1st Outdoor Training Of The Spring 3/23

We did not have the dome tonight so I boldly scheduled training outdoors at McMurray two weeks prior to today.  The weather up until today had been very nice outside, so of course that meant it was 50 degrees and raining off and on by the time we started training.  However, the weather didn't seem to bother anyone because it was so refreshing to be outside.

A number of the girls arrived early and they set up a scrimmage field and began to play on their own while I set up.  The level of play in the scrimmage was very good so we ended up doing that for the first 20 minutes of training.

Our main focus for the next month is going to be crossing and finishing.  As a team we have become very good at a number of different things, but we rarely cross the  ball.  We would prefer to pass or dribble the ball into the box all the time instead of putting the ball into the danger area.  So I've gone back through Mark's 94 team's journal and pulled out all of his crossing and finishing sessions.

For today we were going to just start with some basic runs and then we added in 1 recovery defender on the outside to add a little bit of pressure.

Setup

• 8 crossing playing, 8 central players, 1 GK
• Two disks on each flank, Crossing Disk and Recovery Disk, with the Recovery Disk 5 yards further away from goal that then Crossing Disk

Procedure

• We first started without the recovery defender and added her in later
• central players work in pairs
• (1) Blue1 passes to Blue2
• (2) Blue2 lays off a pass back to Blue1
• (3) Blue1 plays wide to C, who tries to get in a cross to Blue1 (slot run), Blue2 (near post run), and Gold1 (a left-side wide player coming into the far post)
• recovering defenders (wide players take turns at being a recovering defender) start 5 yards behind the crossers and cannot leave their disk until the crosser leaves their disk

Coaching Points

• If crossers leave too early (before the play develops) and are forced to slow down their runs to wait for the ball, their recovering defenders (who can recover the second the crosser moves forward up the field, will be able to get back into a defensive position.  So crossers must read the central players in order to sprint quickly up the field at the right time in order to lose marking defenders.
• Wide passes from Blue1 must have the proper pace and direction
• Play your teammate in to dangerous positions whenever possible
• *In order to work on how we make runs on the outside I had our recovery runners leave a little early so some times they would catch up to the outside runner before the pass had been made to her.  When this happened I wanted the passer to play the ball behind the runner so she would be able to stop and get the ball while the recover defender continued to recover behind her.
  By receiving the ball at her feet, the outside runner can either put in an early service, or she can go 1v1.

After this we finished the training by playing 6v6.  I made 2 wide channels and the the attacking team had to play the ball wide before they could go to goal.