11/17 Transition Game Training

Today we only had a quarter of the dome to train in.  Before having half of the dome last Monday I was wondering what I would do with all of that space and worried that I would be paying for a large space that I wasn't using.  Today I found myself wishing that I had the entire half of the dome to progress the 2v2v2 With Targets game that we did on Saturday.

Before training I was also wondering how the parents would cope with having training starting at 5pm.  It was good thinking of Cook to schedule the 1/2 field training later when theoretically it should be easier for more people to make it to training.  But I actually had more people here today than I did last week at the later time.  Today we were only missing 2 kids.  Really good.

We started off with our partner juggling.  With 2 touch mandatory with feet only our record was 18 and we had another group get to 17.  

For our footskills today I wanted the girls to get lots of reps with a defender since we have been spending so much time going over the moves without a defender and with a dummy defender.
 For the first 10 minutes I encouraged the girls to take their time and try out all of the new moves that we have been working on.  I put a lot of emphasis on getting the girls to try and nutmeg the defender.

The next 10 minutes we went over how to beat the defender while going at speed.  Now we were concentrating on when how we could beat a player on a quick transition so we could attack with pace and create numbers up opportunities.

We stopped a couple of times and talked about the visual cues of when you have a defender beat (hip swivels, off balance) and how to set up the defender as you are dribbling at her.  

I encouraged the girls to try to limit themselves to only 1 cut back when they were on offense and to believe that the move they were doing was going to work.  

While I was doing this Schaefer was able to work with AJ on goal keeping.

After this we did the 2v2v2 With Targets to Goal transition game that we did last Saturday.  After 10 minutes of continuing to really learn how the flow of the game goes, we stopped the girl and focussed on not running straight up and down the field as they transition forward.  

We talked about criss-crossing in the middle after playing the target.

We also talked about making sure that both runners didn't run past the target player because the forward flick on pass for the target player facing the other way is not a high percentage pass and will cause us lots of turn overs.

We finished up training with a 6v6 scrimmage and 2 of the girls went and played with the U15 Green's to give them more numbers and allow us to have everyone play.