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News  ·  Parents  ·  Players
Strategies To Make The Most Out Of The Holiday Break

This article was written by Pablo Toledo, Rush Soccer’s Sporting Project Director.

I’ve mentioned this before: When we think of high performance, we normally place most of our attention into the training aspect. The tendency with training is to think that the more the better, and that’s something to beware of. ‘You got up today and trained hard, well you gotta get up tomorrow and train even harder, son, and if you did 20 today, well tomorrow you gotta get 25’… and it’s not really like that. I call it ‘the Rocky Balboa fallacy’.

Please don’t read this as an extreme, nothing is black or white. Training is definitely a key aspect and if you want to accomplish something within a sport or athletic discipline, you’ll need to train really hard, be driven and consistent, but you should also allow time and be mindful of the importance of resting (physically and mentally). Training is one of the cornerstones of performance, but the other two edges of the performance triangle are Nutrition and Rest.

I don’t mean to sidetrack but I do feel obligated to put this in context and make an important distinction: If we are talking about pre puberty players, these little fellas recover very very quickly, so I personally (this is purely my opinion) do not promote ‘forced’ or ‘planned’ rest, I don’t think they need them, they can play as much as they want to. Please note that I used the word PLAY, not TRAIN. I get that question a lot from parents: “My 10 years old son/daughter really likes soccer and wants to be as good as he/she can possibly be, how many times a week do you think he/she should train?”. The answer I give is always the same: “He/she trains enough, now Play, no limit, as much as he/she wants to, the more he/she wants to play the better!”.

A friend of mine says “kids don’t get tired of playing, they get bored of working, and if you don’t believe me try calling them to dinner when they’re playing, they beg you for another minute! But it doesn’t really go the same way when they’re doing homework, does it?”.

This matters because one of the main problems we have in the US Soccer landscape is early desertion of players from the sport because they burn out (we burn them out, parents and coaches, to be transparent and to take responsibility for it).

All of this introduction serves to offer a foundation for the following comment:

Sometimes, the best thing you can do during the holiday break, is leave the soccer aside for a second. Maybe don’t force the break from it, but also don’t push for it’s continuity.

That doesn’t mean we should focus on eating cookies and sitting on a couch for fifteen days to watch Christmas movies and completely lose our shape, it means we can take the opportunity to ease the mind and still be strategic and smart about staying fit.

In the post Holiday Performance Plates we already shared with you some cool tips about how, from a nutritional standpoint, you can enjoy the holidays without getting too much out of line on your diet.

Something important to consider, apart from the aforementioned benefit of resting the mind, is that this period can also be an opportunity to recover from injuries and pains that result from overuse. In soccer, just like in any other sport or athletic discipline, there are sporting specific movements that repeat and predominant muscle groups and joints that support these. In ours, it is obvious that the lower body muscles and joints are predominant and overloaded by the nature of the sport, so it’s more frequent to suffer injuries, or pains in our ankles or knees, or severe soreness in our hamstrings, quadriceps, calves, among others. That’s why a lot of professional players, during the off season periods, start by taking a full break to let the body recover, and then they cross train.

We’ve seen players like Antoine Griezmann or Sergio Ramos play basketball, or Carlos Tevez and Gareth Bale play golf, or Paolo Maldini play tennis, etc. Even if you could say that some of these are also heavily based on the lower body, this can still be beneficial because the specificity of the movements vary across sports, and also because the mind continues to rest.  Cross training can be smart. A very good idea is to swim, for example, but if you choose to plan around this idea of cross training, I’d personally suggest making sure you’re not pushing for a discipline that the athlete does not enjoy. That would defeat the purpose of easing the mind.

I really hope you find a couple useful tips in this article. We wish you the best in these holidays. Enjoy!

December 26, 2023

Coaching  ·  News
What Is The Rush Way 6-3-1 Philosophy And Why It Matters

This post was written by Pablo Toledo, Rush Soccer’s Sporting Project Director.

There are phrases that we continuously repeat as grassroots / youth coaches. Two that I hear constantly are:

  • It is very different to coach youth than to coach adults / performance stages.
  • Our job is to develop players, not to win games.

Both statements are correct and relate to each other. However, it is my impression that a large population of coaches actually can’t really explain or visualize the difference and the impact of such fundamental cornerstones.

It is very different to coach youth than to coach adults / performance stages. Ok, but how? And why?

Beyond the obvious biological factors, I think the answer is already suggested in the statement. It is very different because we have different objectives! If you were working with a professional team, the objective is to win, but if you’re working with a youth team, the objective is to develop players, and that has deep consequences in the way you organize and prioritize things. In the post  Do We Want To Perform Or To Learn? Is There A Difference?, we deepen in the difference between performance and learning and offer parents some tips on how a club that aims to develop players behaves in comparison to a club that’s geared towards simply trying to win on Saturday.

Once again, I think we all repeat this and it seems obvious, but many struggle to actually perceive concrete differences in how training and club dynamics are approached based on it. Let me ask you some questions below to exemplify. Try to answer them by thinking “What would I do if winning on Saturday is the goal, and what would I do if developing players is the goal?”.

