Monday, January 13, 2020

Technical Skill Development is the Easy Part

     My son started playing when he was three and back then he showed potential to have what I know now is the most valuable combination of attributes for a player.  He had natural athleticism, he loved playing with the ball at his feet and he always seemed to know where he was on the field.  So, fundamental physical ability combined with a genuine interest in technique combined with that most elusive of skills, Field Awareness.
     After his first season of playing H.S. Freshman ball he has taken a few seasons off from playing.    His decision left me sad but I understood it.  He's a player who likes to play lightly and with finesse, up on his toes all the time, dancing with the ball and threading clever passes and then when defending he plays more like a pick-pocket than an NFL linebacker.  So for him the Thunderdome quality of the High School game really took the joy out of it.
     Happily, we did get him back on the field to play in the Fusion Adult Futsal league this past fall and in that setting he found his old soccer self and seemed to enjoy himself thoroughly.  And I loved getting to play alongside him.   It was fun seeing him take on and win 1v1s against older players but what I really loved was seeing him show that field awareness again, those times when he'd come out of a 1v1 and immediately deliver a pass to the feet of a teammate on the opposite side of the field or into their path as they made a sudden run to goal.
     As much as I love great technical skills, deceptive tricks and subtle ball control, the aspect of play that I honestly enjoy the most these days is that elusive field awareness.  Given how little of that talent I've been able to develop myself, when I see it on display at a high level I feel like I'm watching a kind of magic or Jedi-mind-trick.  In fact I have a player on one of my teams whose skill for picking out an unlikely pass is so constant we've nicknamed her The Jedi.  She can receive the ball, look up to check the field, take on the 1v1 in front of her and then, as she's emerging from the pressure, she somehow manages to put the pass where her teammate is now, several seconds after she last looked for her.  Think of pro players like Kevin De Bruyne of Man City or Tobin Heath on the USWNT who look sometimes as though in addition to their eyes they are also scanning the field with some sort of sonar.
     Of course the supreme skill that players like those have is the foundation of their game.  But even as I harp on my players about the need to work diligently on their technical skills (and I do the same in every conversation I have with fellow Coaches and parents of players) I have been thinking a lot lately about how to teach that other aspect of the game.  How do you teach players to be better at understanding the space they are in when they are on the pitch in the middle of a game?  To simplify that by narrowing that field awareness to just one direction, how do you teach them to be aware of what's behind them.   I feel like since I began coaching I've come up with a few clever ways of teaching particular technical skills and of course I've learned a few such methods from other coaches.  But when I ask myself that question above...how do you teach that?...I usually end up staring blankly at my session planning notebook.
     If you look on YouTube for ideas on teaching spatial awareness you'll see some interesting session exercises, many of them a little complex to run and typically focused on one player at a time...so not efficient for large group sessions.  Here's an example:  "Joner" Awareness Drill.  I spent some time at Griffin recently with a small group of players running some of these exercises and I'd say that with a group of players where you can have one coach for every 4 players you can actually get a lot of reps in and the players seem to respond quickly.
     You will also see a lot of suggestions to play rondos.  Here is a great blog post by Todd Beane of the TOVO Institute, Barcelona about the value of rondo training:  Rondos are the Tip of the Iceberg  Beane writes "I need a Rondo as it is one of the best ways to bring forth my players capacity to be players of great cognition, competence and character".  It's a game your players will like that puts a high premium on technical execution and it is a setting that allows you to move around the rondo coaching players directly about technique and awareness.  But I have one caveat, especially for coaches working with players ten years and under.  There is a fair amount of scientific evidence that the natural variation we see among kids in their ability to understand the space around them might be largely due to aspects of the physical development of the brain.  In other words, the kids who seem really precocious in their ability to know what's behind them all the time may simply have a physical/developmental advantage.  And the kids who lack that sort of awareness aren't necessarily lazy or unfocused or inattentive...they may just be developing at a different pace.  This doesn't mean that as a coach you don't start working on field awareness early.  Of course you do.  Everything is incremental anyway so teach your U8s rondo and start getting those players some reps as soon as possible...but be patient.
   
     As I mentioned above, my son seems to have rediscovered a little of his love of the game.  A couple of his friends urged him to play the winter indoor session with them and he agreed without hesitation.  Yesterday I watched him play his first game.  I also got to see some players I coached when they were younger and seeing them now and where their development has taken them was fascinating.  One player in particular, one who I think I started coaching when he was ten, had made so much progress I had to talk with him after the game and compliment him on it.  When I first met this kid he stood out in two ways: he was desperate to play and just loved the game...and he was as awkward, uncoordinated and two-left-footed as any kid I'd seen.  I mean hopeless.  And he wanted to be a GKeeper so I'm looking at him  thinking, no way this kid ever develops a good stroke on the ball since he can't seem to use anything but his toe and he falls down every time he takes a swing.   But he worked at it.  I admit that the last time I saw him I wasn't sure he was making much progress but he was trying and I'm confident I was at least showing him the direction he needed to go.  Now five years later I see him on the indoor field and he's playing keeper.  Three times in the first half he gets called for a three lines violation on his goal kicks which he's hitting at least 45 yards each time.  He worked at it and worked at it and here he was now, a competent player with the basic skills.
     The point of the story is that while teaching field awareness can confront a coach as something of a mystery, teaching technical skills, even to kids who may seem too clumsy at first, is mostly a matter of patience and repetition.  So if you have players who don't seem to have good field awareness yet you can at least be sure to stay focused with them on the part of their game they can develop if you'll help them so that when they finally start to be aware of what's behind them (usually open space) they'll already know how to manage the ball.

   
   
   
     
   

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