Pre Season Training III

Short Prea-Seasons

If you are coaching a school, college or tournament team you are likely faced with a very short time (one to two weeks) to prepare your team for the season. Below are some thoughts on how to get the most out of this time.

Player Evaluation

You need to learn the skill/technical, tactical and physical capabilities of your players within the first or second day of practice. You can run the practices and drills you find at soccerpracticebooks.com. The important consideration is that you collect information about your players. If you don't know the players by name yet, give them numbered shirts and have a list with their name next to the number. Across the top of the list, write the areas you want to assess. Keep it fairly brief because you will not have time to evaluate each player against 30 criteria. An example might be:

ball control
1v1
shooting
passing
tackling
speed
endurance
tactics
attitude
leadership

Then get someone else to organize and run the drills so that you can stand back and write down a number between 1 (poor) and 10 (outstanding) under each criteria for each player. Stand in a location where you can observe all players in all drills. You may wish to get a second person to rate players to compare.

Choose System of Play

At the end of day 1 or day 2, go over the player evaluation results and develop a system of play and game strategy based on:

1. the player talent available
2. any information you have about the competition
3. your team's competitiveness in the league

If you need help with this, visit Systems of Play.

Develop Deficient Areas

Based on the player abilities and your chosen system, clearly identify the areas you need to work on most before the season starts. That could be a combination of technical, tactical, fitness or mental areas. Select appropriate drills and sequence them into practice sessions. A useful tip here is to focus the practices on skill and tactical development with many scrimmages and have the players do aerobic training on their own on alternating days, such as a 5km run. After the season starts, practices can be comprehensive again without the need for separate fitness training. Have an exhibition game if possible to see how the team is progressing and decide if you need to make changes to your program.

Schedule

Your two week pre-season schedule could look like this:

Day 1: Player evaluation
Day 2: Player evaluation
Day 3: Team practice
Day 4: Individual fitness training
Day 5: Practice
Day 6: Individual fitness
Day 7: Practice
Day 8: Exhibition Game
Day 9: Practice
Day 10: Fitness
Day 11: Practice
Day 12: Exhibition Game
Day 13: Practice
Day 14: Pre-Season Meeting

If at all possible, scout the opposition during this time (their exhibition games, practices or tournaments) to confirm your overall strategy

If you only have a week, have the exhibition game on day 6.

Good Luck

Soccer Coaching - Overview

Soccer coaching is probably the most complex coaching assignment in all of sports. Soccer coaching involves an understanding of soccer specific skills, soccer specific fitness training, and soccer specific nutrition.

But that's not all. In coaching soccer , a coach also needs psychological skills to deal with all aspects of individual and team mental preparations. Soccer coaching involves a tremendous amount of data analysis and problem solving during games and practices. Soccer coaching requires visionary, strategic and tactical thinking skills.

And all of the above requirements change with age groups and gender being coached.

It is impossible for a novice or experienced soccer coach to develop all the knowledge and skills from scratch. That is why there are soccer coaching schools and seminars.

Not all aspiring or established soccer coaches can afford time or money for that training.

Our site, soccerpracticebooks.com has been developed to provide you with key resources to become a better soccer coach!

Defending Throw-Ins

The question is whether to have a defender mark in front or behind the attacker on a throw-in.

The principle of defending is to mark goalside of the attacker, i.e. between the attacker and the goal you're defending. This is true for throw-ins as well.

If the pass or throw are short, a defender can decide on whether to step around the attacker to intercept, slide-tackle or stay goalside (let attacker receive ball and then delay-jockey-tackle). If the pass/throw is long, then the defender has the closest distance to the ball.

The goal of the attacker is to move into space past the defender, so why give it to them by standing in front of them??

You may want to consider sandwiching the attacker closest to your goal by having a defender behind and in front.

Soccer Fitness Basics

Soccer fitness training is extremely complex compared to other sports. If you consider the basic energy systems, aerobic - anaerobic, most sports have a dominant requirement of one of these. Proper soccer fitness needs both. At high levels, soccer players run between 10 - 15 km a game, needing a strong aerobic base. Someone once said that soccer players are serial sprinters. For quick speed bursts, the anaerobic system needs to be developed.

But that's not all for soccer fitness specifics. There are many elements of the game that require pure strength. One on one body contact requires upper body strength - hence a recent soccer fitness training trend towards the weight room. But not just for upper body. Jumping requirements necessitate leg strength to maximize vertical leaping ability.

Soccer fitness training must also address agility and flexibility. There are many stop-start runs, many change of directions, many unnatural twists of the body.
So how to train soccer specific fitness? With limited practice time at youth levels, how to build it in without sacrificing working with the ball and developing ball skills?
The obvious answer is to encourage kids to play as much soccer on their own. That will develop a lot of the fundamental skill and soccer fitness. As a coach, you can use the soccer fitness resources available and cleverly build them into your practice plans so that they do not take away from your skill and tactical development. That is exactly what we have done at soccerpracticebooks.com

In addition, you can take some of the soccer fitness drills and ask your players to do some of the work on their own. A lot of the basic plyometrics can even be done while watching TV or listening to music while outside. You can never do enough.
Ultimately, the motivation of each individual is what is going to make them excel. As coach, you need to balance the team's need for soccer fitness with skill and tactics development. Try our practice plans and you'll get a good idea!!

Find soccer fitness resources at:
soccer fitness training

Soccer Skill Development

The key to developing soccer skills as a young kid is the number of touches you get on the ball. I heard it said long time ago that 4000 ball touches per week are a good number. So let's do the soccer math:

As a kid, we used to play 3 hours a day, 6 days a week. Half of it was 1v1 , 2v2 or 3v3 games with lots of individual action. The other half was full field scrimmages. At an average of 5 touches a minute, this translates into 5400 touches a week or more.

Contrast this with what you see on soccer fields today. First of all, kids tend to only play in organizations, i.e. clubs. If they are fortunate, they practice twice a week for 1.5 hours and play one game. Let's observe practices. The absolute killer to soccer skill development are line drills with many kids sharing one ball. You can tell by kids standing around waiting. Next are long set up times the coach uses between drills. Then you see warm-up runs without a ball and fitness work without a ball followed by full field scrimmage. If the kids are lucky they get 200 touches a practice and maybe 20 in a game. Total is 420 per week and you wonder why kids aren't as skillful as they used to be? As they grow older, it becomes more and more difficult to make up for that lost time.

That is why our practices at www.soccerpracticebooks.com are based on maximizing the number of touches on the ball. The key principles is to work in small groups of 2-4 players for most drills. Warm-ups quite often involve individual ball work. Fitness drills involve a ball as well. Players never wait for their next touch of the ball. We also have designed the entire practice sessions such that a coach can set up cones for all the drills before the practice starts, so that there is no time wasted between drills. We focus on continuous action with the ball. In our typical 90 minute practice session, we estimate a player gets between 700-1000 touches. At two sessions per week and a game this gets you to 1420 to 2020 touches a week or five times what you see around the parks.

We believe we are close as possible to delivering the skill development of earlier generations. Try our practices - you won't regret it.