  • How would you manage playing time?
  • What’s your job as the coach during a game? What are you there for as the coach or what should you focus your attention on?
  • What league level should my team play?
  • Should I allow players to play up?

As said before, your responses to these questions and consequently (and hopefully) the way you apply these in your local environment mark the difference between a club that aims to develop players and a club that’s geared towards performance.

Let’s go one by one now:

Playing time:

  • Winning Focus: Play the best player.
  • Development Focus: Equal playing time along the season.

The coach’s role during games:

  • Winning Focus: Purely to help my team win the game.
  • Development Focus: To help the team while observing if learning from topics trained is taking place in competition.

League level:

  • Winning Focus: The one in which we can challenge for the title.
  • Development Focus: The one that provides the right level of challenge for the players.

Playing Up:

  • Winning Focus: No, we need our best players to win on Saturday.
  • Development Focus: Play up, the player comes first, even if that’s detrimental to the team. We need to place him/her in the environment that will make him/her grow the most and the fastest.

Now you see, to say that we are here to develop players has deep implications in how we coach and the decisions that we make. The problem typically comes from thinking that this is developing vs winning when it’s actually not. It would be ridiculous to expect or encourage a player to not focus on winning or try to ‘ease their competitiveness’. Players are competitive, and we like that, in fact we encourage them to be and we see it as a key psychological trait of a Rush player, we want them to always want to win! But as a coach or a director it is on you to look at the big picture and make decisions that go beyond the immediate result. Games are purely another learning instance in your week. A test in which we should try to identify if the topics trained are transferring to the real game. Is the player getting better? In your rondo 5v2 on Tuesday he/she was doing it really right, but is he/she being able to do it in the real game? That simple question can guide your thinking. In other words, if the players are developing, if they’re improving. The more they improve, the more they’ll win naturally. Winning, just like losing and tying, should sustain a balance as we’ll explain later.

Let me tell you one more thing if you’re still not convinced about this:

Gonzalo ‘Pipita’ Higuain is one of the most successful strikers of the last decade, he has been named to the Serie A Team of the Year three times, UEFA Europa League Squad of the Season twice and Juventus Player of the Year twice. He also holds the record for most goals scored in a single Serie A season with 36, among many, many other trophies and individual awards. Now, do you know how many leagues he won during his teenage years as a youth player of River Plate? None.

Do you know how many leagues Messi, or Ronaldo, or Neymar, or Mbappe won growing up? You probably don’t know. Neither do I, and you know why both you and I and most people don’t know it? Because it doesn’t matter. The world is full of youth soccer champions that never broke into the pros.

I frequently exemplify the topic with this almost absurd, extreme example. I ask coaches to picture themselves working at Real Madrid and talking to Carlo Ancelotti, the head coach, who’s in need of a center back and wants to give first priority to a player from ‘la cantera’ (the youth divisions), so you as the head of youth development send an 18 year old player to practice with Carlo and the first team on Wednesday. Carlo comes back furious at you after training, openly yelling that the center back you sent is, as a footballer, pretty much a disgrace. Carlo goes: “This guy was a disaster, he missed 90% of the passes playing out of the back, all he does on the ball is boot it forward and hope for the best! He’ll never play professionally like that!”, to what you respond: “Carlo, what happens is that he grew up playing on a team that we thought was not as technical as others, but we had a very fast forward, an early developer, now he’s not that fast anymore in comparison to others, so from 13 to 17 we had that team fold back and play long as soon as possible, we knew that eventually the fast forward was going to score one like that, but Carlo, hey, this guy’s team won the league at U14, 15’s, and 16’s!”.

Does it sound and look familiar to what we frequently see at the fields on Saturday? That’s how ridiculous youth divisions can be.

Rush Soccer is a club that aims to develop players and so The Rush Way 6-3-1 philosophy is one of the tools we use to ensure and measure this. ‘6-3-1’ represents a target record for our teams over a sample of 10 games: 6 wins, 3 losses, and 1 tie, so if you’re wondering right now if we want our players to lose, the answer is yes, but don’t misunderstand it please. We would never encourage our players to lose, nor start scoring ‘own goals’ because we’ve been winning too much (to state what should be obvious). The value of the 6-3-1 philosophy, in my opinion, relies over three factors:

  • The 6-3-1 philosophy offers a benchmark of the level of competition. It is fundamental to understand, as a coach, that if your team has lost 9 out of the last 10 games, you have a problem. Now, if you’ve won 9 out of the last 10 games, you also have a big problem because the level of challenge is too low. We need to find stronger competition.
  • It places the focus in the long run. If there’s one obstacle we need to sort out as youth coaches (and frequently parents) is our own ego. This is not about us, it’s about helping the players develop and succeed. We are part of a 12 years process in which all of us, the coaching staff, need to work together for the success of these players. When one of them strives at the end of the road, we all win.
  • It highlights the importance of experiencing the joy of winning as well as the sadness of losing. These experiences are important to develop growth mindsets!

