As mentioned in my previous post, US Soccer looks for some key-aspects of your training session when evaluating your session. In particular, there are five features they want to see in each stage of your training session which are:

1. Organization: Does your activity look like an actual training session? Are the cones, players, goals, and other equipment organized in a way that is not only going to help your players, but also keep a safe environment for your players to participate in?
2. Game-Like: Is this stage replicating the situation that you will find in a game? In particular, are your Orientation Stages and Learning Stages using the right dimensions on the pitch? What part of the pitch are you on? Do the numbers used replicate the situation used during a game?
3. Repetition: Is the situation you are looking to bring out being consistently practiced throughout this session? Here’s a quick story. During my “C” Course, we were put into groups in order to analyze a match and develop a training session to help improve some aspect of that team’s game. My group and I decided to focus on transitioning from attacking to defending in the final third. We set up the dimensions of the field, the players, and the positions of those players all correctly (or at least we thought) and began to run our session. Again, our topic was transitioning from attacking to defending. The session began and we decided to start the ball with the team we were not focusing on every single time so that our players would go out and begin defending immediately. See something missing? So we continued to coach how they defended when not in possession and thought we hit every single component of the transition from attacking to defending. And we felt great about ourselves after the session! Upon reflecting with our instructors and fellow coaches, we realized we missed one key aspect of our session – repetition of the transition element. At no point did our team of focus transition from having to ball (attacking) to reacting (transitioning) to losing the ball (defending). Moral of the story: make sure your topic of focus is consistently being repeated or you will have to deal with the consequences (luckily this was only a practice session).
4.  Challenging: Notice how many times your players are or are not successful in the training session and think about how that would translate to this weekend. Will your players be successful every single time during the weekend? I think not! The point of seeing if your training session is challenging or not is to decide whether players are truly learning or not. Therefore, you can manipulate how challenging (or not) by changing the numbers used for each exercise.
5. Coaching: Are you guiding your players to learn to their maximum potential? US Soccer is not looking for the loudest person on the field, but they are not looking for someone to not say a word either. They are looking for you to be effective. Can you get your point across in one sentence as opposed to a full five minute lecture? When to use your coaching points is very important as well!