As mentioned in my previous post, US Soccer structures their training sessions under the acronym WOLI. WOLI is Warm Up, Orientation, Learning, and Implementation. Let’s start with the W, warm up.

The warm up is always the beginning of your training session. The purpose of a warm up is to get players  physically and mentally prepared for the rest of the session. A warm up without the use of the ball is a physical warm up, but a warm up with the ball is a technical warm up. As a coach you decide how you want to combine or separate between the two. Once your players are mentally and physically prepared, we then move to the orientation stage (stage 2).

The purpose of the Orientation Stage is to introduce the situation that you would like to improve upon. Players will now become familiar with what the problems in the situation are and start to think about how they can solve that problem. All aspects such as the area of the field, the space used, and the number of players used will also be key to this section. Some examples of numbers used for the Orientation Stage include: 4v2, 5v3, 4v4, 5v5, 6v6, etc.

Next is the Learning Stage. The Learning Stage is done to teach the solution to the situation. Players in this stage and the latter stage will experience successful and unsuccessful decision-making, allowing them to learn from their experiences. This sort of experiential/cause-and-effect learning is the reason why your session should be player-centered and not coaching/command-centered. Some examples of numbers used for the Learning Stage are: 8v6, 8v7, 9v7, 9v8, etc.

The last and final stage is the Implementation Stage. Here is the application of the solution with no restrictions or constraints. Just play the game! Examples of numbers used include 7v7, 8v8, 9v9, 10v10, 11v11. Getting an 11v11 is difficult, perhaps even impossible for most of us, but the purpose for this stage is to see if your players can use what they have learned and implement it into the game.

Throughout your session, there will be some key-aspects which US Soccer will be looking for when evaluation your session. Be sure to check out my next post to find out what they are!

“People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves.”

-Paulo Coelho