Day 4: Coaching the Team

Originally posted on January 2, 2020 on playbeautifulsoccer.net

On day four of the coaching course, we focused on coaching the team. As was always going to be, my voice was not strong enough to maintain while teaching over evangelical church services. Although my voice was weakened, we forged ahead. We explored team meetings, goal setting, game analysis with an emphasis on identifying and quantifying trends, and session design, focusing differentiating between game-like and repetitious activities, establishing experiences that allow players to develop autonomy (in decision-making), and touching briefly on periodization of adaptation demands and session type (game, fitness, threshold, maintenance, organizational, preparative, and recovery).

On the field, the coaches watched a game and analyzed trends in the teams’ play in the late morning after the lecture portion of class.

Then, for their lunch time activity, they designed a session for a given topic. There were three sections of sessions that the coaches were assigned to: attacking in the attacking third using blind spots and countermovements, attacking in the middle third using varied runs, and defending in the attacking third using get compact, stay compact, and move together. After returning from lunch, we briefly reviewed session design to support their lunch time work before going out to the fields to run training sessions with the players.

Each coach had 20 minutes to run a session solo, covering what we called the problem stage (orientation phase in US Soccer terminology) and the solution stage (learning phase in US Soccer terminology). Running a session well demanded that the coaches implement a cumulative understanding of Level I and Level II materials. A handful of the coaches showed really well in this challenge, especially Clinton and Yvonne, who had a great presence, wealth of understanding, and took great care for the players.