It's a kind of magic

The game Saturday was probably the most exciting outing we've had to date. Once again I saw progress from each girl in their own way and there was a lot of little things that amazed me along the way. Instead of the usual I/me/mine mentality there was a glimmer of teamwork with passing and strategy. The girls started to spread across the pitch instead of bunching up in a clump which made for some pretty spectacular moments sprinkled through the game. We've only got 2 more weeks together but I'm already looking forward to next season and all the ones after that!

And the light bulb goes on

Last night was AWESOME!!! Every time we get together I see little steps from each individual towards a better game. Last night I watched as one player chased the touch line, promptly made a hard left turn at the goal line (without going out of bounds), passed in front of the goal and jerked a hard right hand shot to score....all while being hounded by the opposition every step of that way!!! Another, who has been in the "capable but disinterested" camp made a polar switch to fully in control and pushing the limits and I honestly never expected to see that kind of fire out of her...AND SHE'S MY KID! WOW!!! Unfortunately we only have another two and a half weeks with 5 practices and 3 games before the end of the season. Not sure what I'm going to do with myself until spring......

Well crap....

So after having to cancel our Thursday night practice session due to high winds last week we ended up getting our game rained out on Saturday. Sheesh....

So after a week off we spent practice addressing defense, blocking, and tackling again. MY definition not FIFA's. We were missing a player last Monday but this one was even worse. Tonight I spent the first half hour with only two players, neither of whom were feeling cooperative. Then we had one more show up in exactly the same mood as the first two and well......you just can't make a 4 year old "want to".

Hopefully our makeup game on Wednesday will help turn things around....lord knows I could use the pick me up.

Hrmmmm 3 in one....

Well I didn't blog after last Thursday's practice because I was too pissed off to arrive at our practice space to discover a flag football team. When I approached the wife of the coach to explain that we'd been practicing for over a month she was extremely rude and disrespectful and I just didn't want to get caught up in that here. Hopefully they will show a little more respect this week and find another place or night to practice but we'll have to see.

Saturday was a massacre of gargantuan proportions. The coach of the opposing team was a collegiate level player himself and it really really showed in how his team performed. But as with everything we went away from the experience with new thoughts and new ideas on how we can improve our own team as well as an open offer from the opposing coach to scrimmage during the week and a few tips to boot! Nothing negates the embarrassment of having your ass handed to you on a spit, but if you can't learn from the experience and move forward then you're just not seeing the bigger picture. Just because I'm the "coach" doesn't mean I know anything nor that I have nothing to learn. In fact I see it as meaning that I have a responsibility to learn even more than my girls so that I can have something to teach them in the first place.

Monday night practice was a new and interesting experience. My rock star couldn't be there, and my assistant coach was stuck at work again, but thankfully my M-I-L kept my youngest allowing my wife to assist. Today though she's regretting it on so many levels I can't help but laugh at her. She says she's hurting in places she didn't know she had!!! She's never once thought that what Michael and I am doing "looks easy" but damned if having to get out there and do it yourself doesn't open a whole new perspective on things!! Ok so last night we started working on introducing the concept of tackling. Yes I know this soccer blog is called "football" and I also know that gridiron football uses the term tackle but in OUR world it's a very different concept. CHECK THIS OUT. Essentially what this means is that "tackling" is just the act of taking the ball away from the opposition. Any form of taking the ball away is a "tackle" but I've separated, for the girls, the concept of "stealing the ball" which is taking possession of the ball and moving toward your goal and "tackling the ball" which is essentially just kicking the ball out of the other player's control in effort to disrupt their progress.

In the big game, where you have 11 players on the field, MY definition of tackling is very likely to place the ball within range of one of your teammates who could then take possession and move towards your goal making it synonymous with my "stealing". At our level with only 3 girls on the field (who are more than likely bunched up around the ball with the 3 on the OTHER team) all you can hope to accomplish is to disrupt travel and hopefully get to the ball before the opposition regains control which is why I've decided to differentiate. Stealing is a controlled move, and tackling is a defensive action to disrupt the other team. Next thing to do is going to be convincing the girls to spread out a bit. That whole bunching up around the ball thing is a little bit counterproductive when you're stealing the ball from your own team.....

