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I hope everyone enjoyed a great holiday season. It was a welcome break as our club always takes off the weeks of Christmas and New Years to give players and their families time to enjoy the holidays, spend time with their family and recharge for the second halve of the soccer year.
I like the break from the weekly training sessions and games but I’m looking forward to getting back to working with my players again. They’re really starting to understand the game of Futsal on both offense and defense.
This week’s question is from Arturo. He asks how he can go about developing a style of play.
Arturo says: “I’ve been coaching for almost 4 years, I was fortunate to start my coaching career at a large soccer club where I got to be around a lot of experienced coaches and learned a lot of helpful drills and some tactics. I currently coach at a smaller club now where I feel like I’m learning a lot on the disciplinary side of things. But I have never been able to understand how to build my own style of play.
I remember watching a team play in a tournament and I fell in love with their style of play. I felt like they had a direction/purpose like everyone knew where they had to be depending on what happened during play. With that being said I have been confused on how to develop my own style of play. The question I have asked my self is, “if your teams are going to play with a direction/purpose shouldn’t your training session have a direction/purpose to? ” My answer is yes, but my training sessions don’t have direction and I feel I always change what I coach at least every other week. How do you go about creating your style of play and how do you structure you sessions to support that?”
I thought this was a great subject for the podcast so that’s what I’m going to discuss in this episode.
Today I share the answer I gave him an much more. I talk about the key questions that you should ask yourself and how I’ve answered them to help me develop my style of play. I discuss the difference between style of play and systems of play. We look at how the roles and responsibilities of each position effect the way you execute your style of play as well as how you should structure your training sessions to teach your style of play to your team.
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Th
is should have probably been one of the first podcasts I did because the decisions you make about your style of play impact everything else you do as a coach. It’s basically your mission statement as a coach. Once you have clear understanding of what your ultimate goal is, it will be much easier to plan how you’re going to achieve it.
If you haven’t decided what you want your style of play to be, I’d suggest a book we have called, funny enough, Developing Your Style of Play. It goes into more detail on many of the things I’ve talked about today as well as more that I didn’t have time to cover.
If you have a style of play that you’ve been developing over the years then I would suggest that you put it down on paper before the beginning of your next season. Writing it down will clarify it for you and make it easier for you to plan your training sessions with a clearly defined goal in mind.
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I’d like to thank you for taking the time listen to this show. Putting it out every week helps me to look at what I’m doing more critically and look for new methods that I can share with you. I hope you find value in the information each week and it helps make your coaching life a little easier and more enjoyable.
In the Next Episode
Next week I’m going to look at what to do when the number of players you have at a training session is different from the numbers required to do what you had planned. This happens to youth coaches all time because things come up and players get sick. So I’ll look at how you can still get the most out of session with less (or more) than the ideal number of players.
I always organise my system of play around the moments in a game. possession, loosing possession. I try to teach my players that transition and organising myself around the transition is very important.