The Game Within the Child

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...

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...

U12 is a great age to play soccer. The game speed is much higher than in U12 and players are starting to think ahead. There is a marked improvement in skills and players can show a wider variety of skills. Long passing enters the equation for both crossing the ball and playing it forward early to break pressure. Players are finally allowed to head the ball and they start to settle into more clearly defined positions. With our implementation of the new US Youth Soccer Association (USYSA) recommendations, the U12 grows from 7 v 7 to 9 v 9. More players on the field makes the game more complex, so the challenge for you is how do you prepare the players to first survive and then excel at the game. The most obvious strategy is to focus on the three core skills: dribbling, shield/turn and controlling the ball for your least experienced/ skilled players. Each of these can be developed using the  model training session  I have posted elsewhere on this blog. It mixes the core skil...

Working with 6-7 year old players means that you will be asked to engage, entertain and entreat them. While it is a chore to keep their attention sometimes, there are other times where they will act like a sponge and pick up everything you ask them to do. As a high school teacher during the day, I constantly encounter peers who say that they couldn't deal with a group of 6 and 7 year olds. With a spouse who is an elementary school teacher, I hear comments from her peers about how they couldn't handle older children. For some reason, that has never been an issue for me. I don't know why, but I can coach any age and not be intimidated or uncomfortable. For over 20 years, I have taught parent coaches how to work with the U8 player. The past seven years, I have been able to watch these coaches then go out and try to coach. This is not to say that a 4 hour training session or a season's worth of experience will make someone a master coach, but I should expect to see some i...

U6 is the entry level for many players in soccer. Because the level isn't very high, there is an idea prevalent that anybody can coach U6 players. That idea is quickly dispelled when parents go out to coach for the first time. While it may be easy to entertain your 5 year old, when you have a group of 5 year olds, the challenge is much more complex. As a high school teacher during the day, I constantly encounter peers who say that they couldn't deal with a group of children that young. With a spouse who is an elementary school teacher, I hear comments from her peers about how they couldn't handle older children. For some reason, that has never been an issue for me. I don't know why, but I can coach any age and not be intimidated or uncomfortable. For over 20 years, I have taught parent coaches how to work with the U6 player. The past seven years, I have been able to watch these coaches then go out and try to coach. This is not to say that a 4 hour training session or ...

I got the opportunity to coach a U10 game this weekend. The coach was out of town and asked me to step in. They were a very good group of kids, especially for this level. We were playing a team that had been together for a long time with a coach who has been in the program for many years. The game went well, it was close throughout and the level of skill exhibited by the players was higher than you would expect to see at a recreational level. Basically, everything I would hope to see from the players was on display in this game. As the coach, with little knowledge of the players abilities prior to the game, I just broke them into two groups and substituted the entire team other than the goalkeeper every 7-8 minutes. As the DOC, I tried to model the behaviors that I want my coaches to use every game. I sat behind the players on the sideline and talked to them about the game. I asked them to help me organize who would be playing what positions when they re-entered the game. I did hig...

The use of video can be a powerful tool for both the coach and the player. As a coach, you can save yourself hours of time and energy with one good video segment. Let's say that you are trying to show a dribbling move to players and only one player can do it. When you stop the practice to have that player demonstrate, they almost always fail to do it well. If you catch them on video, you can use that to show that player to both himself and his teammates. Players love to see themselves on video and it can be a powerful motivator to the other players to push them to try and get it right.  An even more effective use of video occurs in game situations. I always counsel my coaches to focus on individual players during the game even if it is only for 2-3 minutes. That way he has something specific to say to each player as opposed to talking about things that only apply to some players on the team but not all the players. Video is a great way to show the player what s/he is doing and...