Sometimes it pays to go backwards

Productivity and something about "a chain is only as strong" comes to mind when I consider our practice last night. Here's the thing...6 different 4 year old girls are exactly the same as any other group of any other people. Each one learns differently at different rates and with different teaching methods, and not two of them are exactly alike. Some came to me with no skills at all and other came with various experiences from previous team sports or playing with friends or etc etc etc. When my assistant coach missed our Thursday practice I made the best of the situation and it ended up being a very good experience for me because it allowed me to work with each girl and see things I had been missing. Last night one of my players couldn't make it so I decided again to take advantage of the unbalanced situation to work on some things and I feel really good about the whole thing.

Since being one girl short left us with an odd number we warmed up and did some drills waiting for our last player until we decided she wasn't going to make it. Michael started to run a scrimmage with 4 of the girls working on blocking and defense and I took the opportunity to have some one on one time with an enthusiastic player who just seems to have a difficult time with the basics. I didn't even know we had spent an hour working on kicking and dribbling until my wife told me it was time to wrap it up! I feel like we made some progress and I hope things start to stick but I think the best thing for her is going to be repetition and focusing on the basics without overwhelming her.

Now on the other side of the world, the scrimmage was equally productive with the girls focusing on follow-through and defense. I'm only going on what I was told because honestly I don't think I so much as looked up during my hour, but they worked on blocking and defending by chasing down the attacking player and getting in between them and the goal as well as stealing possession and following through with it by driving the ball towards the goal after the steal. Most of our girls tend toward simply following the ball more than interacting with it so it's important to get them to actually get into the fray and make contact and then after making that contact seeing it through all the way to the end. A common thing we have been seeing, if we see any contact resembling a steal, is a single touch to the ball disrupting the attackers momentum followed by a dead stop watching the ball roll away while the other team pursues it. Something akin to what we're hoping to see but without the follow-through required for it to actually be useful. I think Michael must have found a way of explaining things that clicked for the girls that I haven't been able to. It's good to have another set of eyes that can think of alternate ways of teaching when I can't get results.

Playing on rails

What we need is some drills that focus on defensive work. The game Saturday was wild and hectic and just like everything that I do with the girls it showed me new things that we need to work on and reminded me that so-called "simple concepts" are really only simple because I'm 30...the girls need more time to internalize things before they become "habit". One of the major problems I'm seeing right now that we have our one superstar player who pretty much does all of our ball work AND all of our defense while the rest kinda trot along side whoever has the ball. Problem being the team is so reliant on her that if she isn't on the field absolutely nothing happens. Last Thursday in practice we started working on the concept of getting in front of the attacking players to block their line to the goal. Get in front of them, take the ball, all these things went out the window Saturday and we were back to chasing the attacking players down the field to the goal. Going to have to find a way to explain the concept of "heading them off at the pass" over just "following the ball". Just a side note....watching a superstar going up against another superstar is pretty exciting stuff!

Every individual is a unique recipe for disaster

So as poorly as I felt about Monday night's practice session I felt equally thrilled by our hour together last night! On the negative side my assistant coach was called in to work leaving me flying solo, which sucked, but There was an UPSIDE!! Because I couldn't break my girls up into two groups like normal, and because I chose to start working some much less "general/simple" concepts, I was forced to take time with each of my girls individually away from the rest of the group one at a time. Now I've never done that before, instead I merely watch them as a group (either the entire team or whichever three I'm working with while Michael works the others) and I learned a lot of things about each one that I did not know.

