. Players like everyone else tend to live up or down to your expectations. Is winning a U-Little match more important than demonstrating your belief in the potential of your players? Not to me. Prior to the match I planned my starting lineup and three changes at the "quarters." Everyone got at least 2 quarters in the field positions every game. (That meant keepers had to spend half of each match in field positions.) Rather than look at starting my best 11 players, I looked at keeping a strong spine (I was using a 433 system) for each quarter and turning every player into a strong player so that we had a strong lineup throughout the match. Before the match I would adjust my plan for any missing players. The team won matches because they played as a team, knowing how to support off the ball and transitioned well. Everybody attacked and everybody defended. The other teams did not. Thus we had numbers up, always. My intention was to prepare the players for adult "total soccer," which relies heavily on zone pressing and interchanging positions. My assigning different positions during the match simulated the interchange of positions between lines. My intent was to get the players comfortable playing in different areas of the field so that in the future years when they did interchange they would know what to do. I also think it is valuable for a player to understand how to play the other positions in order to better connect with their teammates and support them.
Rca..that is almost to the letter what we do. I wrote this coming off a weekend though, where we played very formulaic teams where coaches run the same plays, never move kids around, bench players and still manage to beat us 5-2 and 7-1. It was our first games together...but still...I lose a little heart sometimes. Any books/site you know about besides Coaching Outside the Box? Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G925A using Tapatalk
I guess you have to look at the long-term outcomes for your players. Can they play (as individuals)? When they go out for high school or college teams can they hang? These questions really ask is once they leave the cocoon of their team and tryout for other teams, do they get picked up? Where do they stack amongst their peers? If they can't pass the eye ball test when they are late teens then the development tactics: player rotation, equal minutes, etc were empty words or poor ideas that simply sounded good. And you can't look at it individually, you have to look at the players produced as a whole. In the end, you probably really can't say with a high degree of certainty what you did or didn't do made or broke them. Ajax famously picks the best players in Amsterdam and pigeon-holes them into positions: striker, left wing, etc. They have/had a great track record in producing pros. There's no such thing as player rotation and equal minutes. In the end, most of player development resides in the player. Good coaching merely accelerates development and/or raises the player's ceiling. As an aside, has Total Football really existed in the game except for one period in the 70s with one national team for one world cup? Hasn't soccer, for 99% been more specialized? The counter argument is that players get shuttled around when they hit the senior team. Thierry Henry was a winger turned forward. Ashley Cole forward turned fullback. Rio Ferdinand striker turned center back. Are these conversions evidence of a Total Football development?
Total football, Dutch football of the 1970s, has greatly influenced modern play, especially on the flanks. Flank players today are expected to play both ways and share the same skill set. It is quite common to see flank players overlapping. While wingers have generally withdrawn some, fullbacks generally play higher up the field. Because the fullbacks are playing higher, the roles of the central players have become more separated and diverse. You rarely see old-school centerback attacks anymore. Coaches want both centerbacks and 1 or 2 centermids to "hold" back. As a result we are seeing systems described as having 4 lines instead of 3. I don't associate total football influence with just the Dutch. I also think of AC Milan in the 80's followed by Barca tiki-taka as promoting an evolving total football style. I look at general trends. In my mind the hallmarks of total football are an aggressive compact zone defense, constant control of the middle of the field (I think of it as a balanced stance), quick transitions, and tactical speed and deception in the attack. To personify total football, the team defends high in order deny space, making the field their opponents must attack smaller, and conversely winning the ball closer to their opponent's goal. Me saying that I was preparing kids 20 years ago to play total football is no different than coaches today saying they are preparing kids to play like Barca. IMO they are trying to do exactly what I was.
I think NSCAA is a great resource as well as USYSA. This forum has been a good source of information over the years. I have a lot of respect for the posters here. Most coaches are pretty busy right now, but usually you can get responses fairly quickly. Nick Laino has forgotten more about soccer than I ever knew. GKbenji is younger (compared to Nick and I) and a professional coach who is very experienced, as well as a keeper coach. The moderator, Elessar78, is a younger travel coach who knows exactly what you are going through. Besides his boys travel teams, I believe Elessar78 is also starting to do the parent coach thing for one of his own. Both of the younger coaches are much more experienced than me, and I greatly value their advice.
I was going to add the bit about the overlapping fullbacks about evidence of TF. But as I understand TF is that they're supposed to be interchangeable, at least semi-permanently. In the book Brilliant Orange, they talked about it as a means of conserving energy because he player covered less ground. Today the interchange happens mostly in the flanks and only momentarily. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Bionic Girl, the other thing to do is only roster enough to make 30% changes at each sub. So if you play 11v11, then 3 subs. I think the recommendation is that players get at least a half of PT, not necessarily equal playin time. Even our best players operate best with periods of rest. But 30% changes allows you to keep the level on the pitch high. When you have players who are not at the Rey of the group, it hurts in practice too. Because you can't push the top of the group further and harder. We had a few weak players last year and training would always break down when the ball hit their feet. It's not good for the development of the better players. It's not that we can't develop these players but they need to be on a team with appropriately Matched players. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
This is really helpful. Part of our problem is that we are over-rostered, with some markedly weaker players - although not as much disparity as in recent years. We are a small community with a weak rec program, so we are going to have that disparity to some degree. And I have to figure out how to not let the top kids coast -- will be thinking about that. It is easy, just like in teaching, to kind of let them slide while we try to bring everyone else up.