A few years ago I got together with Tim Schulz, the President of Rush Soccer and the person that conceptualized the 6-3-1 philosophy. In the podcast below, he expresses his opinion on the 6-3-1 philosophy.

“I think it’s what a youth coach should try to accomplish. 70 games aligned with the 6-3-1 philosophy. Now, coaches think ‘how do i do it? My team is bad and I’m struggling to help them win’ and the answer is go search for lower level competition, have them play against a recreational team if that gets them a win under their belts, and vice versa, if you’ve just won 10 games in a row I’ll think you’re not really good coach either, find stronger competition, these kids need to be challenged and learn how to lose”.

Tim Schulz.

Do you apply the 6-3-1 in your club and team? Do you actively assess and measure team records?

December 11, 2023

Coaching  ·  News  ·  Rush Way
The Rush Way: 11v11 Scrimmage To Train “Up A Goal, Down A Goal”

Reaching the final moments of a match can be a team’s relief… or its worst nightmare. Whether winning or losing by a goal, there are aspects of the game that are essential to face the last minutes and succeed.

As you know, it is part of the Rush curriculum to coach our players on adopting different behaviors when the game is coming to its end and the team is up a goal or down a goal.

The Rush Way considers it a virtue of its players to recognize and use the ‘moods of the game’ in their team’s favor. Adapting our game to the current score to either maximize our team chances to come back (when losing) or preventing the opponent from getting in rhythm (when winning) is a skill that can be learned.

Find the ‘Up A Goal, Down A Goal’ Guide with Coaching Points on The Rush Coaching Manual, where you can also check the following activity, with specific tactics and strategies that your team can apply when either up or down a goal and reaching the final 10 minutes of the game:

ORGANIZATION & DESCRIPTION

First segment is open 11v11 game, at 10 min. Team A is down a goal to Team B. The next 10 min. constitute the end of a game. After 10 min. teams reverse roles. These 10 min. also constitute the end of a game. Coach over play and stop if necessary. After those initial 20 minutes, make a water break and discuss.

The following two 10 minute halves mimic the same of the first stage, with Team A starting down a goal, and then in the second half up a goal, but now the coach is on sidelines and there’s limited coaching. Add referee if possible. After this 20 minutes, we make another short water break and we discuss with the teams.

The last 20 minutes of the session are played normal, with a referee. Coaching is purely on the flow and limited. As the teams score and time passes by, encourage players to readjust as a team depending on their situation.

DOS WHEN WINNING

Tip #1: Always sustain a +1 situation in the back. This does not necessarily mean defending next to the goalkeeper but making sure we are outnumbering the opponent in dangerous spaces.

Tip #2: It’s an obvious statement, but we want to keep possession, preferably in the opponent’s half. 

Tip #3: If you lose the ball far from your goal, try to kill the counter right away. If the counterpress works, that’s great. If it doesn’t, consider a tactical foul.

DON’TS WHEN WINNING

Tip #1: Rushing set pieces, such as throw ins, corners, goal kicks, free kicks, etc, will allow the rival getting in a direct, fast rhythm that may decide the match. When killing the game, you need an organized defense, that prevents quick kicks, and protects dangerous spaces. Safety first.

DOS WHEN LOSING

Tip #1: Mentality is key, it is imperative that you stay focused. The opponent will do everything in its power to disrupt your rhythm. Stay in tune with the game. All you can do is control the controllable – yourself.

Tip #2: Adjust system but carefully: You don’t want to be down in numbers for the rival’s counter. Consider the risk of modifying the +1 in the back to equal numbers.

Tip #3: Play the Offside Trap. DO NOT underestimate this item, strikers aren’t always as aware as you think. This can be the solution. The GK becomes almost a sweeper.

DON’TS WHEN LOSING

Tip #1: First, desperation will not take you anywhere good. Remember to stay focus on the mission: scoring, that’s all that matters.

Tip #2: Your team will take some extra risks like we mentioned above, but careful, you don’t want the search of a goal into securing your team’s defeat.

November 3, 2023

News  ·  Parents
Parents: How Does A Good Training Session Look Like?

I’ll speak openly and transparently about this topic. One of Rush Soccer’s core values is Empathy. 

When it comes to soccer, it should take little effort to empathize with a parent. We know you love your kids, and we know your involvement is driven by it, by the desire of ensuring your child’s sporting experience is as good as it can be. Now, and I mean this with all due respect, that doesn’t necessarily mean you know how a good learning environment looks like. 

There’s nothing wrong with that. Again, a bit of empathy suffices. Maybe you are a lawyer, or an electrician, or a real estate agent, and maybe you didn’t even play soccer growing up. In fact, sometimes the parents that did grow up playing soccer are the ones with the most misunderstandings about how a good learning environment looks like and what they should be looking for when assessing a training session. “I didn’t know that to be a good horseman you needed to be a horse first” replied the legendary Italian coach Arrigo Sacchi when a journalist inquired if his far from remarkable playing career could be an obstacle for his coaching one. It is very different to be a coach than to be a player. Very, very different, and the fact that we work with children adds another hundred layers of complexity. 

