Beginning to Mid Season

First few weeks practice we found ourselves shivering from the cold more than actually concentrating on practice, Coaches included. During our practices we concentrated solely on foot skills, ladders, cross overs right foot only dribbling, left foot dribbling, then move on to passing. Left foot right foot, I find it curious that so many players at the age level I Coach at seem to lack confidence in their abilities. I wonder why this is?

During practice, I keep reminding my team that they can do what we show them, they just need repetition to perfect it, I even told them by the end of our season they will be performing some of the skills and they won't even know it. So far this has held true, about 60% of the team is already using about 3-4 of the skills in each practice and game. This is all that matters to me, for them to get better each week, use what we learn in practice, that is a victory in my mind, and well of course, keep coming back out each season to play a great game is also important to me.

Each week we start practice the same, warm up, then dribbling skills, then passing, the off to some fun games, even the games we play build their confidence in the skills we are learning in the first part of practice. I used to make the first part of practice, skills and fun games then the second half we would scrimmage. I found that the scrimmages were becoming counter productive, the players were not using their newly learned skills, it was more race up the field and see if they can score on the Coach! I have found if you keep the players moving, they don't ask for scrimmages and if you keep it fun, they get upset when you tell them practice is over!

All in all, to me a very successful start!