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I look for 3 primary things at tryouts for U12 and U14:
1. Do they have a good first touch?
2. Do they clearly have a desire to be part of the game, learn, and compete?
3. Do they look around and have field awareness?
The rest of it is teachable within how I structure my practice time. Obviously there are other things I look at on top of the three above items, but if you don’t have all three of those, you’re not going to make it on my team.
My philosophy ranks as follows:
1. Always play with purpose. Never just kick the ball.
2. Penetrate their lines when the opportunity presents itself.
3. Keep possession until that opportunity presents itself.
Against teams who play high pressure against us, my outside backs and holding mids have license to thread a through ball to my CF of CAM, who have been instructed to start diagonal runs early into the space created by my wingers checking deep. If they are leaving space behind their outside backs, we have a green light to find a player making a run into that space. To me, it doesn’t matter what part of the field the penetrating pass comes from, so long as it was intentional and had a reasonable chance of success.
In general, the overall philosophy remains the same: keep the ball, move off the ball, penetrate via pass or dribble when it opens up. How we do that varies greatly depending on how the other team plays. I find that we break high-pressure (note: both teams that play high pressure against us play 3-5-2) most successfully with attacking backs who look to combine multiple times in a row in the same buildup/attack. Young players seem to have difficulty tracking runners after they’ve just made a pass as they turn from their defensive responsibility toward wherever they just passed the ball – which allows for plenty of 1-2 combination play.
There is one team who took high pressure to the extreme. They were sitting 6-7 players within 25 yards of our goal because they know we always try to play out of the back. All it took was telling my CF to check deep any time the keeper had the ball in his hands and the keeper would just throw it to him and we’d have a 5v3 or 5v4 counter every single time. It’s the job of the coach to watch for what space your team can most-easily exploit and explain to your players how they can do that using terminology and techniques you have already covered in practice. If you’ve never worked on how or why to play more direct, your team will fail miserably if you suddenly instruct them to do so.
I should make it clear that I only do it this way because of the situation of being in such a small town without another club within 50 miles. If I was in a big city, I would absolutely have stricter rules.
I make it clear at my start of season meeting that it is okay to do multiple sports. I also make it clear that if those players miss practices or are unable to put in sufficient effort, they will not be starting. It results in some kids choosing to do just soccer and some do two sports and make soccer their priority and skip the practices of the other sports. I’ve never had a player make soccer their secondary sport. Sure, I end up fielding a weaker 11 to start the game, but the kids understand there’s consequences for not meeting the full expectations of the team.
Personally, I am rather disappointed with the lack of forum involvement from the Kleibans. I was expecting them to actually answer some questions about the details people are asking about. It doesn’t surprise me that people’s enthusiasm waned when the voices were just of the members.
It’s unfair and inaccurate to lump all of us together on this one. Some of us coach university level, some of us coach 8 year olds. Some of us played at the collegiate level, some never really played at all. Some have been learning to coach possession for years, some just starting.
Hi Bret,
Thanks for the praise. Unfortunately, a lot of the perceived development between the two games is down to the editing and also the quality of competition. The team in the first video has some decent technical players who would absolutely displace a couple of my starters. The team in the second video has maybe 3 or 4 kids who would even make my squad. That goal at 13:20 was my favorite all season as it was made of a lot of the things we worked on: 1-2 combination play, the CF dropping deep to collect the ball, wingers making central diagonal runs for a through ball, and finishing for accuracy instead of power.
For others interested, here’s the outline of our style of play. I pass this out to my players at the start and finish of every season. It’s just another opportunity to help the kids understand what we’re trying to do in a very general sense. With so many different types of learning, I try to utilize as many different methods to explain the ideas as possible.
Hi Justin,
It looks like my team will be playing in WSYSA district 6 again this spring, so we’ll have a few games at the complex in Pasco. Does your team play there?
-Andrew
I always separate out the players that I already know their skill level from those who I don’t know their skill level. I usually end up with 3 groups for my tryouts: one made of my returning players from last season, one made of last season’s U12 players who are now old enough to play U14, and one made of players who weren’t on either team. This makes it a lot easier to basically ignore my returning players, who I already know exactly what their skillset is, and largely ignore the upcoming U12 players, who I have seen during the indoor winter sessions I run and during their practices I am able to attend. That means I’m usually looking at 6-8 players out of 20-24 – a much easier task than looking at everyone.
We do 3-day tryouts. The first day is basically to find the 14-16 players who are definitely on the team and then 4-6 bubble players who might make the team or might get cut. We do a lot of super basic stuff like rondos, 4v4, then scrimmage. The teams are separated out as denoted above to try to find any of the “never seen” players who clearly stand out either good or bad.
The last two days are designed to look at the bubble players exclusively. I create evenly skilled teams for these days to see if any of the bubble players are the kind of player who have a skillset/effort to allow their teammates to be better. I look at things like offball movement, positioning, communication, speed of play, willingness to track back on defense or get forward in the attack, etc. These days also tend to be simple and do much of the same as the first day. I try to add something with a more complex set of rules or process to see how quickly the bubble players are able to understand instructions. This is usually something like 2v2 with bumpers on the outside where the team in the middle rotates to the bumpers, the bumpers rotate to the line, and the front of the line becomes the team in the middle, and also I add a rule such as your first pass after winning the ball must be to a bumper. I’ve found the kids who are able to quickly understand the rules of the drill are the ones who will quickly understand our style of play and pick up on the details a lot faster than kids who struggle with the rules I set up for games during tryouts.
Kids get bonus points if they ask me questions about how to do a skill, their positioning in a given situation, etc. It shows a desire to learn and improve that I demand.
