Dooley Players 1st

Complete Soccer Coach's Guide to Developing Extraordinary Players, Ages 7-14
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78255-439-4
Verlag: Meyer & Meyer Sport (UK) Ltd.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 275 Seiten

Players 1st-a guide to soccer player development for coaches of young athletes ages 7 to 14-is as unconventional as it is comprehensive. It takes the longer-term view that if you teach the skills, the kids will play for a lifetime. This book emphasizes developing the player, meaning the focus is individual improvement rather than team result (although that usually follows). It encourages a 'Go-For-It' mentality and welcomes the failures that happen as young athletes learn to train. Above all, Players 1st recognizes that the primary purpose of all this is not so much about a sport but, in the words of Positive Coaching Alliance founder Jim Thompson, 'stronger, more responsible, and confident individuals who will be successful in life.' Drawing heavily on the author's evolution from a completely clueless newbie to an experienced coach, Players 1st is filled with innovative (and sometimes unconventional) ideas designed to benefit those who are looking to develop as well as refresh and expand their coaching skills. Take your terrific kids and turn them into extraordinary players with this comprehensive coach's guide!

Bill Dooley has coached boys and girls of every age from U-Little to high school level. With a background as teacher, coach, and summer camp and school athletic director, he has most recently been developing programs and curricula for the Coerver Coaching affiliate in Colorado. Bill has been an USC (formerly NSCAA) member since 1988. He was also a member of the World Cup USA Founders Club, which underwrote the successful bid for the 1994 World Cup. Bill holds a 'C' coaching license, has instructed at 'E' and 'D' courses, and has been a trainer for the Positive Coaching Alliance. He currently lives in Colorado.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dooley, Bill