Please don’t think this post is geared towards a reflection on parents’ sideline behavior. Far from it, what we actually want is to protect you because there are times in which business eats it all and the drive to make money intoxicates the honor in the duty.

Let’s start with a little experiment: If you had to pick one of the two following passing sessions for your child to be a part of, which one would you choose? 

Disclaimer: This is our opinion based on our developmental philosophies and beliefs and by no means we intend to disrespect any colleagues with a different approach. Moreover, we are not implying that any of the activities presented are wrong or mistaken as these are presented without an encompassing context. 

Option 1:

Option 2:

I would go with the second one, hands down, and I’ll explain why in a minute. 

Did you pick the first one? Don’t feel bad about it, so do a lot of people. You know why? Because it looks pretty and organized. So controlled. So clean. There’s success. And in the second one (if we actually applied it in a real session) there would be so many mistakes, it would look so chaotic. There would be a lot of failures, and it would look so basic. Hardly any cone, any equipment, nothing. But you should remember that soccer is naturally a pretty chaotic sport, especially at these early stages, and that the sport is pretty basic (two teams, two goals, one ball, delimited space, period).

How does the game look when you see it during the weekends? Like what we see on TV or a bit more like this?

So now let’s rethink the session that we would pick by asking ourselves which one seems to replicate the game best.

That’s where the key is. In the first session, there’s ‘technical work’, and there’s nothing wrong about it (it can be useful if well applied within a specific need), but it can also be irrelevant if there’s no transference to skill. 

Let me explain that further. 

‘Skill’ means that a technique can be applied effectively within a game situation. Then, purely using common sense, wouldn’t it be impossible to learn to apply a technique within a game situation if the session itself doesn’t present the game situation?  

The second session, in that sense, is pretty realistic. The only thing that altered the game was to remove the goals. Why? So the players focus on passing instead of shooting, but the rest is there: Teammates, opponents, space, ball. 

So here you have a couple good tips as far as what to look for on a training session:

  • Enjoyment: The most basic and important aspect, when observing a session for children, is to think: Is it FUN? Is this enjoyable? Please remember that playing is the work of children (Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori).
  • Realistic: Does it look like the game of soccer you observe on the weekend?
  • Safety: Is my child comfortable and feeling safe in the environment to explore the game? This goes beyond the session itself.
  • Is it dynamic? Are the players constantly playing or is it slow, interrupted, and full of wait periods?
  • Are they making decisions? Independently of that decision being right or wrong.

If these are there, you’re off a good start.

Here you have some red flags (don’t take them as black and white rules please, of course):

  • An excessive number of cones.
  • An excessive number of teams in different colors.
  • Excessive lines that lead to long waiting periods.
  • No smiles.

October 18, 2023

News  ·  Parents
How Can I Help From The Sideline?

This article was writte n by Pablo Toledo, Rush Soccer’s Sporting Project Director.

The Rush Way, for all three participants of a game, states the following about sideline behavior:

Coaches’ Sideline Behavior

From the outside, the conduct of the coach on the sideline can be perceived as a reflection of the conduct of all coaches within Rush Soccer. Coaches are a reflection of their players and should conduct themselves with respect for the officials, the opponents, and the game of soccer. Remain positive when at all possible but motivational throughout. Coach actively but don’t misunderstand that with constant narrating and interventions. Actively means engaged. Education and being a first class role model are the paramount reasons that a coach has been given the honor to coach for Rush. It is always important to remember this.

Parents’ Sideline Behavior

Rush parents are expected to be positive, motivational and supportive to all players and officials. Learning the Rush chants is encouraged. Parents are expected not to coach from the sidelines but enjoy the experience of the game.

Players’ Sideline Behavior

Players are encouraged to support other Rush teams and give their full-hearted support. Learn the Rush songs; be as loud but respectful as possible and help educate the rest of the country in the way soccer should be supported, as it is in the rest of the world.

I wanted to include the three paragraphs here because all three of them mention important aspects. Beyond the obvious goal of encouraging all parties to be role models of education, I think it matters to differentiate that from being quiet. We said it before, quoting Jorge Valdano, isn’t football just an excuse to be happy? Then chant, cheer, celebrate! What makes football the most beautiful and popular sport in the world is people’s emotions and passion. As a player, it is no different. To remember those games in which the supporters couldn’t stay seated and every play was cheered and clapped are memories that stay with you forever.

Now, on the other hand, we shouldn’t confuse that with coaching. A rookie yet very common mistake that we coach the coaches on is to avoid making comments to the player on the ball. The reason is simple, soccer is a game in which situations tend to be chaotic and solutions are multiple, so when we tell the player on the ball to do something or to look for something, we are making at least three mistakes. One is assuming that our solution is better than what the player might have already thought. Two is that we add confusion, because now the player hesitates between his/her own thoughts and following instructions from an authority figure, and three that we are trying to solve the problem for them when the overall objective of coaching is that they learn to solve those problems autonomously. If you add now a parent as well yelling at the player another different idea, we are truly confusing the player, who in addition to analyzing the situation and trying to decide what the best solution is in seconds, now he/she is also hesitating which of the two authoritative figures he/she should obey.

