Monday March 26th Woke up beat to hell but forced myself up and skipped breakfast (no time). Left hotel at 9:30 am to walk to turf field across the street from Camp Nou for coaches course with Jordi Vinyals and Arnau. Coaches ran sessions and they critiqued them to improve. Paul and I went to [...]
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I don’t know if real accountability for player development is possible. What are the metrics? Is it how many players you place in college? Is it the number that get called to youth national teams? Is it the number of professionals you’ve touched while they were amateur? Certainly these things are important. But we need [...]
TweetOn a lighter note, here’s a post offering some behind-the-scenes insight. The following is our original email sent to the University of North Caroloina, the nations most prestigious women’s program. I’m sharing this now that our girls team (our first and likely last) has aged out. Hello Chris and UNC Staff, I am writing you [...]
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How do you know a coach is any good at player development? I’m specifically addressing those coaches who are implicitly chartered with that goal. Well, here it is: 1) The coach must have a clearly possession based style. 2) The coach must be a winning one. METRIC #1 (possession) First and foremost, if the coach is not [...]
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There can be no player development factory without monetary incentive. First let me be clear; without competent coaches, all the money in the world will not develop a quality player. So assuming there’s a capable coach, what makes you think he will do everything in his power to develop his pupils? And I assure you, that’s [...]
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I want to congratulate Brooke Elby and Taylor Ramirez and wish them the best in their next soccer chapter. North Carolina head coach, Anson Dorrance, recruited and got verbal commitments from the girls in the first half of 2010 during their U17 season. And last week he got their signatures. What They Can Teach Us [...]
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This winning vs development argument always seems to revolve around technique. I discussed a bit in part I of this series how a coach can only go so far in technical development. But people talk over and over again about how our professional player’s lack of technique is the biggest problem. Again, we’re missing over [...]
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So we’ve all heard about climbing the career ladder. And yes, sometimes we hear about demotions or taking a step back. But how about going from CEO to a line worker? Yes my friends, it looks like former Bayern Munich assistant and this season’s Chivas USA coach, Martin Vasquez, will become a U10 coach for [...]
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