2/23 Chivas Minneapolis, Corner Kicks, and Ball Movement

Before training today I was at a school in Minneapolis for the first day of an afternoon program that Chad Moore had set up.  It is a free program to the school and the kids were super psyched to be there.  Almost all of the kids were latino and it was cool to see how much more they respect the badge on the uniform than most kids that we work with.  

*Since the kids were big fans of Chivas we nicknamed the school Chivas Minneapolis.

At the start of the program I introduced who I was and told them that I coached for the Minnesota Thunder Academy.  Immediately one of the boys asked me how long I've been playing professionally.  I laughed and told him again that I was a coach in the Academy.  He didn't seem to care what I said because the next words out of his mouth were "I can't believe we're being coached by a professional!  I'm going to bring my jersey and ball for you to sign."  I reminded him again that I coached in the Academy, but he held firm to his statement that I was a professional, so for one afternoon I was a professional player. 

For the 13's training today we started out with lots of touches on the ball and 1v1 keep away.  Since we had half the field today and we are starting our tournament season in 2 weeks we spent the next 30 minutes working on corner kicks.  Before we began I told the girls that these 30 minutes were probably going to be the toughest 30 minutes of training that we do all year because it was going to require them to stay tuned in without a lot of running around as I explained the exact details of each corner kick.

Before we began I showed the girls the video that I had made of Barcelona executing the corners in a game with a break down of where everyone should be so they would have the visual in their head before we started.  Everything went well for this and I am excited to see 2 of our corners up in St Cloud.

After the corners I introduced a new game to the girls that focussed on possessing the ball and making the defense move side to side to create openings.  We have spent a majority of our time this winter working on counter attacking and this exercise was designed for us to look at the ball movement when we have possession of the ball in our attacking half.

Set Up 
-2 teams of 6 players plus goalies 
-Attacking team in blue has 6 players
-Defending team in red has 4 players defending and 2 outlet players who cannot defend 

Procedure
- The blue attacking team possesses the ball until they can break down the defending team and create a shot
-If the red defending team wins the ball, they must play the ball to either of their outlet players before they attack
-Once the defending team has played their outlets, the blue team must immediately designate 2 outlets for their team and the other 4 players will defend 
-If a goal is scored the team who scored stays on offense and receives a ball from their goalie 

The object of the game is get the defenders moving side to side to create openings in their defense

Once there is an opening exploit it and score

With this being a new game it took us a little while to get and there are a lot more things that we will look to do out of this game.  Today I just wanted to intro the game to the girls and we will focus on other things besides the ball movement the next time we use this exercise.

I was a little unsure of introducing the new game at the same session with the corner kicks because it was a lot for the girls to handle mentally.  Despite the mental strain of today, the girls seemed to understand the concept when we moved into our 7v7 scrimmage as they did a good job of distinguishing between when to attack and when to possess.