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.
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