That’s why we ask families to support the players vividly but avoid coaching from the sidelines. It is not even a matter of thinking that ‘the coach knows best’. Soccer is a game in which, quoting 1978 World Cup Champion coach Cesar Luis Menotti, there are very few absolute truths but definitely a lot of evident lies. What the phrase means is that there are many ways of doing certain things and frequently picking one or the other is purely a context specific choice, a decision, an agreement.

Let me give you an example that is seen very frequently on the fields.  The coach might have chosen to lower the pressing approach to mid or low block and communicate that to the players. That means that the team will let the opponent have the ball in certain areas close to their goal and start pressing aggressively once they cross a certain spatial reference of the field (can be the top of the center circle, or midfield line, or bottom of the circle, among others). The opponent plays out of the back and the center backs dribble the ball for seconds, our forwards wait. The audience misinterprets this with passiveness from our forwards that seem to not be making the effort to win the ball back, so the word “pressure” starts being yelled at them. Now the forwards don’t know who to obey. Does it sound familiar? This ‘coaching’ wasn’t directed to the player on the ball but was still damaging.

These are just some of the many reasons why it is better to avoid coaching from the sideline and leave that to the coach, who has the responsibility of educating himself/herself to learn to do this effectively to favor one objective: Accelerating the learning process.

When we spoke to Richard Shorter from Non-Perfect Dad about Performance Environments, he referred to the need of uniting all parties to create an environment in which there’s safety but not necessarily certainty to encourage creative exploration. The full webinar below for anybody interested.

“If we are going to get genuine unity, we need to create a safe space where everybody feels like we have an identity, and in which we are willing to explore the new together.”

Richard Shorter.

Moreover, we truly encourage you to laugh and enjoy the experience. Watching our kids play sports is a remarkably beautiful thing, don’t let it turn into stress.

In the article about developing growth mindsets, you’ll also learn why praising the effort is way more beneficial than praising the ability.

October 9, 2023

News
Can I Coach To Win The Game While Still Focusing On Development?

This article was written by Pablo Toledo, Rush Soccer’s Sporting Project Director.

I normally tell our Head of Content that it is not necessary to add my name on fragments that I’ve written. I do that for two basic reasons: The first one is that I don’t want people to think that the Rush Way is ultimately ‘Pablo’s way’. I didn’t come up with it, I learnt it. The second reason is that I really don’t care about the credit. I’m pretty good at managing my own ego, and among many flaws I do think that’s one of the best qualities I have as a coach.

I break my own rule in this post because the opposite happens: This is Pablo’s Way, not the Rush Way, and I mean to be honest about that because there is absolutely no science behind what I’m about to say, I did not learn it from anybody but simply came from self reflection, and I’m pretty sure there are better ways to do it, but this is mine and maybe by sharing it I can trigger some good thoughts on you.

The role of the coach in youth soccer is to facilitate environments that accelerate learning. That’s a statement. That’s why we talk about development in coaching and not so much about performance. That’s why we have a 6-3-1 philosophy, and that’s why another two million things.

Now, what I frequently see and I also experienced as a novice coach, was a conflict between the idea of developing and the idea of winning (or trying to win, because it’s not really a choice). When I first started, even if this embarrasses me now, I just wanted to win and all of my decisions were secretly based on that. I’d say appropriate things in terms of development but my actions were not always congruent with them.

When I realized that I felt hypocritical and that I was really missing the ball, so I evolved into a sort of Himalayan coaching monk, and all I was focusing on was learning aspects, not caring about results, whether positive or negative.

There were some good improvements over that period, in which I learned to be more methodical in my observation, less reactive in my coaching, more rational, more thoughtful and purposeful, but over the years I realized that was also wrong. I was still missing the ball.

When I observe others coach, a large percentage of the time I think they are also going through one of those two phases.

What I realized over the years (it is important to put in the following context: I’ve been primarily coaching U16+ boys for years now), is that I needed to care about winning, because my players cared about it. I need to honor their desire to win the game and they need to feel that I care about it to sustain a top coach-player relationship. I needed to bring my emotions back, but control them, use them wisely. As you get close to performance stages, players will love you for the human aspects of the relationship but those relationships are firstly built on knowledge. Your players build the relationship with you over the foundation that they feel that they can learn from you and you can help them win, otherwise you would just be a great guy/gal to them but they would probably prefer somebody else to coach them.

Once again, this might be very different for younger age groups as we get further from performance stages. I’m saying this in the context of my current U17 Boys MLS Reserve team, so the reference is specific.

All of this said and this personal journey covered, I started wondering how I could coach a game in a methodical way and balancing both aspects instead of constantly battling them and placing them as opposites when they’re not. That way, I came up with this very, very simple approach that has been very effective to me.

