Ice Cream Cones and Constantly Embarrassing Your Defender

As the kids arrived to training early today, I noticed a difference between the boys and the girls.  While the girls talked with each other and started their tennis ball routine, (this is before we started training), the first 3 boys that were on the field immediately began playing keep away with the soccer ball.  They played it in a tight space even though there were no cones or boundaries set up. 

As I watched them play it seemed like they had two objectives for the game.  One objective was to keep the ball away from the person in the middle.  The other, and it seemed to the more important objective, was to try and embarrass the defender or make him look foolish for trying to steal the ball.  To do this, the people with the ball had to see how close they could come to letting the player in the middle get the ball, without giving it to him. 

So instead of them just running around all over the place and making simple passes that would keep the ball.  Sometimes I saw them trying to pass it right next to the defenders leg.  Or they would try to nutmeg the defender.  Other times they would fake the pass and just try to dribble by him. 

As they would try this over and over again, they lost the ball a number of times.  But it didn't matter, they knew they would get the ball back again.  What I really enjoyed was that the attackers received more joy out of making the defender look bad, than actually keeping the ball away from the defender.

While I was watching this, I had a flashback of when I was young and one time I was allowed to get an ice cream cone and my sister was not able to get one.  (Probably because I had been good and she had not:)  I remember taking such joy in the fact that I had the ice cream and she did not.  Who knows if the ice cream was good or bad, it tasted great because my sister could not have it. 

As I was eating it, I kept telling her how good it was.  Then, I would hold it out as close to her as I could, without her being able to hit it out of my hands, and ask her if she wanted some.  But then I would remind her "Oh yeah, that's right you can't have any!" 

Isn't this why parents can go nuts?  What a terrible thing to do, right?  Oh well, I knew at some point she would return the deed to me so I felt I needed to enjoy the moment. 

As I was reliving this childhood memory I realized that this is one of the differences that I see between boys and girls.  Boys enjoy having the ball purely for the reason that they have it and the other team or person does not.  Girls do not seem to derive that joy from simply having the ball.  They want a purpose with the ball. 

If you are playing a game of keep away with a boys team and you say 10 passes equals a point, the boys will try to get the ten passes and win the game.  But at the same time they want to make the defenders look foolish.  They will try to do give and goes around the defenders.  Split passes will be attempted.  Nutmegs will be tried.  Every time something is successful, the person who had just been made to look foolish will be reminded of it in hopes that they will get madder and madder so you can do it again.

If you are playing a game of keep away with a girls team and you say that 10 passes equals a point; you will see a lot of passes around the outside of the grid and a race to see who can get to 10 passes the quickest because that is what the coach wanted.  They take joy in winning the game to please the coach. 

Relating this to the development of a young players game, the way the boys approach the challenge of getting 10 passes in a row is going to grow the young player the most.  This is because in order to "embarrass" the defenders on a consistent basis they have to become very creative.

The boys version of the game is more difficult and you will hear coaches and teammates tell the player who just lost the ball trying to do a crazy flick to play it simple.  But at the young age the more they think about these things, the more it becomes common place in their heads to look for the tricky move.  The game changing move. 

It is much easier to teach a kid who is full of tricks to make the simple pass.  However, it is almost impossible for the player who always looks to play the simple pass to think about game changing moves.  It is the Game Changers that the top coaches and teams are after.  Those players can add something to a squad.  

The goal of trying to Constantly Embarrass Your Defender, or CEYD, is one that demands creativity.  In order to CEYD in our training environment you are going to have to become very creative because you will not be able to embarrass one of our players in the same way over and over again without that defender making adjustments and forcing you to do something different.  Our players are all super competitive and hate to look bad.  So when they look bad on defense, they become more determined to not let it happen again.  The more determined the defender is to not look bad and take the ball from you, the more creative you will have to become in finding a way that the defender was not thinking about to beat her. 

By having our players trying to Consistently Embarrass Your Defender, we are fostering a very creative and competitive environment.  An added benefit of this environment is that it can help players deal with set backs on the field because if a defender does get embarrassed, she has to move on quickly or risk the chance of being embarrassed again and again.  Of course the trick is getting the players to leave this mentality on the field after they are done playing.  But if you can get your players to take joy in having the ball and get them to look to embarrass their defender, you will start to see their creativity flourish.