The fall season is coming to a screeching halt this weekend with the
teams I have coached or worked with having their final training sessions and
games and it is always pleasing to see the looks of disappointment on their
faces when you tell them.
I can say for certain, every player I have worked with is a better
player in some form over the last three months we have been together. As we have said in the past, at the club, for
these young players, their development changes by leaps and bounds in the
matter of a small period, which for adults seems like the blink of an eye and
sometimes we don’t always see the changes as they happen. I recap after each game with parents calling
out so many little things I see, which are different week to week for each
player and parents consistently ask, “How do you see all of that?” Simple answer is, I am watching.
I believe Coach Pat highlighted it all in good manner again with his
statement about his U9 group,
“…our Girl Power squad is now one hundred and eight months old. This means that the last three months of
soccer represent more than 1% of her total life experience. In most contexts 1% of anything doesn't seem
like a significant amount but think of how long three months is if you've only
been alive for one hundred and five months.
Think of how many things you would be doing in those three months that
would be completely new to you, how many new experiences you'd be having and
how much you'd be learning. When you're
eight or nine years old one soccer season is a long time.”
For the U8 group under Coach Brad and me, it has been eye opening for
them to be the two teams who were just turning 6 and played in the lowest
division of recreational play last spring (D4).
They were annihilated continuously and this season, only a few months
after spring, they are going around their peers with Maradonas, Stop Hops, and
carryover dribbling, as if they standing still.
For the U9 Academy and U10 Jrs, it was all about lots of new faces and
watching them all erase, then embrace confident and deceptive ball skills. Their enjoyment of the game increased and
more times than not, for the U10 Jrs, they were asking me at the end what the
score was and if they won. They had no
idea because they were enjoying themselves too much.
For the U12 Jrs, there were also a bunch of new faces, but many old
ones. The old ones had the skill
background, but had to come to grips with whole new teams and work to
understand one another while continuing to master individual skills and spatial
awareness. Their biggest realization was
they were now old enough to understand they could learn and apply new concepts
about the latter at the same time.
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