Club Training edition! We have a
number of great opportunities for players and coaches coming in April and May!
1. NSC Keeper/Striker Camp - Sat 4/26 9:30A-2:30P
2. VUSC/NSC Keeper training - Sundays 4/27, 5/4, 5/11 and 5/18 at the
3. VAA Ref meeting and clinic - for any players or adults interested in ref'ing VAA community soccer games. Mandatory meeting 5/12 7P-9P at Apple Valley Community Center. Ref Clinic
either 5/14 or 5/15 (choose one) 6P-8P at Apple Valley Community Center. MSRA certification is
not needed, but certified refs get paid more.
4. VAA Player clinic - VAA is offering a free player clinic for any players age
13 or younger on Sat 5/17 9A-12P at
If you coach U14 or older, please ask your players to volunteer and
forward the registration link to them.
5. Coach training opportunities. VUSC will offer a "coffee
talk" coaches education session on 4/12/08 from 9A-12P in the
Wed 5/7 6P-8P
Wed 5/28 6P-8P
6. VAA Community Soccer and VUSC working together - You may notice that most of
the coach or player training opportunities this season are open to both VUSC
and VAA Community Soccer players. VAA and VUSC have begun working more
closely together. You will see other connections including a new
community soccer tournament-only team to allow motivated community players to
sample two travel soccer tournaments.
The goal of these initiatives is to align the clubs more closely
and to promote soccer in the
7. VAA Adult Soccer League (over 35)
VAA has an adult recreational soccer league. If you'd like
to be on the mailing list for that league, please email Trevor Childs, trevnjan@charter.net.
Here is an informational email that came out recently:
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Hi All. With the warmer weather starting to show up it got me thinking about
our Friday soccer evenings.
VAA will be enforcing the sign-up policy this year. We have been very slack in
not signing up and making the small $20 payment in past years. This fee covers
the whole year, and the funds go toward improving community soccer for the kids
in our area. We will still allow new players to come along for one week free of
charge to see if our game is what they are looking for. After that "NO PAY
NO PLAY" . To sign-up please follow this
link for the VAA adult soccer registration page;
http://www.valleyathletic.org
If you know of other players that may be interested or players that have come
previously and are not on this email list, please let them know.
I'll send out another email next month with the start date.
Thanks for your continued support.
Trevor Childs
Director, VAA adult soccer.
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8. Article - Letting the Game be the teacher...
From one of my favorite
resources, Finesoccer.com.
They have a number of great newsletters to which you can subscribe, plus free
drills, practice plans and other stuff (they also sell things like books).
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There seems to be a lot of
talk about letting the game be the teacher but I'm not sure many of the coaches
who talk about it, really understand how to utilize the concept.
Too often, a coach thinks
splitting his team into two teams, setting up a field and letting them play is
what it means to let the game be the teacher. While the original concept
is based on players having learned by playing pick up soccer, the reality is,
most players only play during scheduled training sessions and games so the time
in spent in practice must be used as efficiently as possible.
Rather than just throwing a
ball out and saying "play", with the use of restriction and rules,
much more can be accomplished.
An example would be if you
want your team to do a better job with combination play, you could put in the
requirement that a combination must be done before a goal could be scored (or
you could be even more specific and say a wall pass, or a takeover must be done
before a goal could be scored). This would force the players to look for
as many opportunities for combination play and while there might be some
combination play if this were just free play, with this type of requirement,
there will be many more opportunities developed. Another option, instead
of making the combination play a requirement, it can be done as a reward (a
goal counts as one point but a goal off of a combination play counts as three
points as an example).
Another way to
differentiate free play from games used for learning is when a coach sees a
recurring mistake is seen, rather then letting it continue to occur, the coach
can stop the play (freeze), explain the problem, explain the correction,
demonstrate the correction, allow for a reply and move on,
This allows for the opportunity to teach, learn and move on in a game
environment. For this to work, it's extremely important for the coach to
go through the whole process in as short a time as possible while still making
sure the players understand. If too much time is spent talking, the game
is lost as is the players interest.
One key to using games as a
teaching tool is to pick an area of emphasis and stick with this area.
For example, if the emphasis is on combination play, don't keep stopping play
for bad defending. While you want to see a progression over the course of
a season and if defending has been emphasized in the past, you don't want them
to completely ignore defending, you also want to
emphasize the theme so the players understand what you want accomplished.
Combining coaching with games
gives you the best of both worlds.
Any questions, comments or
suggestions should be sent to Lawrence@finesoccer.com or
they can be posted on the FineSoccer Forum
To subscribe to any of the FineSoccer Newsletters please click here
Have a great day!
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Don't forget the coaching resources at http://www.bjb.org/soccer
Thanks,
Barry