Neil, Nick asked that question over in the moderators' forum, so I'll cut and paste the answer I gave him:
On a different thread, Nick asked this:
Quote:
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Did our tactical discussion improve the team tenfold?
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Short answer: alas, no. The girls just weren't ready for it. As a new team, we needed so much work on fundamentals that tactics had to take a back seat.
Of the 12 girls, only 4 have played travel soccer before, and all were cut from their previous A-division teams. A couple others tried out for A teams but weren't selected.
The rest were just good rec players.
And of course I'm not a real coach. I never played beyond grade school, and didn't really understand anything about tactics until Nick and Neil taught me some of the basics at the Summit.
So my team and I had to learn together. I took a weekend coaching seminar from the NSCAA, and I now have a regional coaching certificate, the equivalent of a Class D license. I've read books, studied DVDs, and watch English Premier League games on Fox Soccer Channel for at least an hour a day.
(Fair warning: next Summit, I'm going to have a bunch of questions specifically about the Premier League. Like, how many of those teams are in London? Do they all have their own stadiums?)
The good news is that we turned a corner a couple weeks ago. Staci Wilson, whom I know through the ISSN, came up to a couple of our practices and really drilled the girls in the fundamentals.
Then we went off to play a Columbus Day weekend tournament -- three 50-minute games in one day. The kicker is that we played full-sided, with only 12 players. (I tried and failed to get guest players to join us.) And our one sub left during the second game. So we played the final game without a single sub -- 11 girls playing all 50 minutes.
Something happened during the second game of the tournament. We still lost, 4-0, but it was a close game. My daughter started playing like herself again. At one point she brought the ball all the way up the right side of the field and played it into the middle. We didn't finish, but it was one of several times we had the other team back on their heels.
On Sunday we played our first post-tournament game, and it wasn't good, but it was still substantially better than the way we played in the first half of the season. The final score was 5-1, but again, it was probably a little closer than that.
My big problem right now is that I can't get the right mix of offense and defense. The kids still have a lot of that rec-league mindset, where they're either one thing or the other. So if I play with three fullbacks, my wing players don't push the ball upfield, and we don't have any kind of offense. If I play with three mids, our defense is compromised, and our opponents always have numbers on us when they attack.
My daughter is one of the few who can attack and defend with equal intensity, anywhere on the field. But she's like me when it comes to energy systems: short effort, long recovery. She makes one of her crazy runs and she's dead for the next few minutes.
The plan is to muddle through the rest of the fall season, shooting for incremental improvements -- closer games, more offensive pressure, tighter defense. In the spring I should get a new player who's a pure striker, something I don't have right now.
More information than you wanted, but what the hell.
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Here's the update:
In our two games following the 5-1 loss I mentioned above, we played the two best teams in our division. One's a premier team, and the other is a true A-division team.
We still lost both games, but our girls were a lot more competitive. Both coaches went out of their way afterwards to point out how much the team had improved. In the second game, it was only 2-0 at halftime, and should've been 1-0 -- we conceded a ridiculous goal 30 seconds into the game.
Our final two games are against teams that aren't quite as overpowering as the first two. I'm genuinely torn over whether to emphasize defense and go for the closest scores possible, or try to generate more offense by putting the best players up front, even if it means we lose by bigger scores.
At practice on Tuesday, I had almost all the girls change positions, and something really interesting happened. One girl who usually plays all 60 minutes of every game at left fullback moved up to center forward. The girl who's usually my central mid went out to the wing. And all of a sudden, our offense improved dramatically.
A couple girls who've played forward all season -- including our fastest player -- went back to play defense, and they were more effective there than they've been on offense.
I don't know if everyone just had a really strong practice, or if I've been playing everyone at the wrong positions all along, or if there's some other explanation. But now I'm really, really curious to see how the next couple of practices play out.
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