The Game Within the Child

As both a coach and an educator, I see lots of parallels between my two jobs. For over 30 years, I have been promoting a set of coaching behaviors that include having the coach take a reduced role during the game. While I have been saying for years that "the game is the test," I have never articulated how a coach's behavior can affect the players performance on that test. So let me give you an example. Imagine you are a teacher and you have completed a unit of instruction. You prepare a summative test for your students. You know the level of your students and the difficulty of the material. As a teacher, you will be validated if you give them a challenging test and they are successful. On the day of the test, you hand it out. Once they start taking the test, you immediately begin yelling at them, giving advice to one student about choosing letter C on question 2. You tell another student to read all of question 10 before answering it. Then you tell a third student that ...

I offer group training sessions once a week during the season for U6-U14 age groups in my club. The sessions are open to all players in each of those age groups. Because these are my target age groups and comprise the bulk of the club, it offers me a chance to implement my philosophy more consistently than other approaches I have used in the past. This is the fourth season I have had the pleasure to work with these age groups in this format. I have learned a lot about how to manage a training session for a diverse group of players and keep it fresh for those who have been in attendance for each of the four seasons worth of sessions. For me, it has been a tremendous growth experience and I have had the chance to see players grow in confidence and love of the sport. A couple of weeks ago, I got this hand drawn picture from one of the U6 players and a hug. That experience reinforced my subjective opinion of the program and complemented the objective improvement in skills that I have been ...

I have written previously in "the freeze technique" and "separating the signal from the noise" about finding the right time to stop an activity and being able to identify whether players are executing the skills you are working on in your training sessions. Since I work with novice coaches both in my coaching courses and in my regular role as director of coaches, I see a lot of behaviors that are counterproductive to the development of players. In this post, I wanted to look more closely at one aspect of coaching that will help improve the practice of coaches possibly more than any other, the snapshot. The snapshot used to be called a "Kodak moment" for those of us of a certain age. The idea is very simple. If you know EXACTLY what you are looking for, it is a lot easier to find it than if you only sort of have an idea. In his book, Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People , author Stephen Covey describes habit 2 as "begin with the end in mind."...

I recently watched a practice where a coach had the players passing back and forth in pairs up and down the field. Once they completed this task, they waited for another group to go before repeating the same activity. I watched for a few minutes without interrupting the coach. One reason I didn't interrupt the coach is that he has not reacted positively to me in the past, so I figured I would let him do his thing just in case he had a similar response. What struck me later was that this activity failed to do the two things we most want our activities to do: improve skill and solve problems. The coach was obviously trying to improve the passing skills of the players, but in the time I watched the activity there wasn't a single pass that showed any real attempt by the player to make a skillful, accurate pass. There were defects in body position, foot position and contact point on all of the players involved in the activity. All of the passes were made to players who were less...

In the basketball movie "Hoosiers" Gene Hackman plays the coach. During the season, he decides that they don't share the ball enough, so he sets up a race from one end of the court to the other. The players select the fastest player to dribble down the court. Coach Dale starts the race and then throws the ball to the other end of the court, easily beating the dribbler down the court. His point was that passing is more effective at moving the ball around the field than dribbling. Now you know that I prefer you to focus on dribbling first and there is an important reason for that which I have shared with you often enough, but that doesn't mean you should ignore passing/moving/receiving the ball as part of your player development. It is just that you need to do it at the right time. While I emphasize three core skills (dribbling, controlling the ball, shield and turn) during my group sessions, I do also work on passing with my U10 and older players starting during the ...

So you have decided to enroll your child in our soccer program. If you have no experience with soccer, then this article is for you. First, I wanted to talk to you about the nature of the game. Unlike baseball or football or organized basketball, the game does not have any plays. As a result, the role of the coach during practices and games is different. Instead of the coach controlling the action and the players working hard to run the play the exact same way every time, players get control of the game. If you can imagine, every time the player gets the ball, the situation is different and the player has to come up with a way to solve the problem. The solution to every problem requires ball skills like dribbling, controlling the ball and shielding/turning with the ball. As a result, our practices should include lots of time on the ball. The exercises that the players do should require them to make decisions and use their skills to carry out their decisions. They should also focu...

There is an eternal debate about the nature of teaching, is it an art or a science? As a scientist and a teacher, I can offer a unique perspective on this debate. It is clear, teaching is a science. Since you now know where I stand, let me show you how I reached this conclusion. You can probably guess that I teach science. I have been teaching science for many years, but only a few years ago, I realized that my background was different than most of my peers. I had actually started out as a research scientist. I had no intention of going into education as a teacher. How I got here is a story for a different time. Suffice it to say that I was a poorly prepared teacher when I first entered a high school classroom. It should have been obvious to me that teaching is a science very early on, but I'm not that smart. So here are some ways in which teaching is a science: Scientists need subjects for every study. The more subjects, the better the statistical analysis.  Teachers have ...

When you watch a first-time soccer player, regardless of age, she tends to move slowly and react to the ball instead of controlling it. The touch is too hard or too soft, not like Goldilocks, just right. When the ball is coming at him, he struggles to decide how to get it under control. If you have spent any time around novice players, these images should be familiar to you. With the start of a new season, our program always gets a lot of players new to the game in every age group. Since I never played the game until I was a junior in high school, I am the prime example of an older player just starting out. A recreational coach can never depend on all of his or her players having had prior experience. In fact, the most common comment I receive from coaches is that there is such a wide range of abilities on their teams that they have difficulty making the practice appropriate for everyone. While I have always been skills focused in my approach to player development (at the expense o...

One of my favorite coaching school stories involves the freeze technique. This is a technique the coach uses when s/he sees something in a scrimmage or small-sided game. You are supposed to try and stop it as soon as you see it and then make your coaching point and restart the action. One day, at my B license course a coach was running a session and saw something he didn't like, so he shouted "freeze" and ran into the scrimmage. He then promptly forgot what he was going to say. Instead of trying to talk himself into the situation, he just shouted "play" and walked back to the sideline. As coaches, we often try to has as big of an impact on the development of our team as possible. You know, based on some of my previous posts (" helping your child ", " how to enjoy your child's game ") that I am a strong proponent of having the players take control of the game and become responsible for making as many decisions as possible. You also know ...

When I first earned my A license back a really long time ago, I got the pleasure of having the last session and the topic of high pressure defending. The players (and coaches who were playing) were dog tired and it was going to be hard to run a session and play a game that required a high-intensity effort. I gave the team a few visual cues and sent them out to play. They had had a couple of opportunities to go into high pressure mode, but I was following the advice of my instructors and letting the players see if they could identify the opportunity. Then one of my evaluators came up and told me that if my team didn't score in 4 minutes, I was fired. Knowing my success or failure in this course was on the line, I stopped the action at the next opportunity using the freeze technique . Since this was a corrective point, I had a chance to give the players a short breather while we reviewed what I wanted them to do. The breather re-energized the players and they used the cues on the nex...