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Thanks for sharing, Aman. I enjoyed the quick write-up on your challenges, but your video shows your team moving in a very positive direction. It seems like you deserve to practice your craft on more than just a single grassroots team that practices once/week. Hopefully you get more opportunities soon!
Aldredo, I enjoyed watching this. Thank you very much for sharing. I especially liked your players smartly turning and looking to play backward when presented with multiple defenders in front of them. I also really liked your center mid’s through balls splitting the defenders into space for your outside mids. Great work, keep it up, and please share more videos. I would love to study more of these as my U9G play 8v8 as well.
Hi Rene, I will share my thoughts on your questions. It seems like we coach similar age/gender/skill level and share similar views.
Some context: I am a young-ish coach (28, but only started coaching at 24) that coaches the U9G travel ‘A’ team at a club in southern New Jersey. I coached this group last year during their first year of travel at U8. I don’t know what the gold-silver-bronze levels mean out there as NJ does not seem to use this system to my knowledge. We compete in the third highest division in our league. There are 12 divisions in our league. League has a promotion-relegation system (sort of). Games are played 8v8. I do not have a child on the team. I try to maintain a professional culture for this team, but I have to find balance on certain issues as most of the parents are ignorant to the game with white/suburban/middle-class background (for the majority of families on this team, this is their first child involved in soccer, competitive sports, or both).
Now to share my opinions regarding your questions…
1. I rotate players to play in different positions. My coaching philosophy states I will continue to rotate player positions until ~U11 or so. My club stresses different positions for younger ages as well. We play 8v8 and play in a 2-3-2 formation. One caveat to this idea of different positions is that the talent gap between my best players and worst players is much larger than I’d like it to be. So with that in mind, I reserve the Center Midfielder duties (in my opinion, the most important position in this formation) for the stronger players on my team. I will give the weaker players a shot at the CM position if we are winning by a significant margin or are playing much weaker opposition. Every player has to play a couple halves in goal during the season.
One idea that I would attempt to implement (if I had a larger roster), would be to assign ‘blocks’ of positions during the season’s matches. What I mean by that is that I would assign the two defender positions to the same three girls for a few matches in a row. For example, if I had a 12 match season, I would play the same three players as Backs for the first 4 matches; then they would play the Midfielder positions in games 5 through 8; and finally Forwards in games 9 through 12. My thought is this would allow them to (hopefully) gain a better understanding of the positions through some repetition. Another benefit is that I would know which players to assign to different roles during training– particularly positional rondos and rondos involving jokers. But I only have a 10 player roster at this time, so I have not figured out a way to implement this idea with so few numbers. For now I basically need to substitute for whoever needs a rest or to make other adjustments.
2. I completely agree with your opinions on the CM position at this age. I have about 3 players on my team that play CM decently, about 3 that do it well enough, and none that excel at it; so they all get opportunities to play it. In general so far, I find you are correct… My more physical/athletically-gifted players (with decent to good technical ability) will produce better results at CM at this age. The spacing & positioning of my team and the opposing team range from okay to poor at this age/level, so an athletic player is able to break up a lot of plays and win a lot of loose balls (and their are a lot of loose balls during open play at this age). Unfortunately, their distribution is usually limited to neutral and forward passes, and their off-the-ball movement is insufficient at this time. With that said, I love playing my more technical & perceptive players in the CM spot and seeing what they can do. I give these players opportunities to play against all levels of competition, but these girls usually perform better as CMs against the average/weaker competition. I have one player in particular who really enjoys playing the #10 role because she has good vision and constantly looks to catch & pass, but she is just limited by her dribbling abilities, passing range, and speed of play at this time.
3. I am largely indifferent to the US Soccer Curriculum document, but I acknowledge it can be a useful backbone for philosophy & planning, particularly for newer coaches. It looks like you have given some thought on how to incorporate your philosophy & curriculum into it and I admire you for that. I particularly like the measurable goals you have established as they seem reasonable for this age/level. I would encourage you to think about adding successful 1v1 take-ons and # of times receiving on back/opposite foot (if you have the ability to video record or have parents or assistant coaches counting these stats during matches) as they seem like stats you may want to measure given your emphasis on receiving and Coerver skills/moves.
Hopefully my opinions give you some good things to think about. Overall, I love your detail-oriented mentality. Wish you the best of luck this season. Your young players are lucky to have you as a coach.
