Hi all,
Thanks, Steve, for creating this blog. I've never used one before so it's kind of fun... I have a couple of suggestions:
1. Substitution. Instead of randomly subbing our kids in and out, I suggest that we divide them into 2 teams, each will play 1/4 of the game. This way, the kids and parents will know in advance their playing time; they can practice together as a unit to improve teamwork; and also during the games, they don't loose their rythm and continuity. About the composition of each team, I suggest we divided them evenly (e.g. John, Mike, Khoi, Ben O, Trevor, & Austin and Charlie, Richie, Rafael, Ben V., Chris, and Pablo).
2. Team formation. I've noticed that many of the goals scored against were due to what I called "a defensive breakdown", which typically happened when attackers were stronger and faster than our defense. Over the years, we have always let the slower players play on defense. I suggest that we consider another formation: let one of the faster players play defense. Teach them that whenever attackers come, it's the job of the faster player to chase him down while the other defensive player runs back to help the goalie and/or clear the ball away. This strategy can be used in our current formation (3-2) or in a new one (3-1-1). The current formation is fine when the team is equal or weaker than us but if they are beating us in the first half, we need to consider switching to 3-1-1 to play more defense.
Just my $0.02.
Nhan
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
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Nhan,
You make some very good suggestions. I think we're already moving in those directions.
At our pre-season scrimmage two weeks ago, I established our scrimmage teams which distributed the boys evenly in terms of skill, experience and size. These were also the starting sides that we used for our first game. Our first substitutions swapped out the midfield first, followed by the defense a few moments later. It's not always possible to maintain this kind of pattern (injury, stamina, etc). But my plan is to keep the mids and the defenders together wherever possible.
Our defense is also really focusing on first defender/second defender, where the first defender goes toward the ball, pushing the attack to the outside, and slowing it down so that the second defender and midfielders can fall back into the middle, helping the goalie. It's not so much speed as positioning, and they really did a good job of that on Saturday. Our problem in the past has been defenders drifting too far forward or challenging the attack before the rest of the team can fall back to help out. They really improved on that Saturday, and I plan to focus heavily on that over the next few weeks.
Thanks for your help!
-steve
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