Tag Archives for " Methods "

Three Different Ways to Organize a Training Session

As a young coach I always organized my session in the same way: simple to complex. This is the way I was taught through the USSF Licensing Courses and this was what I always stuck to. Only in the last few years have I found that there is more than one way to have an effective

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Tell Them or Ask Them?

I recently came across a blog post that touched on a topic that I wrote about a number of years ago. The difference between 'telling' a player what to do and 'asking' them what they should do is the difference between the player making the right choice once and the player understanding why it's the right choice.

Here is a link to the post. I would credit the author but I couldn't find their information on the site.

Each weekend I coach five or six games. Because I

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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

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Too Much Talk, Too Little Sport

An article caught my attention recently. It isn't specifically related to soccer but to physical education in general. The study that the article is based on looked at public school physical education programs in England. The finding that caught my attention was that PE teachers were spending too much time talking and this was taking away from the kids opportunity to develop aerobic fitness and conditioning.

We have probably all seen this problem in soccer coaching as well. I've often heard coaching instructors say, "No Laps, Lines or Lectures". But we still see too many times when players spend too long listening and not enough times playing. As I was reading the article below I kept thinking, "Telling is not Teaching". Hopefully this article also gives you some food for thought.

Ofsted: PE Lessons Slammed By Ofsted For Too Much Talk, Too Little Sport

Many PE lessons are failing to improve pupils' fitness, while not enough youngsters are playing competitive sport to a high level, inspectors warned on Thursday.

In a new report, Ofsted raised concerns that many schools are failing to push their sportiest pupils, or help those that are overweight.

It warned that in some PE lessons there is not enough physical strenuous activity, with pupils spending too much time listening to teachers.

Overall, PE lessons are not up to scratch in around a third of primary schools and about a quarter of secondaries, the inspectorate said.

The report, based on inspections of PE in schools over the last four years, concludes that in general the subject is "in good health", with significant investment in the last decade.

But it warns that in more than a quarter of schools, PE teaching did

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Tryouts for Youth Teams

Each state in the U.S. sets their own time for tryouts. In the mid west the date usually falls in June sometime after State Cup has been completed. In Kansas tryout can officially start one week after State Cup is completed.

There are two types of clubs, a truly tiered system where the best players are place on the top team in the club and the next strongest players are put on the second team and so on. The goal of this type of club is

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Rotating Positions

Do you continue to rotate player through the different positions as they get older? What is 'older'? I have always made sure to give my players experiences in a number of different positions during the season. Sometimes in positions that they weren't well suited to but I wanted them to have a chance to play

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Coaching Philosophy

I feel that one of the most important responsibilities of a coach is to constantly evaluate WHAT they choose to teach their players, HOW they go about teaching it and most importantly, WHY they are choosing to focus on those topics. Without this kind of evaluation there is a real danger that we can fall

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