12/8 Scrimmaging Against the U15 Whites

First big snow storm of the year was today.  It took me 75 minutes to make my usual 20 minute commute.  We had half the dome today and our U15 team had the other half.  As we were getting closer and closer to our 6:20 start time both the U15's and us each only had about 6 players each so Young Kim, U15 Coach, and I talked about starting off the day with a half field scrimmage until the girls who were stuck in the snow were able to arrive.

I was a little hesitant to do this because the U15's are a lot bigger, stronger, and faster than us.  (The size difference in girls between the ages of U12-U15 is huge each year for a majority of the girls.)  Plus they are a very good team in the region at their age group.  I wasn't worried that we would get hurt or it wouldn't be beneficial to us, (this was going to work perfectly with our team defending topics,) I just wasn't sure if we could even give them a game at all.  In short, I thought that they would dominate us and it would be boring for them.

As we played 8v8, with more girls trickling in each minute, it went about how I thought it would with the U15's killing us.  We played with no skill and were really intimidated.

After 15 minutes of this, both teams had enough players to play 11v11 and Young asked me if we wanted to play.  I double checked with him that it would be beneficial to his girls and he said it would be so we took a couple of minutes to talk to our team before we set out to play.

When I brought the girls together we talked about how size isn't the end all be all in soccer.  We talked about how using skill offsets the size advantage.  In the 8v8 game we hadn't used very much skill and we were destroyed because of it.  We talked about how we were much bigger than the U12 Boys, but they destroyed us with their skill.  (It was great to have that visual fresh in our minds.)

So I challenged the girls to play with skill and work on their team defending and we played.

The scrimmage ended up going much better for us than I thought it would.  The girls used some of their skill and we actually were not stuck in our half the entire game and even though we didn't have very many chances at goal, the game was not played with us defending the entire time.

Defensively it was great for us because the U15's are fantastic at possessing the ball so we were able to work on shifting as a team.  Our mids were able to get in a lot of work on how to defend with the 3 of them as a group and try to keep the ball to one side of the field.

The game ended 0-1 in favor of the U15's and hopefully they were able to benefit from the scrimmage.  I got everything I wanted out of the scrimmage as the girls continue to buy into the philosophy that the more skill they play with, the better they will play.  Hopefully we will be able to do this again at some point this winter.