Travel Soccer teams around NOVA let's discuss

Forum Index » Sports General Discussion

◄ 1 2 3 ... 322 323 324 ... 522 523 524 ► Go

Go to page...

02/03/2017 09:29

Subject: Re:Travel Soccer teams around NOVA let's discuss

Anonymous

asksoccernova wrote:So, if the 3rd world country player development model doesn't fit here, and the European academy model (and with pro teams in little tiny towns that can always fight for promotion up to the 7th division all the way to the top one) doesn't fit here, what is the answer?

The only answer other than "we need more time" is what US Soccer, of all people, has been advocating for a while, which is ECONOMICAL TRAINING SESSIONS.

Weekly schedule in-season:

Rec - 1 or 2 practices a week (usually 1 hour each) 1 - 2 hours training + game
Travel - 2 or 3 practices a week (usually 90 minutes each) - 1.5 - 3 hours training + game
"Elite" if there is such a thing - 3 or 4 practices a week - 3 - 4.5 hours training + game

Regardless of how you slice it, even 4.5 hours of soccer per week is not enough to really develop a player to their fullest potential. Go to any real soccer country and say that an elite 14 year old kid gets 4.5 hours of soccer per week (excluding games) and prepare to be laughed at. I'm sure that Michael Jordan limited himself to 4.5 hours of organized basketball training per week as a high school kid... How many hours do highly competitive 10 year old gymnasts that are 5 years out from the Olympics train per week?

Anyway, enough about that. Economical sessions are the absolute best way to learn a skill quickly. Street soccer / unstructured play is good for experimenting, learning new moves/skills here and there, and a lot of other "soccer intangibles", but I will tell you, nothing accelerates a player's skill level more than a well-run, economical training session. A player that cannot strike the ball with correct technique will not learn how to do it correctly just by playing street soccer. Maybe another player who can do it right takes the time to show the kid how its done correctly, but its just "do it this way", not a structured motor learning correction process that every coach should know how to do at a basic level.

An economical training session should be (for a technical / skill topic):

warm-up that is related to the topic being taught
-30 minutes of learning a skill without pressure
-30 minutes of using the skill with some pressure with smaller numbers
-30 minutes of using the skill in real game situations

Or, in a rec practice, it would be 20/20/20.

To run a good training session, the burden is on the coach to know how to structure it and teach the topic. USSF has excellent coaching education programs despite all the other things people dislike about the organization, and I learned this concept when I took my D License a while ago. Most of the original USSF (and NSCAA) coaching courses were based on coaching courses in Germany, England, and the Netherlands... but the people putting the USSF coaching courses together realized that we don't have as much time to work with players per week, so while there was good material in the courses, it didn't translate to the American player who didn't even have a feel for the ball yet as a teenager compared to their counterparts in other countries.

I think the idea of economical training sessions originally came from Germany, where at some point, most run-of-the-mill soccer clubs in the country realized it wasn't possible to get the kids 4-5 days per week (except maybe the top top clubs that they had to compete against). So the solution was to implement economical training sessions where the entire practice places demands on the player in all areas of the game: physical, mental, technical, and tactical. You get 90 minutes to train all 4 areas, so its up to the coach to design the session appropriately. There are a lot of variables that can be manipulated in a session (field space / dimensions, time, numbers, amount of pressure, number of touches, restrictions, time limits, incentives... the main things though that slide the difficulty scale up or down are the amount of space and the amount of time that players have to execute a skill or make a decision)

"South American" and "Latin" (Spanish/Italian) training sessions are not economical at all actually... but they don't need to be because its assumed that the players are around the ball so much that they have already developed the technical (skill) part of the game on their own. That's why they are on the team to begin with.

Interestingly enough, training sessions in S.A./Latin countries are designed with the assumption that the players ALREADY have a very high skill level (you won't be on the team if you don't anyway). Therefore, the typical coach will more or less roll the ball out and give the players an objective, but not give them specifics on how they should achieve that objective exactly (or just make running commentary as they play). They let the players play creatively, with their own flair, and be their individual selves as long as they achieve the objective. A German or Dutch session will be extremely specific about how an objective is to be achieved, and even if the objective is still achieved (but in the wrong manner), it's "wrong". Some clubs in these countries break the mold of their own country's soccer culture, and those teams are the interesting ones to watch - Barcelona playing with Dutch influence, Arsenal playing with French influence, DC United in the days of Harkes/Pope/Agoos/Lassiter/Olsen playing with Marco Etcheverry & Jaime Moreno, both players who emerged as among the best from Bolivia's 3rd world country development model (from Tahuichi, which put structure around the 3rd world dev model with huge success) as the engines of the team, etc.

So for right now, I think the solution is educating more coaches and making sure they "get it" when it comes to session planning. Enough faulting the kids for not being from a crazy-about-soccer family where the dad played and enough faulting them for not playing Joga Bonito 24/7 on concrete with soda cans.

Want better test scores in math? Make sure the teachers are good at teaching it and getting the kids to solidly understand it given limited classroom time.

Giving a kid that doesn't speak english a dictionary to memorize does not help. That's the equivalent of what I feel happens when a coach watches Barcelona play, then looks up a random "Rondo" drill from Spain, and runs it with his team. Just stop it.

Raise the bar. Hold coaches accountable for the quality of their training sessions. As a parent, take the time to learn and understand the difference between an excellent session, a good one, an average one, a poor one, and a terrible one.

Try this out:

If your kid is in a larger club, observe a session from a U10 rec coach, a U10 "development academy" session (for more competitive house players looking for more training), a U10 travel coach working with the top team in the age group, and the U10 travel coach working with the bottom team in the age group. Look for the differences in quality in each session. You'll find it interesting.

Agree. Very good. EXCEPT "dad played". As a mom that played with a USWNT and married to a man that never played the game--I still see coaches on the boys side treat all mothers like a bunch of dumb soccer moms serving only for secretarial/managerial duties and snacks. Truth is some of us are more knowledgeable than the dad you assume is a soccer wunderkind because he has a foreign acccent.