6 weeks into the season & still putting players first
It’s only October, but it’s been a busy start of the season. 6 weeks, 6 training sessions, 4 league matches and 1 cup match. So how did it go and what did I learn as a coach along the way?
1. Mixed thoughts about the Mid Sussex League
This is our first year in the Mid Sussex League. There have been positives: a busy schedule of league matches, two cup competitions plus some futsal tournaments still to come. But a few negatives as well: the match schedule changes on a weekly basis, one or two teams arguably shouldn’t be in the same division as ours, and the first cup was badly setup: nobody benefits from a bottom-division team being thrashed by last year’s winners.
Still it went well overall - with great attitude shown by all the players both at training and during matches, and the lows only made the highs even sweeter!
2. Three ways we are improving our coaching
After losing a few matches in a row, we had a good honest look at how we approach matches and thanks to very good feedback from Ben (our Head of Football Development), identified 3 ways we could improve our approach without compromising on our core coaching philosophy.
Goal kicks
All Under-11 teams we have played so far seem to struggle with this, and so did we! Mostly due to the transition from Under-10: no retreat rule anymore + a bigger pitch + a wide goal area = very difficult to pass to defenders and build up from the back.
Our solution: going for long kicks most of the time, and getting our goalkeepers to practice these more, with the amazing help of a player’s dad (thank you Enzo!).
The downside naturally is that we coach our players to play too direct, without enough control of the ball. So we won’t be doing this forever, but it will help us for the time being.
Rotation
We started the year expecting to play all players in attack, midfield and defence at various times. While great in theory, it seems that our group of players would benefit from spending more playing time in the 2 or 3 positions for which they are the best suited.
Thus we will still be rotating players to some degree, but giving them a better chance to learn their ‘better’ positions.
Formation
We are going to switch from 2-3-2-1 to 3-4-1. While 2-3-2-1 is a nice system which works well in a balanced game, it is quite demanding of the team, especially the wide players in terms of effort and positional sense. As such it does expose us when under pressure from a strong side. 3-4-1 should give us more balance in defence, and be easier to coach.
3. The pressure to play to win is increasing
As players go through their teenage years, they will get to play in an increasingly competitive environment. And it is our role as coaches to manage this - as we did after a few bad results, by adjusting our coaching approach as described above.
So it is quite sad to see coaches taking a much easier approach to their team performance, such as:
Deciding from the start of the season that some players will only play half as much as others
Taking some substitute players to matches and not even getting them on the pitch
Which effectively amounts to telling these players that they’re not good enough, that they’re a 2nd class of players who will not get a fair chance to show what they can do or to improve their match performance. With the likely outcome that some will drop out altogether. And just for the benefit of winning an extra couple of matches over the course of the season, and boast about it afterwards?
Instead, our philosophy is to put players first: we coach to develop players, we don’t coach to win. Our players are all 10- or 11-year-old, they all turn up for training, and matches, and put in tons of effort, so why should we penalise some? As long as we get at least a few wins over the season (which we will), we’ll stick to our principle of equal play for all players. And we will lose as a team, and win as a team.
“Some youth academies worry about winning, we worry about education”
A counter argument to this could be: your players are not going to be professionals, so they don’t need ‘optimal’ coaching, and just want to have fun winning. But is winning what matters to young football players? Did these coaches even ask their players what they think is fun about football? We did ask ours - and ‘sitting on the bench’ wasn’t their answer.
So bring on the rest of the season, and we will keep putting players first - far above and beyond results.
