All Posts by Tom Mura

0 Situational Agility: Face or Turn Back to Player

This post from our Soccer Conditioning Experts at SoccerFIT highlights an area that I'm always working on with my players: Facing up or Back to Pressure.

This post is taken from Sub Chapter 5.11- of our SoccerFIT Yearly Program, where we are talking about body position as it relates to soccer speed/agility, specifically regarding the ability to anticipate a situation and make subtle changes to the hard wired agility patterns based on desired tactical outcomes…

Body Position in Relation to Other Players: The third developmental coaching point is

0 Developing Soccer Intelligence

Soccer is a 'Player Centered' game. The players make the decisions as the game is played. Unlike our traditional American sports of football, baseball and basketball. In those sports the players rely heavily on the coaches for direction and decision making. The coaches call the play, give the sign for a certain pitch or run an in-bounds play that the team has worked on at practice.

By contrast, soccer is a free flowing, constantly changing game where the players have to decide what to do based on where they are, where their team mates are and where the opponents are at any given moment. There are no time outs and few stoppages that allow the coach to directly effect the play. The players must have the ability to

0 Transitioning From Indoor to Outdoor Soccer

While much of what I do during the Futsal season is intended relate to soccer in general and not just Futsal, there is still an adjustment period that my teams go through when we move from indoor to outdoor. The two areas that I focus on during the transition are recognizing and playing longer passes and finishing with a different ball, on the larger goal.

Shooting sessions to prepare the players for the different

0 Improving Your Team's Speed of Play

I think that most coaches have a couple of resources that they go back to time and again. Improving Your Team's Speed of Play by David Williams is one of those books for me. The quality of the sessions and thoughtful coaching points always give me ideas that I can use in training with my teams.

This excerpt is from the Small-Sided Games section of the book.

Suppose I have seventeen players, including two goalkeepers, of a reasonably high standard to work with. My aim for this session is to improve the players understanding and ability to run with the ball.

The two teams are set out in a 3-2-2 formation plus a goalkeeper, and I have included the extra player as a floater ( F ). In the defending zone three defenders play against two strikers and

0 Preparing for Super F National Finals

The purpose of the winter Futsal league is mostly to keep the player's foot on the ball during the cold midwest winter. But each year the teams in our club participate in the Super F National Finals. The tournament brings together teams from around the United States in age groups from U8 through Men's Open. The tournament is great way to end the Futsal season and bring together all of the technical and tactical work we've done throughout the winter.

Being able to hold the ball under pressure is

0 The North Carolina Way

I have always admired the University of North Carolina Women's Head Coach, Anson Dorrance. He has been the Head Coach at UNC since 1979 and has won a record 22 National Championships. More than 50 of his former players have represented their country on the National Team. He is also well known for promoting and developing creative dribblers and finishers.

I've read all of his books and watched any videos I could find. So I was very excited when Dorrance agreed to headline our 2008 WORLD CLASS COACHING International Seminar. More than six hundred

5 Training 2 v 1 Situations

Playing indoor soccer or Futsal during the winter provides a great opportunity to focus on teaching players how to break down defenses in 2 v 1 situations. This is an important tactical situation for players to understand and be familiar with because so much of the game can be broken down to 1 v 1

0 Keeping Sessions Fresh During the Winter

With our harsh Midwest winters we are forced to do most of our training indoor. This usually means training in school gymnasiums. They vary in size but most are much smaller than the spaces we use outdoor and severely limit what training topics can be covered.

We do a lot of technical dribbling and passing work during this time because the players get a lot of touches, the sessions are easily scaled to the number of players at training and small spaces actually help to increase the pressure on the players. It requires them to keep closer control and be more aware of open space.

While these sessions are great for technical development, they are

0 Competitive Small Group Training

This is an excerpt from our latest book, 'Competitive Small Group Training' by Tony Englund.

Introduction

As a long-time enthusiast of coaching books, I was struck recently in looking through my library that the vast majority of compilations of training exercises are based on either progressions from small numbers

0 Creating Movement to Create Options

During the winter my teams play Futsal. I have always been frustrated by my team's lack of movement and interchanging of positions. The players tend to stay in a small area which creates fewer options.

