The evolution of soccer (coaching).

As a young parent coach in the early 1990's I knew something was amiss, but did not yet have the experience in soccer to make sense of what I was observing.  With a minimum of knowledge about the game I jumped in as a volunteer coach for my son Grant's U6 soccer team.  I knew I had to become a student of the game if I were to be of any value as a soccer coach even at the recreational level.  Now in my third decade of coaching soccer ... well, if I only realized then what I know to be true now. LOL.

Much of my early soccer education centered around Lima Shawnee high school and it's summer camp clinician, Graham Ramsay.  To this day I still adamantly declare I learn more about soccer in a summer's week spent with Graham than I do everywhere else combined.  The man is simply brilliant when it comes to soccer. That said, there are some lessons that only experience can teach.

My sport was basketball. Heck, our school did not even offer soccer when I was in school.  When I first came to soccer the tactics, such as there are in U6 soccer, were foreign to me. I used the formation (4-3-3) prescribed by the high school coach. Yes, it was 11 v 11 at U6 back in those days. I took whatever hints or suggestions the high school coach offered and tried my best to implement them. We were both fools - the high school coach and I - for promoting the implementation of and attempting to implement anything remotely resembling tactics with a group of 5 year old soccer players. I honestly do not know what the hell either of us were thinking.

It wasn't until the founding of a futsal league in our area a couple of years later that the correlation between basketball and soccer began to be realized.  The two sports are quite similar in some regards, but it would take several more years before I fully came to appreciate the lessons I learn from basketball could be applied in soccer.

Around the turn of the century I joined the high school coaching staff as an assistant coach in charge of goalkeepers. I knew little of how to play goalkeeper so I signed up for the old NSCAA State level goalkeeping course. To this day, still the best coaching course I have ever had the pleasure of taking. Tony Waiters, Tony DiCicco and John Murphy were the clinicians.  Waiters and DiCicco were world household names, but it was the young John Murphy who made the biggest impression upon me. He taught me more about the tactics of attacking soccer in a weekend course than I had learned in the previous ten years combined. Yes, I learned attacking soccer at a goalkeeping clinic because of the emphasis John Murphy placed on analyzing play from the goalkeeper's perspective.

Still, I would not fully appreciate the correlation between basketball and soccer nor the complete import of Murphy's lessons for a few more years.

For more than a decade beginning in the late 1990's Lima Shawnee was the powerhouse team in west-central Ohio.  A primary reason for this was Graham Ramsay introducing the "flat back four" zonal defending system to program. We were the first to run zonal defense in the area and it not only defined the Shawnee program, but gave us an advantage others simply could not over come. No one else in the area ran zonal defense and thus teams really struggled to prepare for and play against it.  I don't know that Shawnee always had better players than some of the teams it regularly defeated, but that zonal defense was like having a nuclear weapon in our arsenal against opponents playing with muzzle loading muskets.

During much of that time our biggest rival was Elida high school. The Bulldogs ran a conventional diamond man-marking defense with a stopper and sweeper. They were great defensive teams in their own right and Shawnee certainly struggled to score against them. We were confident in our defense and quite honestly believed if we could score one goal against the Bulldogs we would win the game. The problem was in breaking down the Elida defense to score that one goal.  I remember those strategy sessions in the small coaching office back at Shawnee.  More importantly I now recognize the futility of those strategy sessions because none of us looked at the problem from the proper perspective. And that is the point of today's writing.

As a soccer coach I was constantly conflicted by the similarities I recognized in basketball and soccer and being told they really did not exist.  That fledgling futsal league previously mentioned seemed to drive home this point as we practiced a style of play reminiscent of basketball transitioning only to find others playing futsal ala Iowa style girls basketball - attackers on one half of the court while defenders stayed on the other half of the court. We had to adjust our style because of the constant cherry picking of opponents leading to easy goals against us. Still, I was on the right track in my thinking only meeting obstacles along the way that caused me to doubt what I knew in my heart to be true.

It wasn't until the youth (and high school) soccer world began to catch up with our use of zonal defending that the proverbial bells sounded and the radiant beam of light shone down upon me that I fully realized and appreciated what I had always known.  Just as in basketball a soccer team must recognize the defense it is facing and attack accordingly.  That is, when facing a man-marking system a team must attack in one fashion and when facing a zonal defensive team it must attack in a different fashion.

Coerver Coaching was a huge thing back in the day and is still quite relevant today. They have modified their curriculum over the years to reflect the changes that have come about in the game.  Allow me to explain,  Coerver is all about individual ball mastery.  Lots of dribbling exercises and moves to beat an opponent. This was perfect for the era of man-marking diamond defense where the focus was on 1 v 1 battles across the pitch. On today's game of zonal defenses a passing attack is more pertinent than individual moves to beat an opponent. Coerver, to their credit, has incorporated more small sided games and group play into their curriculum.

The concepts of zonal defending were introduced to the game to counteract the 1 v 1 experts emerging in the game via schools of instruction like Coerver.  The idea with a zonal defense is to be numbers up around the ball.  It takes pressure / cover / balance and turns it into pressure / cover x2  / balance effectly negating most 1 v 1 play. No longer was isolating your best attackers against a single defender the most viable option.  If you wish to attack a zonal defense effectively, you must move the zone forward and backwards, side to side in order to create seams through which to attack.  Everyone who has played organized basketball knows this to be true.  I certainly recognized this truth applied to soccer as well even in the face of being told by the world of soccer it did not.

