I'm into the flow of Futsal practices and games at this point. My teams are training less during the week but the weekends are crazing because most of my teams are split into two teams for the league. This gives them more playing time but that means more games for me. It's worth it though. The teams are all progressing nicely. I have a slightly different focus with each team. With the younger teams we're talking a lot about using the skills that are more … [Read more...]
#215 Increasing Injury Rates Among High School Athletes
#214 Coaching Conversation with Michael Davitt
I really enjoyed the weekend off for Thanksgiving. Lots of time for family, friends, food and football (mostly American Football). The week before my teams started their Futsal season. I never know what to expect on that first weekend of Futsal but the teams all played really well and made a much quicker transition than I had expected. We were fortunate to player our first games on some of the largest fields. I think that helped us keep the ball in play and … [Read more...]
#213 Using Technology to Improve Your Coaching
I had last weekend completely off. No games! I always take the first weekend of the futsal season off. This provides a welcome break between the outdoor and indoor seasons. It also gives me one more week of practice with my teams before we play our first futsal games. For the first two weeks of indoor practice we focused on finding the openings or creating the openings when attacking. This week we switched and worked on defending so it was all about closing … [Read more...]
#212 Attending a Coaching Course
Since I didn't have a podcast last week I have to catch you up on what I've been up to. Two weeks ago I had my last outdoor tournament of the fall. Two teams played in the tournament and it was a great way to wrap up the season. I go into all of the details about the weekend in the episode. We had our first two weeks of futsal training sessions in the last two weeks. Moving indoors changes our focus a bit because we don't have the space to run the Play - … [Read more...]
#211 Should Coaches Train their Own Children
With only one game last weekend it left me with a lot of time on my hands. Saturday consisted of work around the house to get it ready for the winter (which seems to have started already!). My game on Sunday was at 8 am but first I decided to get up early and watch the Rugby World Cup Semi-Final between Wales and South Africa. That started at 4 am my time. I love watching the knockout rounds of just about any sport. The intensity and drama are something that … [Read more...]
#210 Using the Play-Practice-Play Method in Practice
Last weekend was a busy one; I had six games between my four teams. The results were 3-2-1. The interesting thing was that the teams were 1-1-1 on Sunday and I LOVED the performance of my teams in every game. My approach was different with each group but I think it really matched with what they needed on the day a struck a balance between too much direction and not enough. Realizing that the balance needed by each team will be different and that sometimes even … [Read more...]
#209 Experiencing Different Soccer Cultures
Thanks to an email from listener Kevin I discovered how to allow iTunes to include up to 300 podcast episodes in the feed. I've made that adjustment so we have a couple of years before we have to worry about older episodes dropping off of the feed. Thanks Kevin! I don't usually use guest players for my teams unless we're very short on players. This weekend one of my teams really need a couple of guests because of illnesses but none were available to we had … [Read more...]
#208 Ways to Encourage Your Players to Compete
I followed up the out of town tournament two weeks ago with an in-town tournament last weekend with two different teams. One team played their own age group and the other was playing up. They both faced some good competition and didn't end up making the finals but they both had great experiences that will definitely help them continue to develop and build on a great start to the year. I talk more about their experience in the episode. There's a Grassroots … [Read more...]
#207 What’s in Your Coaching Toolkit?
I took one team to a tournament in St. Louis last weekend. This was my first trip to St. Louis in many years. In the past they just didn't have the same quality of fields that we could find by staying closer to home. The teams have always been very competitive but I just never wanted to play those teams on inferior fields. Now there are a number of good turf field complexes in St. Louis so I'm sure to be traveling that direction more in the future. We had … [Read more...]
#206 Choosing the Best Size Field for Your Small-Sided Games
It was a crazy wet weekend. I know this podcast sometimes sounds like a weather report but it has such an impact on the game and my coaching that it's an important factor. You can listen to the episode for the details. I'm continuing to experiment with not coaching during running play. I think it's having a very positive impact on most of my teams. However, one of the teams hasn't reacted as well to it as the others. I talk about the details more in this … [Read more...]
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