3/2 Half Field By Surprise: Final Training Before The Games Begin

The U15 Grey team usually trains on the other side of our 1/2 of the field when we are at 5pm on Monday's, but since they were down in Texas playing we had the entire 1/2 field to ourselves.  This was a nice surprise to have with this being our final training before we kick it into gear with the games.

I decided to scrap the session that I had planned and take full use of the space.  To begin we played 1v1 to 2v2 to goals to get lots of touches on the ball.  Another surprise that we received today was that the Stars (U18 Blue) train on the other half of the field from us and their keepers were not being used so they stepped in and played goalie for us.  It was cool for the girls to see the intensity they played with.  The 18's played all out and we had a couple of good collisions between them and the girls that really raised their awareness of where the keepers were and how top level keepers play.

Next we worked on our corner kicks again.  So many goals at the top level are scored on set pieces so it was really nice to be able to work on our corners again before the weekend.

After that we played 8v8.

For our skill portion after training we did some of the footskills routine, played 1v1 keep away, and finished with blob soccer. 

2/28 Defensive Training With Eric Singer

We continued our defensive training this morning and we were lucky to have Eric Singer lead the training.  I have learned a lot of defensive training techniques from Eric and he personally plays the type of defense that I want our girls to play.  High energy.

Eric started off with a lot of footwork exercises for the girls.  The repetition and detail that goes into becoming a great defender is incredible.  Eric just started working with a couple of the girls on defending last Wednesday and watching the details that he puts into it has been really good for me to watch and the girls to learn.  We definitely need to spend more time on the basic footwork.

After 30 minutes of footwork Eric played his favorite 2v2 to 2 goals continuous game.  Eric really focussed on the footwork of how to pressure someone, being loud, and not stabbing in.

Next he played 4v4 cut throat to large goals with no goalies.  The point of this game is to find the balance between immediate pressure on the ball and protecting your goal.  It is a really good game that focusses on how to defend as a group.

We finished with playing 6v6.

After the on the field stuff Evan led the girls through a lot of ball work/conditioning exercises so we could get the touches on the ball that we missed during the on field training portion and to help increase our fitness level so we will be prepared to play when the games come.

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. 
 

2/22 Futsol

At the session today we started off with our individual dribbling.  It was really simple as we just dribbled around the gym keeping our heads up while changing direction and speed.  Then we spent time on each players favorite move and went into the footskills routine.

After that we played "Blob Soccer" The Blob game is one of the fun camp games that I have strayed away from until recently under the misguided belief that this is top level club soccer and those camp games shouldn't be played here.  The Blob game is perfect for working on dribbling with your head up, changing speed, changing direction, and team defending.  Plus it is a ton of fun.

This game is just like Sharks and Minnows where everyone starts on an end line with their ball.  One person starts in the middle as the Blob.  It is the goal of the dribblers to get to the other end line with control of their ball.  The Blob in the middle tries to kick the balls out.  If a dribbler's ball goes out of bounds, the dribbler must join the blob by linking arms with the blob.  To really focus on keeping our heads up I kept splitting the blobs into groups of 2 so there were more blobs for the dribblers to go against.  

After a couple of games of Blob soccer we played a scrimmage with each team attacking 2 small Pugg goals.  The focus of the game was to keep your head up and try to score when you get the ball from far out or to find passes to the far side of the gym.

We ended with playing futsol.

Woodbury, St Cloud, Training, Meeting, Rosemount 2/20-2/21

On Thursday night I received the "Oh crap, can you help me out call" from Eric for the 16's this weekend.  The 16's are playing in our MTA College Showcase that is held in St Cloud.  Eric is taking his doctorate/phd/whatever degree you receive for taking more classes than anyone on earth, and his weekend class had been moved up to this weekend and he was not going to be able to make the first game of the showcase.  

The game was against Mequon from Wisconsin and it was slated as the match of the Showcase that would have the most college coaches in attendance.  In short, it would be good to have someone who knows the team coaching them.  Also, last year in this event we lost 0-4 to Mequon and it would be good for us to see how much we have improved.

Normally this would not be a big deal since I have coaches for all the Academy teams and I have Evan with the 13's.  But this weekend it was going to be tough because I had planned on being at the 13's training on Saturday since I missed last weekend.  

I also had a meeting planned with the parents of our U10 Boys team to go over our club philosophies.  It is still a work in progress to get everyone to buy into the fact that we create our Academy teams with the goal of individual development as our first priority and the Academy teams are not built in hopes of world domination and victory at all cost.  