Never heard the phrase "Rey of the group" before. Is it a typo or slang? I agree that including weaker players will reduce speed of play for a team, but group speed of play is only important for older ages when training is more focused on group tactics. Say above U10. Even then you can still push the better players, it just isn't as simple a process with players of mixed skill levels. Rec coaches face this challenge at every level. Having some weaker players is not a disadvantage for individual skills training or 1v1 drills. In early elementary school for reading, teachers break down classes into groups by ability so slower readers don't hold back the faster readers. The different groups may even have different books, but it is the same grade level. There are always going to be weaker and stronger players in any group, but who is weaker may vary with the task.
Our other local club just pushes the weaker kids out by drastically limiting playing time, etc. I am talking at the u10/u11/u12 level. It is ridiculous. But, we lose a lot of matches to them because they are always maximizing competitiveness.
The only way to insure that the best U12 players will still be the best soccer players six years later is if the clubs drive the rest of the U12 players out of soccer. I bet that this club also claims to be the best at player development.
"rest of the group" sorry. if rec, no. If the players are trying to push themselves, weaker teammates hold back their training. Going against these kids offers insufficient resistance. And for the weaker kids, they're just treading water to survive. It's too fast for them. It's a disservice to both from a developmental standpoint. IMO, rosters should be more fluid. Gotta get the players to the optimal developmental training environment. You're right at younger ages, for the MOST part, it won't matter because they're working on individual things. But even in a 1v1 a weaker player doesn't offer enough of a challenge to a good player. Once you get into skills such as passing and receiving—players who still can't pass and receive with quality after six months—training sessions break down. But in a classroom setting, Johnny and Jane aren't reading from one book. Johnny's reading ability doesn't slow down Jane's ability to comprehend and vice versa.
Of course. And I have a friend who is complaining to me that her (u12) son who is on their State League team (lower division) is now riding the bench because he isn't fast enough. (Translate -- got a little chunky.) This kid lives, sleeps, and breathes soccer. Great player, great vision, awesome foot and ball placement skills.) We all know his fitness isn't going to get better sitting out.
Another consideration as to how many to roster: what are your training games like? So we work in triangles (3), diamonds (4). In games we have seven field players on the pitch and play either 2-3-2 or 3-3-1. So I can work in units of 2-3/3-2 (5 players) or a 3-1 (4 players) or 3-3 (6 players). So 12 players is optimal. IMO, better to carry less. More playing time for everyone makes people more happy. Even if your attendance isn't always perfect, much easier to adjust training to the numbers present than having to find game minutes for all your players.
F*** it. At the end of the day, if a player is better than when he was when you got him in August then that's all that matters. I used to sweat losing players to other clubs, but it never really happened. I've lost a one or two. It may still happen but I think human nature likes the status quo and people tend to be optimistic ("if we fix this next season, they'll be fine..."). They will also over-rationalize why they went with you in the first place. It's also why you'll see families stay with a club that gives their kid five minutes of PT per game.
I was thinking of the early years while kids are reading aloud and taking turns. Reading slower adds to the story completion time and over extended time to the text book completion time. So it holds back everyone's progress to the "new curriculum." Kids learn at different rates and teachers would adjust by moving kids from one reading group to another. Where I ran into coaching frustration at the U10 and U12 level was getting significant numbers (about 30-50%) of new players each year who were the right chronological age but their soccer age was U8. They just weren't ready for the U10 and U12 curriculum. I was able to handle it at the U10 level because a review of U8 fundamentals is a great place to start a U10 training plan. With U12s sadly I had to repeat the U10 training plan, meaning that it held the U12 players back. Another thing, however, that held back development was the lack of quality in the opponents we faced in matches. The vast majority of the opponents were coached to play kick and run bunch ball. I suspect this held back the development of our team attacking tactics, but not our team defensive tactics because we were facing physically and technically good attacking players and facing significant challenges to our transition to defense. The bunch ball opponents presented no problems that short combination passing (think 1-2s) could solve and forced us to play direct with longer passes into the gap behind the "bunch." This experience is why I say the problems arise after U10. It is also the reason that I feel U-Littles should be inclusive until after U10 like it was 20 years ago rather than stratified. Truly talented U10s can play up, while the lesser skilled U10s are not excluded so that the more talented of the lesser skilled players have a chance to catch up and even surpass their lesser talented peers. This won't make much sense to a reader who doesn't differentiate between current performance level and talent--the rate at which players learn. Elite U11 and older youth players should be identified by their talent rather than their growth rate.