Also because of the advanced nature of a couple of things I was trying to work on I found it pretty much impossible to get the girls to work with each other in a productive manner, but I did find a way that I can run the same exact drill once Michael can help me out and even better if I can enlist one more parent to allow us to split into 2 kids versus 1 adult (I say adult but I'd take a sibling just as quick). In addition to ME learning about each individual girl I discovered in each of them areas where I really feel that since I lack the ability to spend one on one time with them I could really use some parental help so I started last night to get with each parent individually to talk about where we're going and how they can help if they are willing. Lots of really long sentences in this post.

I'm just amazed at what an experience this is becoming for a guy who got suckered into volunteering and now wishes he could travel back about 5 years and start doing this even before he had kids of his own. I honestly can't imagine NOT doing this now that I'm involved and every single moment I get with my team teaches me more about each of them, and about myself as well. Looking to the future and this is going to be REALLY good!!!

I'm really sucking at this aren't I......

So it seems that I just can't remember to write about the Saturday game BEFORE our Monday practice so I'm having to bundle two days worth of blog posts into one. Guess I need to try to be better about that.....

Ok, so Saturday right? Saturday was a BLAST!!! Our first game with my entire team in attendance and the team we went up against, I feel, provided a real challenge to the girls that the first team we faced didn't and the girls really stepped it up. I honestly haven't the faintest clue what the score was so we'll just go with the official policy of "it was a tie".

Monday night practice on the other hand was a totally different animal. I suppose a little of the "new" is wearing thin on the game for some of the girls, and they're beginning to let some of their personalities show through. One has started manhandling anyone within arms reach, despite my insistence that the "no hands" rule applies equally to the ball AND other players. Another is playing at a level higher than our age bracket can provide a challenge for and is acting out a bit because of it. Two of them, who I would say had a very weak start, are both making strides in leaps and bounds of improvement, though the larger of the two is extremely timid for fear of "hurting somebody". And the last two seem to be polar opposites of each other....one seems to really WANT to play but struggles with the basics, while the other seems to have a fairly solid foundation and absolutely zero interest in the game. Lots of places in there for me to feel I'm failing to do MY job, but quite a few places to feel good about what I'm doing at the same time. I guess the only thing I can do at this point is to continue trying to impress the basics and keep things fun enough they don't lose interest. I'm still having fun but it has definitely gotten harder.

Let's get together....

So we had RAIN!!!! All day yesterday it rained off and on and it's been toying with it today as well. Considering the drought that's a very very good thing but I was a little worried about it putting the brakes on our Thursday practice. After work I went by our practice spot and in spite of the rain it was looking great, no mud, grass only mildly damp, and I opted NOT to cancel practice. Sadly two of my girls didn't make it but I wasn't going to let that spoil it for the 4 that did show up! We started again with our usual circle drill, toe touches and dribbling and re-hashing the basic concepts like "no hands" and "kick with the inside of your feet" before moving on to some more interesting games.

Remember those superstars and butterfly chasers I mentioned last time? Well, when you end up pitting three out of the four girls against the superstar in a scrimmage and then having to help the three by deliberately interfering with said superstar to try and make it even remotely fair the only thing I can think is "this girl is going to end up on a scholarship!" so I'm really hoping that I can keep her interested in and excited about the game. The butterflies on the other hand.....well I'm obviously failing as a coach in a couple of ways there. See, the way I figure it if the girls aren't particularly interested or focused it's more than likely because I'm not making it interesting enough to keep their attention. Going to have to find a way to reach them better without boring the other end of the spectrum. On the other hand, of course, it REALLY doesn't help that the one who needs the most help only comes to one practice a week because her mother obviously prioritizes cheer leading over soccer....because yeah....that's 4 year old appropriate.....:facepalm:

Wow! This is the most fun I've had in FOREVER!!!

Ok ok ok so I didn't blog about our first real practice last Thursday. Guess I need to fill in some details. One of our players opted not to play at the last minute leaving us with only 5 players. An early morning APB on Facebook Thursday morning miraculously managed to yield a 6th player that we got signed up and on roster in time for the first practice that night and wowee what a mess we made.

