The Game within the Game

Coaches, We Need Your Help to ‘Raise the Level!’

Please take 10-15 minutes to complete this survey, and we will match the results with the hundreds of thousands of quantitative assessment results already gathered to better understand how:

1 – Technical skills correlate to in-game performance.
2 – Individual achievement has impacted player motivation

As a way of saying thank you, complete by Dec. 1 and you will automatically be entered into a drawing to win a $100 Gift Certificate from Eurosport.

Thanks in advance for your willingness to help us make iSoccer as effective a motivational and player evaluation tool as possible!

Full Article:
http://www.ourgamemagazine.com/?p=1459

By Scott Leber, iSoccer.org – This fall, thousands and thousands of hours are going to be spent training to improve a young player’s technical ability. And a great question to ask is, “Are we making the best use of that time?” Across the country, players are getting a lot of touches on the ball – however, they may not be training at the speed or the sharpness that is required in games.

Coaches often ask players to dribble in a box or allow players to have less than perfect touches. But in a game, we are not dribbling in a box and the ball turns over every time there is a lazy or poor touch. When we don’t provide enough pressure, a time constraint, or a space constraint, we may not be challenging our players to develop the proper tools to solve the problems that the game demands.

Therefore, as much as possible, we need to train in game-like setting when working on our individual skills.

So how do we do it?

First, we have to ask the player to be deliberate with every single touch. Try and isolate a specific skill or skills to leave no room for interpretation – the coach and player knows exactly what is being asked to perform and players can really see where their weaknesses are. If the first touch has to be with the outside of the right foot and at a forward angle, demand it. If you want the pass to hit the right foot, demand that type of accuracy. If you want a quick outside right touch and then an inside right foot touch past the defender after the scissor, demand it.

Next, we can limit the time they have to do the skill and keep score. When placing a time constraint and a score to a skill, we are requiring players to perform the skills at their absolute maximum speed for that time period. You will be amazed when the work rate jumps 15 to 20 percent! Players will consistently want to beat their old scores while wanting to compare themselves with their teammates. Building a healthy sense of competition in practice can be motivating and fun for all the players.

Finally, when you add deliberate training + time constraint + score keeping, we are applying the best pressure we can to an individual player – the pressure to be better than yourself. Players can now set their own goals and see their own improvement. Individual achievement in a team setting can be very powerful. The strongest and weakest players on the team can score and improve at their own rate without being dependent on anyone else.

So let’s make the most of this fall! Be deliberate with every touch. Perform the skill at game speed. And always push yourself to improve your score!

Scott Leber is the Founder and CEO of iSoccer.org. iSoccer was founded in 2008 with a single objective: How to motivate players to train harder and increase their technical ability. Check out iSoccer.org to learn more about the iSoccer skills test, tracking tools and age group technical standards.

Nadeshiko Japan! A word unknown to the soccer world outside of Japan, Nadeshiko is the name used for the Japanese women’s national team. It means beautiful flower.

Nadeshiko Japan made lots of noise by knocking off host Germany, 1-0, to reach the semifinals, and the team will make history if can beat Sweden on Wednesday and reach the final. You can’t find many people inside Japan these days that are not following their beloved Nadeshiko, which is led by Homare Sawa, the team captain who is scored a hat trick against New Zealand during the qualifying round. Sawa is perhaps the best known Japanese player, having played in five World Cups and three Olympics.

Japan’s current team has been together since the Beijing Olympics, where it finished fourth. And while Japan has a long history in women’s soccer, it has not enjoyed success like this summer’s until recently. Japan formed its women’s national league in 1989, which helped the national team qualify for the first World Cup in China in 1991, and it has qualified for every World Cup. Japan had only advanced out of the group stage once before this summer, when it lost to the United States, 4-0, in the quarterfinals.

In fact, Japan won only one game in its first three trips to the World Cup, but several years ago the Japanese Football Association decided to get more serious about women’s soccer. The J.F.A.’s Captain’s Mission mandate set in motion a better network for identifying players, along with better coaching and the involvement of former national team players. Of note, all though more women coaches have become involved with the game, there is still only one in the country who holds the SQ License, which is the equivalent to the A License given out by U.S. Soccer. She is Midori Honda, who served as Japan’s captain at the first World Cup and was the first woman to pass the difficult exam and receive the license. Honda is currently an assistant coach for Japan’s under-20 team.

Still, not a lot of money or resources are put into the women’s game. Compared with some of the world’s powerhouse programs such as America or Germany, the difference is staggering. I have conducted thousands of soccer clinics for over 500,000 kids over the past 20 years and over all the number of girls playing the game has remained flat. So the pool from which to select players is still very small. However, the organization for identifying and the emphasis on training technical skills at a very young age has been the difference. So although the number of players has neither increased or decreased over the years, better resources and training methods have produced better results.

The woman have the same set up for national training centers as the men. There are 47 regions and each has a training center program. These are not facilities in the physical sense, rather the name of the program. They meet monthly to provide specialized training for select players, and that training culminates in a national camp in December that brings together the best 15-year-olds in the country.

Soccer is a year-round sport where players play 365 days a year, men or women. You can not help but produce good, technically sound players if the content and emphasis is on technical skills.

This is what is happening in Japan.

Tom Byer, the former director of Coerver Coaching Asia, was born in the Bronx. He has lived in Japan for more than 25 years, where he is known as Tom-san, and has conducted more than 2,000 soccer events for more than 500,000 children. He also appears on a nationally televised, daily show for children.