US Soccer not creating a true soccer pyramid with promotion & relegation. That’s it! You want youth development on par with the rest of the world? You want our top flight pro teams at the level with the best in the world? You want the National Team to consistently be a legit World Cup contender? […]
Practical
Who Else Wants to Win?
Yeah, that’s what I thought. Winning fucking matters! And don’t you ever forget it. The only question (AND IT’S A CRITICAL ONE) really revolves around context. Under what circumstances has winning occurred? What were the pros/cons considering short, medium, and long term objectives? But, whatever your answers … on the whole, winning matters. Chronic losers […]
The “Possession Movement” Has Finally Hit American Shores: How Prepared Are You?
There is a movement towards possession-based soccer in our country – and it’s about time. The possession-based game, in one manifestation or another, has dominated global football for decades. But unfortunately it has taken an extreme interpretation and execution of possession, in Barcelona/Spain, to awaken us in the United States. As a result, the word […]
They Laughed When I Said It Could Be Done; But When I Started to Coach!
That’s pretty much it, right? All too often it seems that if you want to do something that breaks the mold, people react strangely. It’s like you’re an extraterrestrial or something. Two kids want to build a search engine better than multi-billion dollar incumbents? Larry and Sergey create Google. Twitter? Who the fuck is going […]
How to Execute: Who on Earth are You Learning From?
The figure breaks coaching down into 3 fundamental elements – all of which contain huge challenges. For instance, we’ve got over 4 years of philosophy-based content here, and we’ve barely scratched the surface. But now I think there’s enough of a base to start efforts in the other two elements – Activities & Execution. The […]
1 Truth, 1 Fallacy, and 1 Solution for Coaching Possession Soccer
A Truth It can be successfully done across all levels of play. The main reason it’s rarely seen, is that most coaches have not acquired the expertise to do it. First and foremost, a coach must develop a possession-based philosophy (a vision … a taste … a feel for that type of football). Then he […]
The Golden Rule to Team (and Player) Development
This continues with the theme of our previous article … It is after your team demonstrates a level of mastery with your core material, that you can start layering in other principles. For instance, our founding core (the set of activities all our teams start with) does not include stuff like: Combination play up the middle. Offsides trap. How […]
A Huge Mistake Well-Meaning Coaches are Making
They try a bunch of different activities. Doing this, creates no continuity in your training. Which means: Your players aren’t getting a simple digestible message (the philosophy). Your players can’t achieve a level of mastery in the skills associated with a particular activity. And you, the coach, aren’t achieving a level of mastery with a […]
Why “Developing All Players to Their Potential” is a Lie
You can not be all things to all people. You have to pick. Let’s consider you have a single roster that you get to work with for a certain number of hours per week. I think we can all agree this roster is comprised of players with unique qualities and varying levels of talent (or […]
You Can’t Copy a Style of Play and What Mr. Sigi Schmid Said.
There are many fundamental issues with talk of ‘style of play’. I’ll state two (which are intimately linked): 1) You can’t ‘copy’ a style of play. (on the coaching front) A ‘style of play’ is a specialty – like neurosurgery or cardiovascular surgery. Yes, it’s all medicine, and yes there are overlapping competencies, but one […]