In October of 2008, when Owen was playing U6 in the NKYA league, I began maintaining a blog about my experiences as a youth soccer coach. That was "Coach Pat's NKYA Soccer Blog" and I stopped posting to that blog when I began devoting more of my coaching time to the Legends club teams. Even as the Legends program grew dramatically during the last year I've also continued to coach with NKYA and to be the administrator of their youth soccer league. In two weeks my work with NKYA comes to an end though. I'm devoting myself to Legends Soccer full time and I want to get back in the habit of writing about the kids I'm working with, how they are progressing and what I'm learning from them about how to effectively coach the game.
Here is a link to one of the final posts I wrote for that NKYA blog. At that point I was already seeing the game from a Legends coaching point of view: March 2013
I don't know if anyone else will find the posts here interesting but I know for me writing about my coaching experiences is a very important step in organizing my thinking about coaching, about what works and what doesn't. My blog posts also form a record of the development of players and that's very valuable to me. One aspect of coaching that I am most concerned with is the extent to which I'm able to customize my approach for each player. Am I focusing on what each individual player needs at this point in their development? Am I sure that no one is getting lost in the chaos of a practice session? By using a blog to record what I'm seeing in practice and game situations I can keep track of what I need to be working on with each individual player and avoid a "one size fits all" approach.
I also consider this blog to be an open conversation with parents and other coaches so comments are welcome.
P.S.
I've imported my posts from the original NKYA blog so that they appear in this blog's timeline.