I put the following session together in order teach my players to pass, move and be aware of the movements of their teammates. If each time a player passes and moves another player slides to

1 Brain Based Learning and Differentiated Teaching

This is an excerpt of the second article in a three part series that has been contributed by John Pascarella, Sporting Kansas City Assistant Coach. The first part was published in our Coaching Advanced Players blog.

In the first of this three part series I began with a saying from Coach John Wooden:  “You haven’t taught until they’ve learned” and how this caused me to think of my own coaching style and how I sometimes find it difficult to get my points across to players in different ways when they don’t understand the initial way I’ve tried to explain it.  In that article I compared US Soccer’s Simple to Complex teaching methodology to the French Federations Whole-Part-Whole method emphasizing that I didn’t feel one was better than the other but stressed that coaches need more than one way to teach progressions so they can teach players with different types of learning styles.

In this article I wanted to expand on that idea by

3 Headgear Required for Soccer Players in New Jersey

A recent article was mentioned on our Kansas City Soccer Forum. It discusses a recent Princeton, NJ School Board decision that would require soccer players (as well as field hockey and lacrosse players) to wear a protective soft helmets in order to diminish the chances of suffering a concussion. I've seen this topic come up from time to time but this is the first time I've heard of a school district attempting to mandate the use of headgear for soccer.

The headgear they are planning to use is the SG360 by HRP Products.

This is largest headgear I've seen being used for soccer. Other protective headgear on the market includes the Full 90 and ForceField. They are much smaller and don't include any eye protection.

“We’re very aware that for players in all sports there’s a risk of head injuries and we’re just trying to do whatever we can to prevent them,” said Timothy Quinn, president of the Princeton school board.

My question has always been, "Do these helmets protect against a concussion." Pediatric neurosurgeon Alexander Post from the New Jersey Pediatric Neuroscience Institute in Morristown has given numerous lectures on concussions and said he does not believe that the proposed headgear would even be effective in reducing the risk.

“You can get a concussion from pretty much doing anything,” he said. “Any activity carries a certain degree of potential risk and you have to weigh that risk. In general, the headgear is good for reducing abrasions and lacerations, but not for protecting against concussions to any significant degree.”

Barbara Greiger-Parker, the president of the Brain Injury Alliance of New Jersey, told NJ.com that

1 Training Sessions for the 4-3-3

One of our latest books has generated a lot of interesting. Both the hard copy and the eBook version of 'Training Sessions for the 4-3-3' have been a very popular choice of coaches visiting CoachingSoccerTactics.com. The book is a guide that provides exercises, drills and small-sided games that teach players how to perform the roles and responsibilities of each position in a 4-3-3 formation.

1 Stats Don't Win Games

As an American I'm drawn to statistics to evaluate players and teams. The mainstream American sports of Baseball and Football are often viewed through the stats of the players.  They are evaluated and ranked based on batting averages, yards per carry, quarterback rating and earned run averages. Soccer enthusiasts used to decry the use of

1 Balancing Creativity and Decision Making

This is an area that I'm constantly thinking about. Especially with players that are moving from one developmental stage to the next. My focus currently is on my U10 that plays in a U11 division. We have focused on individual technique to the point where they are very confident with the ball. But at times

0 Attacking in Transition

This is a portion of an article that appears in the November edition of WORLD CLASS COACHING Magazine. It's available to all subscribers of the Member Drills Database. The article contains an analysis of the game between Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich. The author, Stevie Grieve, looks at the factors that lead to an effective

4 Juggling Study

In a post from August of last year entitled, 'Juggling - Developmentally Important or Just a Nice Trick' I described a new juggling program we implemented with our club. We set juggling targets for each age group in an effort to give the players a goal to shoot for so that they would be motivated to work on juggling in their own time. I found the question discussed in the post to be a difficult one to answer. I hadn't seen anything that quantified the benefits of juggling as they relate to balance, touch or ball control. 

I recently came across the study below which looked at