Phenomenal post. It really has me thinking and reflecting upon my own practices and how I might approach some of the topics you are thinking about.
As I was reading through your thoughts, my mind kept returning to the fact that a lot of your ideas seem binary when the reality is there is a definite sliding scale. The whole idea of knowledge is a spectrum of self-perceived understanding, as well as true and actual understanding. Your series of numbered questions doesn’t really seem to allow for any level of the process of understanding aside from “yes” or “no”. Though, simply posing the questions of 6, 8, and 9 in particular are going to have me thinking all night.
Kinda of running through this exercise to reflect on my U10-12 coed sessions from Wednesday with a bunch of kids I don’t regularly coach is interesting. Our warmup was a bunch of coerver stuff like ball rolls, so I’ll use that as my primary case. Did the players already know what a ball roll is? about 75% yes. Did they understand how to physically do it? about 66% yes. Could they do it at speed? about 25% yes. Did they understand the timing of it relative to defender closing? 1 kid out of 50.
So my point is that a kid’s answer of “yes” could be drastically different to the reality of the situation because they don’t know what they don’t know. It’s an interesting concept to include the players’ self-reported level of knowledge in our planning, I’m just not sure how reliable and accurate it might be.
Great post, and I’m sure I’ll be returning to re-read it and think on it some more after pickup tonight.
Hi Dong Li,
I just ran the 4v0 version of this with my U14s and my kids were also really struggling to get the concept of two players near the same cone. They wanted to maintain spacing so the receiving player could theoretically have more time to receive. What I did, is I stepped into the middle and we played at walking speed. Whenever a player started to run away from the correct cone toward the wrong cone to create some spacing I froze them. I (the defender) simply stepped to the player on the ball and asked what their passing options were. The kids realized there obviously weren’t any. I then brought them down to correct positioning and asked them what their passing options were. That’s when it clicked for them. Some kids got it after me doing that just once, some it took 5 or 6 times.
Hope that helps!-Andrew
Hi John,
You’ve clearly worked a ton on how you want to build up from the back and into the middle third. Your players generally receive across their body and have decent enough spacing. Your holding mid does a great job of finding space, receiving the ball, and moving it along quickly. She’s clearly got some of the best understanding of how you want to play.
As others stated (and I’m sure you already know) your final third leaves something to be desired. I really don’t think it’s a lack of composure on your team’s part, rather a lack of penetrative movement. Their back line is clearly content to keep the game in front of them and not take many risks. Unfortunately, your front line is also okay with playing the game like that, based on this clip anyway.
Your center forward is dropping to collect the ball usually when appropriate, but there’s absolutely no movement elsewhere when she does that. Your wingers are already wide-ish and they stay wide-ish. You can see several times when you’re in possession that there is a gap of 5-10 yards between their backline and anyone from your team. There needs to be some kind of push to penetrate that you guys are lacking, that is most likely solved by your wingers trying to get in behind like in attacking pattern 3. At 2:10 your wingers are pinched in but make jogging half-runs instead of demanding a through ball with a penetrating run. At 3:23 there’s a huge amount of space behind their right back that your left winger could run into but doesn’t recognize the opportunity for the dangerous 1-2.
There were a couple times your wingers were isolated 1v1 and were afraid to go at the defender, most notable at 1:00 and 1:16. Outside of your blonde attacking mid, none of your players really seem to have the will to go 1v1. Maybe your center forward a bit. If that continues to be the case, I’d consider moving your left back to holding mid, holding mid to attacking mid, attacking mid to left wing and find someone else to play left back.
Here’s a 13 minute clip from my BU14 team’s first game last spring season.
Some context: My town is 13,000 people and about 10,000 more within a 45 minute drive. So we don’t have much option for recruitment. We have to combine U13/U14 just to get enough kids to field a travel team. We are playing against the team coached by their boys’ high school coach who has won our conference for the last 10 years.
There’s some other videos of this team on my youtube account, feel free to watch any of those. I edited this one to be in the same format as a lot of Barca USA’s, focusing on the 5-pass sequences. We’ve come a long way since I picked them up the year prior, but I know we still have a long way to go.
Sorry for the low quality videos, but it’s what I have (no parents were willing to tape for me this past fall season). Also, beware of the wind running across the mic on most of the videos, we played in 20+ mph winds almost that entire season except for the game in the first video linked.
Any and all critique is welcome.
I’m an economist by trade. In economics we have something called “signaling” which is basically one person simply conveying to another person that they have some quality. Licenses are merely a method of letting parents/DOCs know that the license holder knows at least a little bit a bout soccer. The higher up the classification, the more a person is supposed to know. This is supposed to indicate some level of higher understanding relative to the general population, but we all know that there are ridiculous amount of coaches with high licenses that don’t know anything more than to pick the biggest, strongest, fastest kids to play jungleball.
That said, license classes are an absolute joke for anyone with a certain level of understanding. The USSF D and E licenses were all well below my level of understanding of the game and an absolute waste of my time and money. There was a glaring lack of discussion about style of play, and the instructors here in Oregon seemed to completely brush off any questions about it. The curriculum in them are geared for people who didn’t play soccer growing up, yet they no longer allow people to skip the early licenses if they played at a high level. Ridiculous.
The best thing I can say about them is that it allowed me to network with other coaches and I was lucky enough to find two others involved with the possession philosophy (one a member here and the other at the same club as a member here). I’m taking my NSCAA National class next month but only because my club agreed to pay for it and it is the easiest way for me to signal to potential future employers that I know what I’m doing and it meets the minimum qualification of many university coaching positions.
