12/15 Training- Combination Finishing and 1v0-4v4
Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 04:36PM We started off training with some fun partner juggling challenges for the girls. The first one was one girl had to juggle the ball up high and her partner had to take a knee and hit the ball off her other knee, get up and juggle it back to her partner. The second challenge was one partner juggles it up high and the other partner hits it off her back back to her partner. The third challenge was to have one parter juggling and the other partner hits it with her shoulders back to her.
The girls seemed to enjoy the challenges and it helped to work on our ability to time the ball out of the air and control your body.
Next we did a Combination Finishing exercise that Mark Abboud wrote up.
We only focussed on the pulling away portion. Eventually we added in live defenders at the trash cans that could start to recover as soon as the ball was passed. Adding in the recovery defender really showed the girls how important the pass was to the success of the break away.
We talked about all the different ways that you could hit the through pass and it was exciting to see the girls actually trying the different ways to strike the ball. Many of the girls struggled with the different ways to hit the passes but they kept trying the different ways even though they didn't have to.
After training I told the girls how happy I was that they were trying to push themselves to get better and they were not afraid to look bad. If you don't look bad in training you are not pushing yourself to get better. Looking back on it now I am also very pleased the the girls continued to try the different passes even when we were competing and did not get discouraged when their pass didn't come off and their team didn't score any points because of the missed pass. They could have played it safe the next time but a lot of them continued to push themselves and continued to get better.
Next we played our 1v0 to 4v4 game but I modified it so we went to 2 goals and had teams coming off of each post. The variation worked very well and I was able to get a lot out of the new set up with going from quick counter attacking to building the attack when it was 4v4.
