The Game Within the Child

  Avoiding the 3L's Sam Snow , former Director of Coaching for Louisiana Youth Soccer Association , introduced me to this term and it clarifies so many things for me that I feel compelled to share it with you. The three L’s are Lines, Laps and Lectures . I will deal with each of these separately, but the basic idea is that the 3L’s will eventually cause your players to look at practice as work and not play. Lines reduce the number of touches a player will get on the ball and will reduce the reality of the game. There is no element of the game where the players line up for anything except a handshake at the end. I once counted the number of touches a player got during a 5 minute period while participating in a shooting activity . There were 12 players on the team and no goalkeeper. During that 5 minutes he got 4 shots and his touch count was 8. The rest of the time was spent holding his ball so that other players wouldn’t knock it away or chasing his errant shot, retrieving it and r...

  It’s the pressure, stupid In 1992, President George H.W. Bush was coming off one of his best years ever. Riding high in the polls after assembling an international coalition to retake Kuwait from Iraqi invaders, he was expected to cruise to re-election. While the presence of a third-party candidate from the right most likely did the greatest damage (Clinton won a plurality of the vote), there was also a famous phrase from that campaign that resonated “it’s the economy, stupid” because after the war, the U.S. went into a brief recession and that phrase was meant to imply that Clinton was more in touch with the economic needs of citizens than the President.  I was reminded of that phrase after some of my coaches insisted that they couldn’t adequately coach their inexperienced players without having lines and a full-size goal for their practices. I do empathize with them. When I coached at the HS level, my teams always had access to at least one goal and up to 4 depending on th...

  4/12/23 Key Takeaways from ATLUTD coaches clinic We had a good turnout of coaches for the clinic, but I know all of you couldn’t make it, so here are some key takeaways for you to think about.  Look like you are having fun and your players will too…. All of our coaches are parent volunteers. We have tried in the past to get help from HS and College students who were knowledgeable about soccer, but it rarely works out because they are either not good with the kids or don’t communicate well with the parents. I’d rather have parents who know how they would want to be treated even if their soccer experience isn’t great.  One of the issues that crops up is that our parent volunteers have difficulty getting out of “parent mode” even when they are the coach of the team. What we saw from Leigh and Casey, the coach instructors last night, was an ability to get a little silly with the players. Their enthusiasm for the activities they were doing was infectious and the kids felt it...

 When I took my National Youth License back in 1999, one of the big revelations I had was the concept of 100% participation. As a coach, I was comfortable having players wait their turn to participate in an activity. What I learned was that waiting reduces opportunity and breeds misbehavior. Players who are not participating in an activity are losing opportunities to learn and they are far more likely to engage in misbehaviors that distract others or get themselves into trouble. We learned the motto "no lines, no laps, no lectures." While each of these deserves it's own essay, this essay is focused on one area of coaching practice that I have always found particularly disappointing, the dribbling through cones activity.  It is a staple of practices throughout the U.S. and it features rows of beautifully spaced cones and players waiting in line to dribble around the cones and then back. It has so many features that I find disdainful, but I do have to acknowledge that it do...

American Soccer has long been derided as little more than "kickball." We have a large number of players, but produce relatively few truly outstanding players compared to a country like the Netherlands which has a much higher success rate at developing young talent. There are tons of reasons why we lag behind other countries including the lack of infrastructure and the lack of a "soccer culture" where people had grown up with the sport and therefore have parents with prior experience. Our parent coaches are often transplants from other sports that are primarily coach directed like football and baseball. Employing the same coaching strategies in soccer is not very effective due to the player-centered nature of the sport. The problem As the director of coaching for a recreational program, my most persistent problem was finding coaches for U5 and u6 teams. When I did find these coaches, they had little idea of what to do with the kids during a training session o...

We are wrapping up the season and I wanted to record some of the action so that I could see how players have grown. I have observed a great deal of growth in the players in terms of their skill and attention to the game. Many parents have commented about how their child is starting to "get it" when it comes to game play and how to use the skills we focused on in training. When I started the group training for the U5/6 in the fall of 2017, I did it because I was dissatisfied with the quality of coaching at practices and game play. I thought it would be easy to train a large group of 4/5 year olds and improve the quality of their development. As you can probably expect, it wasn't easy. Activities that are easy to do with 6-10 players on your team are almost impossible to carry out with 40-50 players. Getting 8-10 teams of players to the correct field and have the right color was crazy some weeks. Despite the challenges, I was able to modify the sessions to focus on my p...

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 ...

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...

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...