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