12/15 Training- Combination Finishing and 1v0-4v4

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.

Tale of Two Cities and Winter Training Ideas

Every time I get behind on writing the entries the issue compounds itself as I start to look at how much work I have to do to catch back up.  The task always seem so daunting to find the time to get caught up and it can end up like now where I make adjustments to get the final result.

This is exactly what happened to me over the summer of my junior year of high school when our AP English teacher gave us 5 books to read over the summer and write papers on each of them. (The Invisible Man, Tale of Two Cities, Heart of Darkness, and two other long books that I can't think of the name but if my memory is correct about this horrific episode of my life, both books were well over 400 pages long and on topics that I didn't believe they should warrant a teacher requiring students to spend their valuable time off reading them.  One of them did involve sending someone from Russia to Siberia and I can't remember the name of the book and it is absolutely killing me even though I didn't like it.)

When I heard about this extra work over the summer I debated for the first two months if I really wanted to be in the class.  By "debating" I mean I forgot about the assignment completely.  Then when I did get around to the reading, I complained how much work I had to do, but I did continually try to point out to people how "hard" I was working on my education over the summer.  

Due to the lack of time that I had to read each book before the school year started, I thought it would be a good idea to teach myself to speed read.  It turned out that I am unable to speed read, however, after reading the papers that I wrote at a later date after actually reading the books.

The situation also reminds me of what I see every June when some players, all of a sudden, realize that they are behind where they should be in their development and that they might not make the team that they want.  

That is when I get a ton of calls asking "What should I (or insert my son/daughter) be working on?"  My first reaction is to say that "If you really were serious about this you would know the hundreds of little things that we have gone over all year and what I have been telling you to work on for the last 360 days."  

But instead of going with that I'll list off the areas that I think they should focus on and give them some ways to work on improving those skills. 

Then they will start putting in all the catch up work and the parents will tell me how hard Johnny or Suzy have been working on all the things that I have told them to work on and how dedicated they are to improving.  

Now it is always fantastic to see the effort they have put in over a 1 month time, but by the time it is done the overall quality is not as good as it could have been had they been putting in the work consistently over the year and I always wonder how good the player could really be if they chose to put in this work all the time.

Back to the current topic and while I realize that I might be the only one who reads this section of the site, I know that when I am updating this site on a consistent basis, the overall quality of the articles that I post are much better than when I get behind and rush to catch up.  I have also found that updating consistently allows me to continually look over what we have done in the past and where I want us to go and see if that aligns with what we are doing each week.

Here are my goals for the girls for this year:

Training Goals

-To become the best 1v1-4v4 team in the nation
-Creative ideas and movement.  Players are always switching positions. 
-Need to continually work on the basics
-1st Touch, 1st Touch, 1st Touch
-Ball striking
-Look to combine
-Transition Games
-Play as much as possible in uneven number situations
-Play good defense.  Good defense leads to great offense
-Go to goal.  It is important that we are always looking to score goals or deny goals
-Use as much space as possible in all the drills

Key Ideas

-Look to be dangerous all the time (Can I score? Set someone up to score? Keep the ball?)
-1st touch 1st touch 1st touch
-Show Skill
-Players and the ball move diagonally across the field
-Players are always rotating and changing positions.  The game flows smoothly.

I try to look at these goals each day before I design our training session to make sure that what I am doing is in line with these goals.  This year I have also made out Topic Guidelines for each day of the week that we train so I can be sure to continually focus on our goals.  

I have been guilty of the Band Aid Approach in the past

Working on one or two topics for a short amount of time, then seeing something else that we need to work on and begin to focus on that.  Then seeing something else and bouncing to that topic.  And even though we are covering a lot of things, I believe the kids were learning but I am not sure if they were mastering the topics.

It was a personal goal of mine to stay focussed on set topics all year this year.  

So after all of that it is back to what we have been doing for the past month and I realize that I'm going to need another post just to get into that.  Not to mention the fiasco that going to Vegas has become . . .

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.

Passing and Dribbling Highlights Updated With Music

I have updated the video highlights from the U12 boys game with music and transition screens.

11/29 Scrimmage vs U12 South Boys err Showcase By U12 Boys

Holy cow are our U12 boys a ton of fun to watch.  I was looking forward to playing them again as both the games this fall had been good.  Today the boys put on an absolute show against us.  It was great for us to play them because we have been talking about needing to train at a faster pace and this game was perfect to show us why as the boys absolutely shredded us with their skill and quickness.

I am trying something new with the video that we were able to take this weekend by pulling out all the dribbling highlight and passing highlights from the game and making videos out of them as well as pulling the goals out by themselves.  Let me know which highlights version you like better.  The one with the replays or the one without it.  I am going to try to add music to the clips later.

Here are the dribbling highlights.  The boys pull out some amazing stuff.  

*For best viewing, double click the video while it is playing and watch the highlights in full screen.

11/29 vs U12 Boys Dribbling Highlights with music from Andy Kaasa on Vimeo.

Here are the passing movements that were fun to watch.

 
11/29 Passing from Andy Kaasa on Vimeo.

The boys got on the board first with a goal around the 9th minute when they countered us very quickly.  Good passing and great runs led to the shot.  While the shot should have been saved, the movement deserved a goal.

Boys First Goal from Andy Kaasa on Vimeo.

We were able to tie the game up 10 minutes later when Kenzie flicked on the thrown in into the box where Carly challenged the boys defender for the ball.  The ball came through to Kari, who continued her run into the danger area, and her quick touch was able to sneak past both the goalie and the defender on the line.

U13 Goal from Andy Kaasa on Vimeo.

The boys scored their second goal around the 40th minute mark and it was a thing of beauty.  After winning the ball in the midfield the boys set off on another one of their quick counter attacks.  The scissors were mesmerizing and the pass and finisher were fantastic and a joy to watch.

Boys 2nd Goal from Andy Kaasa on Vimeo.

Despite the show being put on by the boys we were somehow within one goal of them at the end of the game.  Soccer is a cruel game like that depending on your position in the game.  As we approached the final minutes of the games I thought about how this group of girls always finds a way to be close at the end of games even when they have no business being in them.  They always seem to give themselves a chance to get a result.  It is a great characteristic to have and one that will serve us well in the future.  

As we were pushing to tie the game up the boys countered us after blocking a shot in their box with another great full field movement.  Again the dribbling and passing are fun to watch.  How did he get through our 3 defenders with the ball?

Boys 3rd Goal from Andy Kaasa on Vimeo.

 We finished the game on that note.  After the game I talked with the girls about the speed at which the boys play, but they never seemed rushed on the ball.  They are relaxed and skilled.  We didn't use our skill and we were not ready for their quickness because we don't aren't used to this type of pressure on a consistent basis.  The challenge for the girls is going to be to try and create this type of defensive pressure so we will be able to play at the same speed as the boys.