We started out with some basic toe touch drills and some rules for the girls to start grasping the concept of what we're going to be doing followed by some dribbling exercises and some shooting drills all the while circling back to where we began and going over it again. Honestly I kinda think some of the girls got a little bored at times, which is 100% my fault, but even admitting that I feel like I had no choice but to focus on the core principles. The most important thing about this endeavor is that no matter what else goes on there's nothing more important than the girls here. Screw the parents, screw the "scores", screw everything, if the girls aren't having fun there's just no point in bothering with this at all and all of that hinges on my ability to keep it interesting. Only problem is that at the same time every single thing I'm doing has to actually translate into applicable soccer related skills. I feel like Mr Miyagi trying to find fun ways to trick the girls into learning the skills that they'll use to play the game!

ON TO THE GAME!!! So we get there to set up last night, we're one player short because one of the girls couldn't be there and we haven't so much as had a scrimmage to explain to the girls the concept of what we're going to be doing. but a quick breakdown and they pretty much had it figured out. We've got our superstars, and we've got our butterfly chasers, and to be completely honest.....they weren't always the same ones from moment to moment! I saw tons of great things, and just as many not-great things that we'll be working to encourage/discourage as needed in the following practices and the entire experience showed me a lot of things that, as a coach, I'm doing right and a lot of things I hadn't thought about that I can approach in my practices that I truly think will let me get the girls to relate to the game and develop skills that will be useful but all in a way that, with any luck, will be engaging and enjoyable across the board for everyone! I can not wait for Thursday!!!

You have GOT to be kidding me......

WOW! So we had our "first practice session" last night via the OSA Fundamentals Clinic last night as I had planned, thinking that the girls would get more out of it than I felt I could provide them on my own. I think I counted about 65 little kids from 4-6 years old and there were only 2 players coaching the clinic. Don't get me wrong, the guys made a valiant effort, but there is absolutely no way 2 people can coordinate that many small children effectively. I think that with the help of a few parents we can achieve a more productive practice session on our own so it looks like we'll be skipping the clinic in the future.

On a brighter note after last night, along with all of the research I've been doing on my own, I actually feel very confident that I can provide a coaching environment that, while not producing a world cup level team, will be able to lay ground work for the girls to build skills that should be helpful if they continue to pursue football as a sport, and if they don't.....well I think they're going to have a lot of fun and that's really the only thing that actually matters in the long run.

Lethal Weapon

So yesterday we went to the coaching clinic and the coaches meeting where we received some basic coaching information and our rosters. At the clinic the wife pushed me out to volunteer along with 11 others to go through some drills and exercises which is where we get the title of today's blog post....I'm gettin' too old for this $#1][!

Afterwards we picked the girls up at the in-law's had dinner and then while the wife was bathing kids in preparation for bed I started making phone calls to try and touch base with the parents of my new players. Three voicemails (one call returned), one invalid phone number, and a full message box means that at our first "practice" tonight at the fundamentals clinic is so far going to consist of Cassie, and just one other player. Hopefully I'll hear from the remaining two voicemails today and we're going to get with OSA to try and find alternate contacts for my remaining two players.

So this is how the story begins...

We tried to get my daughter Cassie into soccer last year but her birthday in December was beyond the cutoff so we had to wait and sign her up THIS year instead. We bought her her own ball and shin guards and she has been avidly looking forward to this ALL YEAR LONG!!! Well I guess a week or so ago the club called my wife to let her know that they were one team too many, and one coach too few and unfortunately Cassie is on the team without a coach. If they don't find someone to coach it by Sunday, my little girl and 5 others just like her will be told they won't get to play after all. Completely ignoring the fact that MY daughter has been looking forward to this for MONTHS, that's just not fair to the 5 other little girls who may or may not have been looking forward to it just as long or even longer. So after talking things over with the wife, and seriously thinking things over myself, it looks like we'll be at a coaching clinic Sunday and attending the coaches orientation meeting afterwards.

Hi! My name is Charles, and apparently I'm going to be an Odessa Soccer Association Girls U5 Soccer Coach! May god have mercy on my soul.....this should get interesting quick!!