While I say that a little in jest, it is important for us to communicate clearly as a club what our goals are so our players and parents can decide if this is what is best with them so I really wanted to be at this meeting.  

To go with this I had to be in Rosemount for the U12 Whites game at 1:30.  The 12's had participated in the Dakota Rev President's Day tournament and they had went 1-1-1 against some good teams while I was gone and I was happy to hear this.  However, with their last results being the draw and the loss if I missed this game and I had to have someone fill in to cover for me who was not named Mark or Carlie, things would not be well in the U12 world.  

Mark had his team playing on the field next to us and offered to coach both teams but if one of the teams won and the other did not, lord help us.  I would have to deal with that from some of the parents even though almost all of the parents on that team really understand what we are trying to accomplish.  

With these things weighing on my mind I began to make some phone calls to see if I would be able to get up to St Cloud to coach the 16's.  I talked with a number of the U10 parents between Thursday and Friday, as well as their coach, Matt Holmes, and I ended up writing out answers to a bunch of questions and putting together our philosophies and Matt said they would be good to have the meeting without me and I would plan on meeting with anyone who had any further questions on the following Saturday.

I talked with Evan about the 13's and he was set to run their training.  Due to a giant snow storm up north the team from Red River was not going to be able to make the first game of the Showcase so Cook was able to move the 16's game up 30 minutes so that would allow me enough time to make the 100 minute trek to Rosemount and arrive right at 1:30.  

Everything was set as I left to go and coach our U9's down in Woodbury in their final winter league game.  At this game I was able to forget about all the other things for an hour as the girls on this team have such a fun time playing the game.  Mini Alberts, one of the 16's younger sisters, decided to try slide tackling today and she was quite proud of herself after she slid twice in the game and could care less that the ball wasn't within 5 yards of her.  I truly recommend coaching this age group if you are in need of entertainment.

After that entertainment ended I made my way through the blizzard up to St Cloud so I could crash at my parents house for the night.  I would not see them though because my dad was in Madison and my mom was in Florida.  I think one of them got the raw end of the deal on that one.  Despite this, I still wanted to get up there on Friday night because I would rather drive late on Friday instead of waking up early tomorrow and driving.  

As I was driving up to St Clould I'm not sure if I ever actually saw the road as it was completely covered with snow.  I just kept hoping that the tail lights in front of me knew what they were doing.  I wondered how many people were doing the same thing.  It was a good thing whomever was leading us had a clue of where to turn.

Whew!  Saturday morning finally came.  I woke up early for the 9:40 game to make copies of the 16's player profiles and went to the Carribu Kinkos combo store at 8:15.  I ordered my Caramel High Rise and went next door to make copies and found that the Kinkos in St Cloud do not open until 9:00am on the weekends.  I asked in my head "What kind of town allows a business center to be closed early in the morning on weekends!" and then I remembered that people shouldn't be doing business early in the morning on weekends because sleep is good.

So I drank my Caramel High Rise while relaxing and waiting for the store to open to make the all important player profiles.  I relaxed even more when I didn't receive a call a little after 8:00 asking where Evan was and what was going on.  Even though Evan is never late and is great with the girls, there was still a little fear that something would happen and I'd get a phone call.

With the player profiles made it was off to the 16's game to see how we compared with Mequon 1 year later.  It turned out to be a non contest as we completely dominated them.  We spent a majority of the game in their half and scored 2 goals in the opening 30 minutes and cruised to a 2-0 victory.  It was great to see the improvement in one year with this group.

On my way down to Rosemount it turned out that I was one session off with my bad feeling premonition when I found out that Carlie had been in a minor car accident a couple of miles from Holy Angels and was unable to make it to the 12's training.  Luckily Mark was able to mix both the 12 groups together and run the session.  Since I had plenty of time in the car I also found out that the 10's meeting went very well and no follow up meeting would be necessary.  

I also talked with Evan about the 13's session.  Although unplanned, it was good for Evan and the girls that he was able to run the Saturday session for the 2nd week in a row so the girls continue to get used to his coaching style.  Evan built off of his session from last week and things went well.

I pulled into the Rosemount Dome parking lot at 1:28 and the 12's played well in their game.  Then I remembered that I had forgotten to eat all day.  It was time to go enjoy a nice steak and hang out with some friends after the long day.