Leseproben

“You owe it to yourself and to your teammates to do everything you can and give everything you have toward your goal of Being the Best” –Tracey Bates Leone, World Champion, 1991 US Women’s National Team JOURNEYS
Too many years ago I shared coaching duties with a fellow teacher—let’s call him Brian—at a small private school on the East Coast. He coached the varsity soccer team, his first coaching job. I coached the JV and a middle school team in addition to my duties, at age 27, as the school’s athletic director. Together, and with even less of a clue, we coached the school’s girls’ varsity basketball team. (The highest qualifications for that assignment were our limited experiences in faculty pick-up games. But that’s another story.) We were the proverbial teachers one textbook page ahead of the students—except we had no textbook. In time, both of us moved on to other places and other responsibilities. Decades later we continue to coach. Every few years we trade notes, and somewhere in those conversations, we always ask ourselves: Don’t you wish we could go back and coach those kids again, knowing what we know now? The discussion that follows usually includes some declaration of how we would have just crushed the teams from the Big-School-Down-The-Road. Just a few years earlier my first coaching duty was with the school’s fifth and sixth grade soccer team. The team went 9-0-0, with coaching that was, looking back, woefully inadequate. It was a classic example of “coaching as you had been coached.” Practices were dedicated to organizing the team on the field in the same W-M formation I’d played in high school. Skill work? Small-sided games? Preparing the players as people for the psychological demands of the game and beyond? You must be kidding! But those 10- to 12-year-olds did get fit. Brian would discover how little they learned when coaching many of those same players on his varsity team six years later. At the time, though, their lack of success was puzzling. Learning by doing was how we managed our early coaching assignments. It wasn’t completely useless. The best part of experiential learning, and there were some spectacular learning experiences, is that you usually learn more from getting it wrong than getting it right. Fortunately, there were enough of the opposite, those very satisfying moments that kept you thinking you were figuring it out, getting better at it, eventually getting pretty good. But no matter how interesting that journey was personally, the fact remains that the kids in those early years didn’t learn what they could have if “we knew then what we know now.” Coaching rarely allows mulligans. The kids you’re coaching won’t be waiting around for you to figure it out. That’s the idea behind this book. For the dad or mom who has just become coach of a group of 8-year-olds because “we don’t have a coach and nobody leaves the room until we get one,” these pages are designed to get you through. You can do it. It’s really not that difficult. But Players 1st is also a roadmap for the more experienced coach, be it one who is returning to coaching after a break and looking for something new or one who has a group of young athletes headed for bigger things and is willing to indulge his or her (and their) Teachable Spirit. The program you will find here is simple and efficient. It adapts to the differing experience levels of players and coaches. Despite an atypical approach to how some things are more frequently done, it works at all those different levels. And when you do it again with a second group, the results will be even better. THEN AND NOW
Since that earlier time there has been an explosive growth in youth sports, with youth soccer very much in the vanguard. The most significant difference is that youth sports, including youth soccer, have become Big Business. That change has been accompanied by several unintended and unwelcome consequences. First among them is that the fundamental purpose of youth sports—developing better kids, “stronger, more responsible and confident individuals who will be successful in life”1 in the words of Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA) founder Jim Thompson—is too often ignored. Words in the mission statements of youth sports organizations about personal development and building character are rarely accompanied by substantive plans to make that happen. Of greater concern is a growing trend in mission statements to exclude even the words. Another significant difference is an ever-increasing emphasis on winning at ever-younger ages. Driven by a mix of economic influences—notably revenue and market share battles among soccer clubs—and abetted by parental pressure a) to have Monday morning content for the water cooler, b) to shield their kids from the supposedly damaging impact of failure on “self-esteem,” c) to chase college scholarships, or d) all of the above, much of the youth sports culture has become adult-centered and adult-driven for adult purposes. Here’s a question to consider: What possible personal or athletic benefit (to use one of the more ridiculous examples) accrues to a child who wins a “World Championship” in 3v3 soccer at age 8? Yet tremendous resources are devoted to just that end. TOWARD A DIFFERENT MODEL
There’s an adage that says, “There are those who know, those who don’t know, and those who don’t know that they don’t know.” Many youth coaches, especially the draftees, fall into the second group; a disturbing number get mired in the third. The best youth coaches, though, know they don’t know and sometimes even what they don’t know. These coaches are constantly adapting, chipping away at their deficiencies, trying to get better. It’s a Sisyphean task, of course. You always discover that there’s something more after that. But it becomes a boulder that is fascinating to push. ON THE FIELD
The changes in youth sports and the excesses that accompany them (early selection, overtraining, the emphasis on tactics and strategy over technical development) impede the realization of the two fundamental soccer purposes at issue in preparing players: lifelong enjoyment of the Game and continuing success at higher levels of play. Given a group of 10-year-olds and a mandate to win a game in two weeks, quite a few coaches could get it done. (The formula: organize things to get the ball as quickly as possible to the biggest/fastest/strongest kids up front.) But the process of preparing for a similar outcome would be—or at least should be—very different if the mandate is to prepare them to win consistently at age 16. The pursuit of the immediate result presents a number of problems. It leads to team selection at the younger ages based on advantages of size, strength, and athleticism that often vanish once all have reached puberty. This consigns those not selected to lesser opportunities which, of course, produce “lesser” players. The early selection becomes the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. Meanwhile, many of the selectees reach the high school age lacking the fundamental skills to go much further. As one coach has put it: “Players who do not get a thorough grounding in the game’s essential skills at the younger ages are being cheated out of their futures in the game.” Another has put it more simply: “Teach skills and they will play for a lifetime.” A third, Dr. Jay Martin, editor of the United Soccer Coaches’ (formerly the National Soccer Coaches Association of America [NSCAA]) Soccer Journal, sees the ultimate result of too much focus on winning and too little on developing players: “We are creating a nation of kids who can win but cannot play the game.”2 This book promotes a longer-term view. It outlines a process that pursues three basic objectives: 1. better kids 2. who will play for a lifetime 3. at the highest level their interests and efforts will allow. It leads to a style of play that is as fun to play as it is enjoyable to watch. And should that process somehow result in teams that win a lot of games including a healthy dose of upsets against your own version of the Big-School-Down-The-Road (spoiler alert: it does), that’s a nice bonus. The fundamental philosophy of the Players 1st approach has been in place for a while. In a nutshell, it says that coaches of younger players (ages 7 to 14) should use the time with their teams to prioritize development of the individual players, with particular attention to their soccer skills. For a time, attention to tactical development and team play is limited to only what is necessary to avoid total chaos on game day. This is not the way things are commonly done in youth soccer. If anything, there has...

Über Autor(innen)

Bill Dooley has coached boys and girls of every age from U-Little to high school level. With a background as teacher, coach, and summer camp and school athletic director, he has most recently been developing programs and curricula for the Coerver Coaching affiliate in Colorado. Bill has been an USC (formerly NSCAA) member since 1988. He was also a member of the World Cup USA Founders Club, which underwrote the successful bid for the 1994 World Cup. Bill holds a "C" coaching license, has instructed at "E" and "D" courses, and has been a trainer for the Positive Coaching Alliance. He currently lives in Colorado.