Friday, May 25, 2012

U17 - Transition - Intro to Counter Attack

After my U13 practice last night we had a U17 session.  The start time was 7:15 because we had team photos immediately after.

Some of the boys had track and school soccer earlier that day, but everybody was in a good mood.  I was feeling pretty groovy after a good session with our U13 boys.

We started out with a dribbling warm-up and introduced them to some 1v1 attacking ideas.  I am not sure what the sequence is called, but it's a change of pace, double tap on an angle with the outside of your foot, and making a move.  The three moves we did were 1) turn back 2) chop across to the other foot 3) push it forward and go.

We progressed from this to a 1v1 drill to the net.  Players were encouraged to experiment with their new moves.  Coaching points were:
  • Keep ball close and under control
  • Attack defender, then change of pace to double tap
  • See man, ball and space and time move properly
  • After the decided move is executed, explode and go
We saw some good creativity by the attacker and some good attempts  at finishing.

On a side note, I always appreciate the GK on this team.  He works hard all the time, even when he's not being directly coached.

We used a Game-Activity-Game (GAG) approach to the last part of practice.  Our last session, we worked on maintaining focus during transition.   The progression was to introduce/review the counter-attack.  Counter-attacking is a mentality.  To me, it's a celebration of winning the ball back and trying to make the opponent sorry for losing the ball.

To start, we let them play for  5 minutes and get in game mode.  I then stopped and quickly went over ideas for what can happen when the team wins the ball back:
For the player with the ball:
  • Long first touch forward if possible
  • Pass/run forward into space
  • Move with urgency
  • Catch other team before they re-organize
For the players supporting:
  • Look to get ahead of the ball for a forward pass
  • Look to create a target/space behind defenders
  • Look to support man with ball in case counter-attack is not there and he needs support
This break in action and ideas changed the game.  The boys gave our ideas and philosophy an honest shot and executed it with a fair amount of success.  At times we corrected a few situations but for the most part, they understood.

We only had 11 players and one of the coaches played.  It would have been more effective if the entire team was here, but they weren't.  We played with offside to make it more realistic.

This was about counter-attacking, so it was transition  from defending to attacking.  Another time we will do transition again, from attacking to defending.

This group has their first game Monday night.  I am not sure what to expect as we've had very little time together and very few sessions with a full squad.  They come to work and I always feel good about our progress when the sessions are over.





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