If only we, at Shawnee, had applied the correct attacking principles in going against a man-marking system back in the day.  Instead, we viewed soccer through the lens of our zonal defense. We attempted to play a possession game of ball movement when what we needed was to focus on winning the 1 v 1 battles against isolated defenders. We looked at creating numbers up situations when being man marked across the pitch greatly restricted the feasibility of doing so.   We saw the zone every day in practice and became quite adept at possessing the ball and moving the zone. It's just that this is not what we faced in our actual matches. And so we struggled to score against good defensive teams.

With my most recent teams I have stressed recognition of the opponents formation and defensive system as soon as possible. The earlier we define both, the sooner we can effectively begin attacking the opponent. In a strange but predictable turn of events, it is the now rare man-marking system that provides the stiffest challenge for many teams. Such has become the emphasis on possessing with a purpose - that purpose being to move the structure of the zonal defense to create seams to attack through.  The athletes (coaches?) in today's game are sometimes slow to recognize the 1 v 1 scenarios present by man-marking systems of defending. The result being an approach designed to combat zonal defense being employed against a man-marking system which is proving quite frustrating.  I know, because this is full circle of where I was as a coach in the late 1990's / early 2000's - I have been there and done that. There truly is no greater teacher than experience.

The value of small-sided games is found in the details of the process.

I considered titling this article "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" or something to that effect. The prompt for this article comes from a question recently posed to me; What are some good small sided games for teaching zonal defending?  I knew what the questioner wanted to hear, but I also knew what she needed to hear. 

Let's set the background before diving head first into the question.  The high school program I began with has been playing zonal defense for a couple of decades. They were the zonal defending pioneers in our area.  Great attention to the details within the process were stressed in those early days of defending zonally. At a time when Pressure, Cover, Balance were stressed as the pillars of defending we focused on Pressure and Cover.  Balance was a consideration for sure, but not emphasized as strongly.  There was implied necessity for balance and a general understanding of what it entailed through nomenclature such as (hockey) Stick and Arrow (head) whose descriptive qualities included both cover and balance positioning.

Small sided games seek to isolate specific game situations with a phase of play and train players decision-making abilities within that context. To this day, most of the zonal defending exercises and small sided games focus on pressure and cover with an implied consideration for balance. I stress this because when a team is just learning to defend zonally the breakdowns occur in two generally areas. One is balance. The other is secondary or high cover. 

As an old basketball coach I realized early on many players of the 1990's were well versed in on-the-ball man to man defense and cover,but balance was somewhat nebulous at best.  I began teaching the basketball concepts of back to goal Ball / You / Man and Man-and-a-half defending to soccer players.  This served to address overall defensive team shape including balancing the shape. This allowed our teams to define with purpose what the roles were within our zonal defending scheme. We added a better defined structure to the nomenclature of stick and arrow. 

That's all fine and dandy, but how does a team set about training to play in such a manner?

First and foremost the coach must define the defensive system the team will employ.  This goes much further than simply saying "we are going to defend zonally" and introducing any of the regular staple of drills and exercises for zonal defending one can find in books or on videos / YouTube. 

1) Select the shape or formation you wish to defend in.  Four in the back or three in the back are common.  There is a bit of a trend developing to play 5 in the back and I have even seen some alignments utilizing 2 in the back. 

2) Where on the pitch do you want to win the ball.  This can be "geographic" location and involve establishing a line of confrontation or it can be position / player specific within a teams shape and specific player positioning.

3) Design a small-sided game that focuses on the area where and the timing of when you wish to regain possession of the ball. These conditions will differ when focus is on regaining position in your attacking third as opposed to the middle third of the field to the defending third of the field.

4) Although utilizing a small-sided approach be sure to incorporate emphasis on team wide play related to the moment in lay you are directly coaching.

For instance, if I were training the outside backs to pressure in our zonal system while defending in the final third, I would utilize a small sided game with a strong focus on opponent flank play.  When an outside back moves to pressure the ball carrier what do we specifically task him with doing?

1) Stop or delay the advance of the ball.
2) Make the ball carrier predictable by channeling or forcing him in a certain direction.

Our general rule of thumb for the outside back is to force the ball carrier inside towards the help waiting in the form of a center back in  (hockey) Stick! positioning. There is "Balance" implied with the correct position of a second center back and / or remaining outside back.

For most coaches, this is where the thought process stops.

There are other considerations. 

For instance, if the midfielder assigned to provide high cover to the inside and in front of the center back providing coverage is not in place, forcing the ball inside might be an extremely dangerous thing to do in allowing the ball carrier to "load up" for a shot while moving centrally toward goal or allowing for a cross to the back post. 

So, if high cover is not available, then the ball should be forced outside. This presents an entirely different set of circumstances that must be dealt with. A tactical decision must be made on how to support the pressure defender (outside back) to the outside.  The easiest solution is bring the nearest center back further outside to be available in support or to double team.  However, in doing so this will stretch the back line and open areas in front of the goal.  So, a second tactical decision must be made on who will drop back into the back line to fill the gap in front of the goal or on the backside.

A good small-sided game to train the outside back will cover all these situations and more. It is why small side games or situational training remains an effective way of teaching the game to players. While the primary focus is on training the outside backs, the secondary considerations pertaining to nearest teammates and the team at large are just as important.  The point is simply if a small-sided game viewed in a book or on video / YouTube or perhaps witnessed at a coaching convention or course is just rolled out there for the kids to play it will at best only be marginally effective.  It is all the other details of the process that hold the true value of using small-sided games to train decision making in specific game situations.