Working with this group has been interesting. They're tough, athletic, they want to play and still want to learn. We still have a few players who fight us on staying organized and working through bad habits, but we make progress with them too.
During games I look to remind them of their shape, keeping the ball moving, involving everybody (including the GK) and looking to play entertaining soccer.
A few players have had a lot of success in new spots and that has given us more options to get more players on the field for more minutes.
Between players, we've had a lot of positive talk on the field and a few all our arguments about how things should have been played at certain times. I can live with that as long as they're talking about the soccer and not each other, and get back to the business of playing.
My hope for these boys is that they all take what they've learned and apply it with their high school programs and beyond.
For each position we continue to give them suggestions on how to play different situations and getting out of jams during games. My biggest pet peeve has been wide midfielders trying to take guys 1v1 when there was a wall-pass or penetrating-pass option already present. We gave them options for this too.
We'll see how the season ends. We have 3 games left with a 4 point lead. One of our final 3 games is against the second place team.
No comments:
Post a Comment