Month: April 2018

Intro to Training Topics

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Your training topic is the main subject being taught within your training session. Each training exercise within that session will reflect your training topic. Your coaching points within your training exercises will reflect your training topic.

Having a specific training topic as opposed to just saying “attacking” or “defending” will make it easier to define the goals and objectives of training sessions. At Johan Juniors, we teach a variety of subjects such as speed of play, the support system, transition, and other subjects that apply to the game. These subjects build a strong foundation for player intelligence.

“Playing football is very simple, but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is.” – Johan Cruyff 

 

Intro to Training Sessions

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Training sessions will have a training topic, which is the subject being focused on within a session. Training exercises are the components of a training session.

US Soccer’s structure for training sessions include: Warm-Up, Orientation Phase, Learning Phase, and Implementation Phase (WOLI). In my next post, I will break down WOLI.

The first step in setting up a training session is to determine the age and playing level of the players. For pre-academy ( U4-U11) players, their practices are generally 60 minutes long compared to academy (U12-senior) players, which is usually about 90 minutes in length. Playing level is another important aspect to consider when putting together your training session.

The four main playing levels are: recreational, travel, development, and academy. Players within each level may have a certain amount of game intelligence which generally will increase as you go from recreational to academy. With that in mind, the amount of information given should be adjusted to the level of the players.

“He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Mental Side: It’s Not Just About Soccer

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“It’s not just about soccer…”

This may be one of the most impactful quotes that I have heard in my coaching career. We all start off wanting to teach tactics, formations, and all of these other aspects of the game, but how do we get our players to buy into what we are selling them? Well first it takes making them into great people, not just great soccer players.

Joe Misso, our technical director, has taught me so many more aspects of success and hard work, that not only apply to becoming the best coach I can be, but also to becoming the best human being that I can be. If we instill that attitude into our players, then we will truly see success.

For those of you who don’t know Joe Misso, here is a short film made about him and his career coaching soccer and developing human beings: https://vimeo.com/56036869