"You haven't taught it until they've learned."

John Wooden

 

 

As I reminisce about this summer's camp season the above quote of legendary basketball coach John Wooden has often been on my mind. In a team environment one will find not all players learn in the manner. Something I have discovered over the years is that not all teams learn in the same manner either.

 

 

I am a student of the game. My soccer library consists of over 100 books, hundreds of magazines, over 250 videos and mountains of notes I have taken while attending camps, clinics, symposiums and even from my own practices and games.  My wife is very tolerant of my studies.  LOL. When I find something that I really like I latch onto to it and use it over and over be it a coaching phrase, terminology, a warm up, small sided game or game related activity. A recent example of this is the phrase "making offers" that refers to players making purposeful off the ball movement in order to receive a pass.  I truly am an old dog learning new tricks!

 

At a team camp a couple of weeks ago I was going through my standard coaching methodology using tried exercises in an effort to improve a tams speed of play.  First day went well as did the morning session of day two. The afternoon session of day two we hit a brick wall and hit it hard.  I had utilized a type of non-directional transition game to reinforce the concept of organizing early and taking advantage of an opponent before they got set up.  It was working beautifully, in part because we were playing in a large area with adequate time / space available.  When I attempted to use the same theme of transition in a directional, smaller and therefore faster paced environment is when we hit the wall.  Everything we had worked on, strove for and had begun to have success with was abandoned as the players reverted to old habits.  An exercise that had worked well with my own teams and for other team camps just wasn't going to get 'r dun this time. I knew I was going to have to change things up for the next days sessions.

 

On the way home that afternoon I thought about the wonderful success we had had the first 3 sessions of the week and pondered why things fell apart during that 4th session. I had made a comment to their head coach that I would have to approach things differently in the next session and would think on that before returning the next day.  I defined the problem as how to move the team from success with non-positional, non-directional play towards playing in a more game like environment.  Lucky for me, I am a member of an email group of coaches from around the country that exchanges ideas on all things soccer. On of the members had the perfect exercise to segue from non-directional play to directional play with purpose. He calls it Possession with Positions.  It is brilliant variation on some standard attacking exercises I had previously used but never fully embraced... likely because I never fully appreciated how they might be employed. Here was my colleague teaching me a new approach to an old coach tool. 

 

The next day I returned to the foundational work we had previously done with the team before quickly progressing to Possession with Positions. Voila!  It all came together in rather quick order. A different approach for a different team. It was that simple.

 

As I traveled home afterwards the question I asked of myself is how to recognize the need to adjust my teaching approach before hitting the wall as we had in this camp?  I found myself admitting there were red flags in the early sessions to indicated the exercise I employed that eventually broke things down would not work with this group.  Primarily, one of the better players and dominant personalities was never going to "buy in" or play the practice game as it was intended to be played.  My mind was drawn back to helping one of my sons solve a math homework problem. We got the right answer and I'm feeling pretty good about things only to have my son return from school the next day and informing me we did it wrong. What?  The answer wasn't correct?  Oh, the answer was correct, but we had solved it wrong. ????  Evidently they were teaching "new math" and I helped him solve it the old school way.  That was the case with the transition game in question here. They were solving the problem, just not as I had intended or wished for them to. Thus the need for a different approach.

 

A few days later I watched the team compete in a pre-season tournament. To my delight, and I think that of the team and their coaches, much of what we worked on was in evidence in their play. They looked quite good in their play and went on the  championship game.  John Wooden's quote came to mind as it was apparent I had some success in teaching them because they were enjoying success with what they had learned!