The approach is simple and it organizes my coaching during the game to remain focused, purposeful, and avoid randomness and constant reactive behavior.

The game starts and I observe our performance for at least 10 minutes. If I feel like the competition is even or we are better than the opponent and there are no major problems, I immediately switch my attention to favoring learning. What I mean by that is that I place my focus on aspects that we’ve been training and trying to improve. Let’s say it’s been playing out of the back. There we go then, all I focus on is how we are doing there, reinforce concepts, praise when we do it right, etc. If we make a mistake on the attacking third, I don’t care, that’s not the topic today. If see it repeatedly, I’ll just write it down to work on it in the future, but I don’t allow myself to get wrapped up on it, avoiding randomness. This sounds basic (and it is) but can be very useful, because in most games you will see fifty million mistakes (and virtues).

On the contrary, if within those 10 minutes of assessing performance I conclude we are having problems, it is my job to fix it. I can’t focus straight on learning unless it’s directly correlated. Imagine that learning today refers to bouncing the ball on the striker to attack the goal and we are having major issues defending on the flanks or with our pressing approach. The players would look at me like saying “coach, what are you talking about? Do you not see that?”. Again, I can’t focus on learning without first honoring their desire to win the game and putting them in a good spot to do so. And trust me, as you start training good older players, they know football and what they’re talking about. If you say something stupid twice or you miss a couple big problems that are obvious to them, you lose the group because that initial foundation breaks. So the approach is simple in that way, focus on fixing the problem, take some actions, observe again and then question yourself the same initial question: “Are we better than them?”. If the answer is yes, you know what to do, and if the answer is no, keep your focus on fixing the problem.

I’ll wrap this up with an initial comment. This is not scientifically proven but purely an approach I’ve developed through experience. Far from rocket science (does it need to be anyway?), but if you ask me that question: “Can you try to win the game while focusing on developing players?” I’d say absolutely yes, and this is how, at least I, do it.

April 25, 2023

Goalkeeping  ·  News
Coaching The Individual Goalkeeper

This article was written by Sean Connors, Rush Soccer’s Global Goalkeeping Director.

“T.E.A.M. – Together Everyone Achieves More!”.

“There is no I in Team!”.

However, there is only one player on the field for each team that can use their hands.

Everyone can recognize that the goalkeeper position is unique to the game of soccer. The uniform is different. The equipment is different. Clearly the rules are different, and what it takes to be successful in the position is different to that of every other player on the field.

To be the best goalkeeper coach you have to balance the individual needs of each goalkeeper on a team, or the individual needs within a training group. There is no “one size fits all” approach that will give you as much success as being aware that each goalkeeper is different and needs to be treated as such.

Recently I had the chance to speak with Goalkeeping Director Mike Kappas from Virginia Rush, and Goalkeeping Director Matt Stueckle from Washington Rush where we spoke about this exact situation.

“Making an individual connection starts when the GKs arrive at training. Taking time to greet each GK, handshake/fist bump, and checking in to see how they are doing. How is school? How is your family? How were your games this weekend?”.

Mike Kappas – GK Director at Virginia Rush.

These individual meetings allow Mike to get a read on how they are doing at that exact moment and gaige what they need from the training session. Learning the needs of the player encompasses both emotional and physical needs. Maybe the GK did poorly at school, or took a bit of an injury from the weekend.

Coaches must make these types of connections to best know how to meet the needs of their players.

“Within a training session the coach must be aware of individual struggles. It might be with a certain technique, or making a save from a particular position on the field. What if during the session the GK is in the same position over and over again trying to get reps to improve but the ball keeps going in the net? The risk is it can reach a point where mentally it is crushing the player making them think they are terrible and can’t stop the ball”.

Matt Stueckle – GK Director at Washington Rush.

In these cases what can a coach do?

Coach to the individual! Try to change how you are teaching them. Can you demonstrate the technique differently? Can you change the language used? Have a fellow GK try to explain it to them. In some cases the GK needs to be pushed further and can handle being challenged. Other GKs will need to move on from the situation and come back to it at another time.

Get to know the Goalkeepers and work to teach them at their level! The better you can address each individual the more success they will have.

March 29, 2023

News  ·  Rush Way
Rush Way: Player First, Team Second

This article was written by Pablo Toledo, Rush Soccer’s Sporting Project Director.

We have spoken about this before, clubs almost always declare that their goal is to develop players. Now, in my experience, that doesn’t normally make it far from beautiful words and sentences full of coaching education cliches. Maybe I’m pessimistic and/or overcritical. Moreover, I think most of the time clubs and coaches can’t even express in pragmatic terms and actions how a club would specifically behave and operate in certain areas if that is the true objective pursued (I must be pessimistic…).

