The Coach's Vision for the Team

I wrote some recent articles on coaching good field vision in your soccer players. However, there is a different type of vision a good coach should have. I'll admit I'm weak in this area myself.

A coach should have a clear vision for how he wants his team to play. I personally have often focused more on the tactics and skills we need to improve on to make up for some gaps revealed in the previous match rather than having a long-term vision of what we should be working toward.

Of course, you need a little bit of both. However, having a long-term vision and making sure you're working toward it takes a bit more discipline. The plan I have to help me will be to:

1. Have a real vision. I mean a real picture in my head. In the case of soccer, more like a movie.
2. Try to find something measurable to help you gauge your progress toward that goal. If your vision is to look like Barcelona (a bit ambitious perhaps), should you count the number of successful passes? Is there a better metric?
3. Set incremental goals with dates. This will force you to prioritize the work necessary to reach your long-term goal. Since you have a metric, setting intermediate goals should be easy.

Finally, the coach's vision needs to take into account the strengths of his players. Forcing a square peg into a round hole is a hopeless task.

Another Soccer Vision Game

I mentioned earlier a game to improve soccer vision where a leader ensures the follower is dribbling with "eyes up". I just read about a different version of the game where both the leader and the follower have a ball. The rules are simple. The follower tries to tag the leader without loosing the ball. The leader tries to remain untagged without loosing her ball. When the leader is tagged, the players switch.

I'm a little worried about the leader being so "careless" with the ball that the follower doesn't really have a chance. However, we may be able to deal with this by limiting the space to a fairly small square or something like that. I'm pretty sure the kids will like this one.

Coaching your Soccer Kids to have Split-Vision

I was recently reading an article on coaching your players to have better vision on the field. "First touch" skills are, of course, a prerequisite to good vision and that's still an area where we need to work. Still if I can improve my players' vision with some occasional drills at the same time, I think it is time well spent. Some points in the article reminded me of a drill we ran recently that the girls really seemed to like. It was very challenging and there was lots of giggling to boot. (Our friend Sarah taught this drill to us.)

Here's the key steps of the drill:

1. Pair up the girls with each pair having one ball.
• One player is the dribbler.
• The other player is the leader.
2. The leader, while facing the dribbler, starts running backwards.
3. The dribbler must keep the ball as close to the leader as possible while maintaining eye contact with the leader. The challenge is to keep the distance between the dribbler and the leader to a minimum.
4. The leader varies her speed and changes her direction constantly.

The dribbler learns to keep the ball close (if she dribbles it too far ahead, it will contact the leader) while keeping her head up because she has to maintain good eye contact. If she looks down, the leader reminds her to look up.

Hopefully, this drill will build more self-confidence in the girls so they will take a look around and know they won't lose control of the ball.