What allows good players to successfully respond/react to a given situation?
What allows one player to calmly finish a goal-scoring opportunity and another to miss it? Training.
The objective of training is to develop techniques, the muscle memory, those instinctive values, to ingrain them into player’ muscles and minds, to develop the conditioned response.
It is a lot easier to train/program young players than it is to correct technical deficiencies in older players. The ability to make immediate decisions and execute techniques under pressure must be trained and developed during the early formative years.
The only way to train and develop quality players is to train not until they get things right but until they can’t get things wrong. Training the muscle memory and auto habits for those key, reactive moments which decide match outcomes in the future.
Coaches and players who are satisfied with 1 in 2 or 1 in 3 correct execution of exercises, will never reach full potential, and all of the bad habits/responses/reactions will lead to losses and talk of being “unlucky”.
Today, most coaches have been exposed to players who have played on the so-called elite youth teams. Some of them have been playing (playing not training and there is a huge difference) football a long time and have developed poor techniques and habits, which prevent them from being effective players at the next level.
There exists debilitating trend in youth soccer to offer variety in training, to focus on fun.
Fun should not be the objective of training, correct execution of techniques should. Fun should be a byproduct of exercises well executed. Most kids instinctively enjoy completing tasks and derive pleasure from correctly executing techniques.
Remember when you learned to read and to count? It wasn’t much fun. Lots of memorization and repetition. But this process of memorization and repetition is what eventually allows people to become successful teachers, businesswomen, doctors and players. In football, technical repetition is essential to development of the muscle memory for a conditioned reaction.
Our job as coaches is to develop proficient players and give them an opportunity to excel, not to be entertainers of kids.
In sports as in real life, the difference between wins and losses comes from training not luck. Success and failure depends on how well trained and how deeply fixed in your player’ subconscious the conditioning is. That well trained players and teams are more successful, is a given.
