12/9-12/14 Futsal and Training

Sometimes I feel so spoiled to have a talented group of players that I forget they are only 9 and 10 years old. Per my last post I praised the effort and play of their Sunday afternoon futsal session which was very much deserved. I will continue with this thought later in the post....

Tuesday again brought the challenge of having 10 boys with tons of energy and not a ton of space to work it off in. We jump right into some "Coerver" style drills will tons of 1v1 moves and plenty of reps for everybody. The boys were full of energy but despite that they were very sharp and did very well with the combination moves that we tried. After about 30 minutes we moved into another gym for speed and agility training. This is not my forte but I am adequate enough at it to do a session. We worked on changing direction at various speeds and lots of fast foot work. It went well enough and was glad that Tim was in the gym to help out since I had both the blue and white teams for this part. Again after 30 minutes or so we moved back in to the large gym to scrimmage for the last 30 minutes. We started off with an inter team scrimmage of just the blue group, after 10 minutes or so Matt came over and wanted to switch one of my groups with one of his which was fine, it was also one of the first times a majority blue team played a majority white team since the split in October. We were out worked from the beginning and we made some silly mistakes as well as some unforced errors. This did not look my group from the past Sunday. I dont want so make it sound like we did everything wrong as we made several smart passes and had glimpses of great play along with what we didnt do well. I was very indifferent overall about the session because we were sharp to start but didnt finish well. Which brings me to my continuation of above...I have to continue to remind myself that even though we can look fantastic sometimes that we are still a very young team and have a lot of room to grow and improve and there will be many bumps along the way to consistency.

On Saturday we had training at Rosemount. This went pretty well. Trying to teach 1st and 2nd defender concepts to U11's is difficult because for most it is their first exposure to the ideas. They grasped the 1st defender concepts quickly and by the time we moved the 2v1's I was pretty satisfied with their progress since I was able to see some level of consistency. All I am going to say about the introduction of the 2nd defender concepts was that I introduced it and we are going to need to work on it several more times before we even think about going further. We struggled in the scrimmage but again the flashes were there.

On Sunday we played our weekly Soccer Blast league game. This week we played my U12 team. This is always an interesting situation as I want both teams to do well. They U11's were pretty out matched on the physical and speed aspects but technical skills is were we could hang with them. I stressed posession, team work, and the need to play both ways. Never less we ended up losing, but if we could I would want to play teams like that every weekend. We pushed our Futsal back to later in the afternoon since the indoor game was at 1pm. For the second weekend in a row we had a great session of Futsal. At this session I had them play with several different restrictions. We have played two touch max before and have always done pretty well at it. I introduced a new restriction this weekend where the player in possession cannot pass back to player who passed it to them. We had mixed results with this but overall I was very satisfied with their play. For the last 35 minutes we played Futsal with the U12.e girls white team. The boys enjoyed mixing up the teams and the standard of play did not drop even though they were playing with people they have never played with before. It was fun and I hope we get a chance to do that again.

Comments

[Michele Spencer]

Phil ~
Great idea. I will look for photos so that you can post them on the site.

Michele