Back in late summer I spotted the sign above while at a driving range and it seemed to me that the advice it provides applies to any sport. I especially like the first two points.
Recently I've had some opportunities during training sessions to talk with players about the fact that as they continue to develop they have to become their own personal coach, a concept that was a favorite topic of Coach Jeremy when he trained our players. The idea is that if you really want to improve you've got to be self-aware. You've got to learn to really focus on your technique. You've got to judge your own performance and be interested in and open to ways to improve that performance. It's an attitude that is the exact opposite of that old characterization of insanity as "doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time."
Following the season opener for the U11 boys on Tuesday evening it occurred to me that maybe I'm the one who keeps doing the same thing and hoping for a different result. Obviously all we ever work on in practice is dribbling skill. We find ways to combine that sort of work with practice on first touch and shooting but we never talk about tactical passing and we never talk about tactical play in terms of defense. Not surprisingly our defense is terrible. One player gets the ball and goes on a run and everyone else but the keeper drifts up field after them. Our field awareness as a team is weighted heavily towards wherever the ball is and so every turnover turns into a counter attack. We had the same problem outdoor in the fall and yet I was never willing to change our practice plan or to change my basic instructions to the team on game days in order to focus, even temporarily, on defensive shape or tactics. I've been confident that if we just keep working on developing every player's ball control skills they would pick-up the basics of being more organized defensively by simple dint of playing experience. Obviously I talk to players on all of my teams about how important it is to be aware of what's going on around you, to anticipate, and to remember that when you don't have the ball you aren't just doing nothing. But I never force players to stay in any set "position" on the field. I felt justified in the expectation that players will "get it" on their own with this minimal bit of guidance as my U8 girls team, my lab team, plays a wonderful flowing style of soccer where they defend smartly and build their attack right from that defense.
My girls have great field awareness and know to rotate about the field to cover for each other and to find open opponents when we lose the ball. I've had most of the girls in this group since U6, many since U4, and I've always encouraged them to possess the ball and dribble for a shot from anywhere on the field. As they got older and started asking me what "position" they were in as they went onto the field I'd always say "figure it out yourselves." Then I'd usually add the caveat "But remember, if one of you is in the back and the ball comes to you, you have to dribble up and someone else needs to move back to cover." Obviously I did that mainly because asking your defenders to clear every ball is a terrible waste of opportunities for them to get dribbling experience. Over the long term though, I also wanted them to come to understand that "positions" aren't a matter of particular locations on the field, rather they're a matter of responsibilities and most of the responsibilities on the field can and should be shared. It took them a while to get the hang of that, from their first year in U6 to their second season of U8 really. But now it's how they play. Possess, dribble, rotate.
For the U11's though, that "global" sense of what the various responsibilities on the field are is slow in coming. I'm still not going to move my coaching focus away from ball possession and deceptive dribbling. But I am thinking about setting the U11 team up for their next game with specific instructions to play either up or back because it occurs to me that with everyone drifting into the attack all the time many of my players aren't actually getting enough game experience playing defense. I don't mean playing defense in the 1v1 technical sense, but rather in the sense of having an understanding of how to anticipate and move into space to respond to a change of possession and how to see the opportunities the attacking team is seeing. So what I'm wondering is would it be helpful to force each player on the team to spend some portion of the game in the backfield, force them to see the game from there for an extended period in hopes that they'll each start to get a better sense of how to occupy that space effectively? What if I gave players a specific instruction to stay behind the attacking line no matter what? Not as a tactic, mind you, but as an instructional exercise, like when we tell younger players they have to dribble back to our own eighteen then do a move before they can go up to have a shot.
The team we played Tuesday night had a handful of players who were competent defenders in terms of their spacing and speed and toughness. But they were also clearly specialists who weren't working on their ball skills very much and I don't want that for my players. Basically I want them all to have the skill set of a central midfielder which means having the ball skills to possess and dribble for attack but also having the field awareness and soccer IQ to know how to work together to contain the other team. With my U8 girls I've had the luxury of being able to work with most of the group for three straight years of outdoor and indoor sessions. I feel like I need to find a way to help these older boys leap ahead a bit so now I've got to be willing to make some changes in some areas of my coaching in order to help them get there.
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