We, the Rush, do know, and that’s a statement we can stand behind. Our Rush Way Player First, Team Second philosophy is one of those areas that specifically guides the way we operate towards prioritizing in player development. Read below:

PLAYER FIRST, TEAM SECOND

Similar to the European youth club structure, Rush encourages the player to be first before his or her individual team. For example, we encourage:

  • The player to play with the adult team before his own team’s game.
  • The player to train with older, experienced teams in place of his own teams.
  • The player to guest play with an older team in place of their own game.
  • The player to attend national team events, college showcases, international tours, select events.

This enables players to be comfortable playing on teams that are in line with their ability regardless of age but based on performance in training and game days. Players are encouraged to train with higher level teams to accelerate their development.

– “But Pablo, don’t take away my best player, we are fighting for the league”.

– I don’t care.

Have you ever self reflected on how you and your club would operate in the following areas if the objective and the priority is truly to develop players? I think you’ll find the following graph interesting. Enjoy.

March 14, 2023

News
USC 2023 – Design & Development Of A Club’s Sporting Project.

This article was written by Pablo Toledo, Rush’s Sporting Project Director.

When I was proudly invited to present at the USC Convention 2022, the first thing I told the audience was that I had no formula as far as how to design and develop a successful sporting project for their clubs, and that all I was going to do was share what I did and what I’m still doing for my club, Rush Soccer, which has very particular characteristics, given our size, geographical distribution, and type of club that integrates our network. Solutions are always tailored to the specific problem that you face. There are concepts and methods but hardly ever we get to apply any of these exactly by the book. No secret sauces in life, nor in coaching, I guess.

One year later, framed by the 2023 United Soccer Coaches Convention, I’m meeting with the leaders of over 50 Rush clubs and I can tell you that my feelings are of pride and enthusiasm as I insinuate to the audience that ‘today, you won’t hear anything from me that you haven’t heard before, this is more of an update about the progress that we’ve made in our project and the progress that we’ll make in 2023‘

The objective of my department and the sporting project we lead can be simply summarized as ‘unite and improve’. Unite our clubs under the same culture and methodological approach, and improve the way we develop players, and to do that the first step, as obvious as it sounds, is to be really sure of who you are and what you want. You need to find the essence of your club, the non negotiables, and then do the very hard exercise of not only formalizing it in a fancy document or a statement on a website, but to ensure these instrumental aspects of your culture and approach are present in everything that you do, and that implies the way we behave, the way we play, what we teach, how we teach it, etc.

Let me give you an example: In our club, we consider competitiveness a key characteristic of our organization. We like to compete, we want to compete, and we want to nurture that competitiveness in our players. Therefore, when we designed our curriculum and/or we run coaching education courses, we mandate our coaches to make every single training activity a competition in which (per definition) has to be a way of winning and a way of losing.

This might look like a simple detail, but a culture is actually not a lot more than the sum of hundreds of little details that are shared, valued, and respected by a group of people, so it matters to us.

Defining and sharing these layers in our culture and our player development approach is what I’ve been calling ‘Stage 1‘ of the project. Stage 2 was about finding ways to implement them in the 100+ Rush clubs in the world. This is an equally challenging stage that resulted in the creation of several services that we are providing our clubs (Mental Health, Video Analysis, among others) and the development of tools to learn and implement this culture and player development approach locally.

Among these last, we managed to develop a tool that we call Rush Coaching Manual (a white label product of The Coaching Manual) in which we designed every session and activity of our curriculum in detail, gave access to every Rush coach in the world, and developed a feature that allows coaches and clubs to create fully Rush customized season plans for their teams.

Another tool was our Train @ Home Program, which supplements on the field training with follow along video sessions in ball skills, passing, receiving, and fitness, among others, in pursuance of increasing our players weekly hours on the ball.

Now here is where you could think “easy, I get Coaching Manual for everybody in my club and a Techne subscription for my players and problem solved, I caught up already” but you haven’t. All you did was provide a service, but where’s the imprint from your club? Techne teaches Techne Way, not The Rush Way. We care about integrating each of these programs with our culture and approach in specific ways, so for example when including in Train @ Home a certain skill for any age group / ability level, we explained it and demonstrated it in the same way we added it to the training session that coaches are reading and delivering to those groups, so it’s aligned not only in topics but also in language.

A third tool that is of vital importance for our organization is what we call RSD University This is an online learning platform in which, apart from other courses we provide for players, parents, and coaches, we developed our own coaching education certification pathway, which we made mandatory for our coaching staff globally.

This was a foundational step for our club as it related to what we consider Stage 3 of the project, that is about finding ways to Assess and Develop Our Clubs & Coaches. In other words, knowing what you want and developing the layers of it and even the tools to implement it loses it’s purpose if you don’t have a system with checks and balances, in which you can assess what’s done right and wrong by your clubs and assist towards progressing, as well as highlighting the top performers. This might sound obvious but when we stated the objective of the project we phrased Unite and Improve, not do and use whatever you want and hopefully improve.

This is the stage where we are now, Assessing & Developing, in which as I mentioned before the RSD University marks the first step of progress as we have the capacity and are already tracking the percentages of Rush Way certifications in each of our clubs, with the goal and requisite of reaching 75% of Rush Way LII certifications and sustaining that minimal in each club at all times.

