Football training – Why the game is the best teacher

I’m so out of touch with the modern game, I guess; that I keep thinking that the defense is begging me to switch the point of attack to the other side of the field, but that would take someone with the skill to drive a ball knee high across the field.

That would also take mastery of a special technique through repetitive practice in order to do it with both feet. That isn’t how to train players these days because they get bored with that kind of practice and besides it shows the coach is out of touch with the players and the newest training ideas?

The basic laws of the game seem no longer to apply, of course…

* or we wouldn’t counter into a defense that out numbers us on a wing side of the field,

* or we wouldn’t allow the cross,

* or we would get immediate pressure on the ball and not allow players to look up and pass wherever they like,

* or we would defend with one more than they have up front.

But of course I’ve been around so long I think that the basic laws of the game do still apply!

Years ago I watched a famous American professional soccer player practicing left-foot side volleys. He couldn’t get consistent service. How do you groove a stroke if you don’t get consistent service? Once the mechanics of the stroke are under control then, of course, one works to achieve match levels of execution.

Not one coach had a thought about how to give him consistent service other than to kick it in to him. When he was struggling to get the ball turned to goal, not one coach walked up to him and told him how to get his foot over the ball or how to get his hips re-positioned to make the movement easier to control. Where was the technical coach to help him? If he were a professional golfer his swing coach would have been working with him.

How often do you see evidence that we learn from successful training programs in other sports? Every major professional team in this country, except soccer, has technical coaches for their players. We only see it for goalkeepers in soccer but not for field players. Coerver is a training system for a player that breaks the dribbling training issue into steps that, once learned, enables anyone to teach their players.

We should have been developing training of all the techniques in this format years ago. How much do we study how our sister American sports teach technique? Do we learn from them? Other nations have looked at our basketball’s multiple defenses very carefully. Do we see anything to be gained from employing their tactics and street smarts in our game? Certainly, the Europeans will evolve their game faster than we can play catch-up. We always talk about an “American” style but inevitably we copy the Europeans.

Years ago in a meeting with the chairman of the NASL’s Competition Committee, in answer to the question of how to speed up the development of our players, I proposed using circular TV and holographic images to increase exponentially the exposure to quality opponents of our players. When will we utilize the technology to allow us to get our field players caught up? If our technical ability was up to standard and we had an American style, the Europeans might be chasing us for a change.

All this assumes that as coaches we actually know how to teach technique and then elevate it to skill in a match. If some of the college coaches think that the players today are less technically competent than they were 20 years ago, then whose failure is that?

Of course this may all be academic if today’s coaches are a product of the “throw-away” system themselves, are they going to turn to the NSCAA for technique training or do they think they are beyond that? Maybe they believe technique training should be done at a lower level than where they are coaching, leaving them free to be seeking the “magic tactics” that will equate to wins…and that simply continues the downward technical spiral!