The statuses of this request are currently tracked and soon to be publicly posted to our network, ranking the clubs per its performance and giving awards and penalties based on it. This is the path for progress for us and the type of setting and indicators we defined for other areas that affect player development and cultural representation, as well as facilitate the long term measurement of player production.

Several of our current projects relate to this development of mechanisms to assess and develop our clubs, including the formation of a pool of ‘Club Technical Directors’, the figure that we use to refer to a team of highly experienced professionals with the capacity to conduct purposeful visits to our clubs, run assessments, and correlate these last with developmental periods.

To build a global, real-time dashboard in which we transparently reflect the performances of our clubs in these areas is the pinnacle of the project.

This, at Rush Soccer, is the engine for progress.

Give me one more year coach, and I’ll give you another update. Thanks for reading.

Watch full presentation!

February 10, 2023

Coaching  ·  News
Tryouts:”Should we just split them up and play?”

This article was written by Pablo Toledo, Rush Soccer’s Sporting Project Director.

Over the years I’ve seen two sorts of tryouts. The first one had a battery of irrelevant training activities and the second one was the ‘let’s split up and play because ultimately I want to see what you’re capable of doing in the real game’.
I’m personally quite against the first one and until a few years ago, to be fairly honest, I would have been a strong supporter of the second type, but now I’ve realized that there is a third option that actually works best, but first things first, it is worth mentioning that a common mistake in tryouts is that we observe but we don’t know what we are looking for. This needs to be put in context. Which is the developmental stage we are looking at? Everything you need to consider, in that sense, is straightforwardly expressed in Rush’s Development Blueprint.

Now let’s imagine that I’m running tryouts for a U9-12 segment. What am I looking for? Skill. Do I actually care too much about the tactical understanding of the player? Not really, if it’s there I’ll think that is great, but it is not a priority to me. In other words, I would way rather find a tactically deficient U11 that has great skills than the opposite.  

Then, if I want to assess skills, I’ll definitely need to play a real 7v7 or 9v9 game and observe that, as there is only one fully realistic situation that is the game itself, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use other activities in brief intervals to ‘get a quick glance’ at more specific areas, so in this case and to over simplify the approach, I would want to know as soon as I can who’s good at Dribbling, Passing, Receiving, Shooting, Heading (if possible, second priority), and 1v1 Defending. How can I accomplish that? Simply running some short activities and finishing with a scrimmage. Here’s an example of a tryouts session I’ll be running.

Bantam Division: 2-3 Touches 3v3 + 2 Neutrals Keep Away

In 30 x 20 fields play 3v3 + 2 Neutrals keep aways in 2-3 touches max (adjust depending on the level of the players: the less touches, the more complicated). Teams can score by completing 10 passes. 
This simple keep away, played for 15 minutes, might be all you need to quickly perceive who’s good at Passing and Receiving. Plus, you might get to recognize who has a basic understanding already of utilizing space.

Bantam Division: Finishing 1v0, 1v1, 2v1

This is another extremely simple activity you can run for 15 minutes. These repetitions of 1v0, 1v1, and 2v1 situations will quickly allow you to get an idea about who is good at Finishing, Dribbling, and 1v1 Defending. Place three parallel cones close to the center circle and line players up in three teams, having the first line in one color and the other two in a different one. This is a finishing activity in double roles.

The first line starts by going to goal 1v0 (you can add a condition or a line to have them shoot from outside the box, for example). As soon as that player shoots, he turns around to become a defender. Then, the player in the second line goes 1v1 against this defender. Once he/she finishes, the second player becomes a supporting attacker for the player in the third line, and the first player continues to defend one more ball.

Bantam Division: Attacking – 4v4 + GK’s Scrimmage (Or 7v7 or 9v9)

Now that you have a base idea of the skills you are looking for, make them play a scrimmage and try to check if your initial observations were accurate. If you followed the session so far, you’ll probably have 45 minutes to play so you can always use simple conditions to create more repetitions of the skill you are trying to ‘double check’.

Example:

  • You need five passes to score or teams can also score goals by making 5-10 passes (Passing & Receiving)
  • Everybody plays man to man marks for 5 minutes (Can help observing defending behaviors, dribbling, and receiving)
  • Teams need to shoot to goal every 10 seconds max (Finishing). 
  • You need to dribble at least one opponent to be allowed to score (Dribbling).

These are just some of the many conditions you could use. 

Tip for observing: Do it alone during the session. Don’t assess players with another coach, in fact try to stay away and not observe one another, so your analysis remains objective and is not influenced by someone else’s thoughts. After the session, get together and discuss what you’ve seen. 

Hope this helps, Coach! Good luck on tryouts! Go Rush!

May 3, 2022

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Winter 2021/22

Week 12

Description
Lessons
Description
This drill is designed to help you improve your ball control. This is a great drill to help you develop the ball control that will enable you to cut and change direction quickly. Goal: When you reach the point of being able to do whatever you want with the ball; you will have more fun playing the game.
Lessons