soccer

Mental Health

Anxiety When Playing Soccer

This article was written by Santiago Figueyra, Rush Soccer’s Mental Health Coach.

Soccer is an amazing sport that requires both physical and mental skills. But sometimes, the mental part can be challenging, especially when it comes to anxiety.

Many of you may have experienced that feeling of unease or nervousness before a big game, and that’s totally normal! It’s what we call “pre-game jitters.”

Pre-game jitters are the butterflies you feel in your stomach before the game. It’s a normal response to the excitement and anticipation of the game. It can even be helpful in boosting your energy and focus during the game. You might feel a little nervous or excited, but this feeling usually fades away as the game begins. Pre-game jitters are normal and don’t usually affect your game negatively. So, don’t worry too much about it. Instead, try to channel that energy into your performance.

However, there’s another kind of anxiety that can affect your game, and it’s called “performance anxiety.” Unlike pre-game jitters, performance anxiety can be a negative feeling that impacts your performance during the game. It’s sense as a persistent feeling of worry or nervousness that can make you doubt yourself, hesitate, or lose focus. You might worry about making mistakes, disappointing your team, or being judged by others.

So, how do you differentiate between the two? Pre-game jitters are usually temporary and fade away as the game begins. Performance anxiety, on the other hand, persists throughout the game and can affect your performance negatively.

Performance anxiety can be a challenge, but here’s a first approach that can help calm you down:

1-Find a quiet and comfortable place to sit or lie down

2-Close your eyes and take a deep breath through your nose.

3-Hold your breath for a few seconds

4-Exhale slowly through your mouth, letting go of any tension or stress

5-Repeat this process for a few minutes until you feel calm and relaxed

Remember, feeling anxious before a game is normal, but don’t let it affect your performance. It takes practice to stay positive so instead of focusing on mistakes or negative outcomes, focus on positive self-talk. Tell yourself that you can do it, and that mistakes are part of the learning process.

Taking care of your mental health is just as important as caring for your physical health so use the pre-game jitters to fuel your excitement and focus, and if you experience performance anxiety, take a deep breath and try the exercise above.

Soccer is a game, and games are meant to be fun! Don’t let anxiety get in the way of your enjoyment of the game. Keep practicing, keep playing, and keep loving the game!

Keep in mind the importance of sharing these feelings with your coaches, reaching out to our Rush Soccer Players Development department or contacting me at [email protected]

noviembre 14, 2024

Coaching

Diary Of A Season Coaching U9 & U11 Teams – Part IV

Este artículo fue escrito por Pablo Toledo, Director de Proyectos Deportivos de Rush Soccer.

So here we are in this part IV and last of these series of posts about coaching U9 and U11 teams, and it might be the most interesting part.

As we spoke before, we coach these teams at my club guiding ourselves by the topic charts of Rush’s Curriculum per age group / ability level (to the point that we highlighted that our U11 team is actually working with the U10 curriculum), and using the sessions from Rush Coaching Manual as an initial reference or a fountain of ideas, to then tweak them depending on the objectives we are pursuing in each session and our observations about player development.

Then, every 6-8 weeks we make a checkpoint in which using colors we assess the evolution of the players. Example below.

This is simple yet very important to stay focused on your role and objective as a coach. I’m in charge of teaching these topics to my players so the next coach can teach the following set of topics, that will require these, in many cases, as a foundation.

One of the things that we mentioned in the previous three parts of these series is that our players just came out of a recreational program, so all of these topics are new to them. Therefore, the first part of the season we are not constantly alternating topics but ‘going in chunks’, picking two or three and coaching just those for a few weeks, so as to build an initial foundation. As explained before, the newer the topic the more frequently you want to repeat it. Let me give you a simple example to clarify that: If you’re teaching kids to multiply for the first time, you wouldn’t want to give an amazing class about multiplying and then not cover the topic again for six months because your students would forget. Well, the same happens with coaching soccer. You don’t need to repeat the same thing for two months in a row, but maybe in a period of two or three weeks you want to make sure you repeat the topic (the topic, not necessarily the session) a couple of times to build that initial base of understanding. After that, you can start spacing the topic out in time.

Now, in our case, we are reaching the end of this initial period in which we wanted to build the bases over all of the chart’s topics, and we are ready to, after the Christmas break, start working with a more interleaved model (alternating topics). For that, we are going to use the season planner of the Rush Coaching Manual in two month cycles, so there’s checkpoints along the way.

I’m hoping, obviously, that at some point in time and over these checkpoints, I’ll feel like the U11 team is proficient enough in these topics to jump up to the U11 curriculum. That would be incredible progress for this team, but if they’re not ready that’s fine as well. Hopefully it will happen by next season.

Our last cycle, in that sense, was a short cycle to present the topics we were missing, adjusted to the time frame we had prior to the Christmas break. Here is how it looked.

Now, what I would like to share in this post is something interesting that happened in the last couple of sessions and that we all discuss frequently as coaches, that is the dilemma between opposed and unopposed training at these stages.

As you probably know if you’ve taken the Rush Way Certification courses, is that Rush seeks for 75% of opposed training in every session, so the most common misunderstanding is to think that Rush has a preference for opposed training, when it is not really about that. In my opinion, the fundamental aspect here is to be cognizant of the difference between ‘technique’ and ‘skill’, in which the second one means that ‘you’re effective at applying a technique in a game situation’, so if we make an agreement that we all want skillful players rather than technical players (without making a big deal out of semantics), we need training sessions in which game situations are present. In other words, how can you possibly develop a skill without a game situation if it’s saying by definition that it needs it?

Now, that doesn’t mean that unopposed training is purposeless. All we are saying, and the reason why we have that Blue Thread element of 75% opposed training, is that at some point you’re going to need to take that technique and put it in a game situation so it can turn into a skill, but that’s not a pejorative statement against unopposed training. Moreover, I’d be skeptical of the idea that ‘great players learnt it all playing with others on the street’ because they also used to spend a lot of time playing on their own, against the wall, the curve, juggling, etc. Now, given that in nowadays world training might be the only instance in which there are others to play with, I’d strongly support using a majority of it to try to turn the technique into skill in opposed environments, and then trying my best to increase time on task in days off.

Beyond that, I think we should all understand that opposed and unopposed training have pros and cons and are tools to an end. Opposed allows you to apply it in game-like situations favoring the development of skills, and unopposed allows you to work on the reps to correct technical mistakes, so at the end what’s really important is to try to escape from prescriptions. I’m constantly listening to people argue that ‘we only do opposed training because of this’ and/or ‘kids should start with unopposed training to then move onto opposed training’. I’m particularly against this last statement, which I consider overly linear and simplistic. Not everything goes from simple to complex or can be isolated and then sticked back together. I think everybody is just wrong when they make these statements simply because they are searching for a definitive statement. THERE IS NO FORMULA. It goes case by case, and I’ll give you a real example to justify that opinion: I have two players on the same team, let’s call them Johnny and Billy here. It happens that Johnny, who’s never done unopposed training in his life (in reference to formal training sessions), has a perfect passing and receiving technique. He might have just discovered that playing, so if I take Johnny to club “A’ in which they state that ‘players should start with unopposed training at these ages’, the club would be wasting Johnny’s time, because he can do that already, so instead he should be training to develop the skill, which is far from perfect. In simple words, he passes and receives perfectly, but he doesn’t always pass to the right place nor at the right time, and the same when it comes to receiving.

Now the opposite happens with Billy, who’s also never had unopposed training in his life, and although he’s been playing in predominantly opposed environments these first three months of the season, he hasn’t really discovered the technique to control and pass the ball and is struggling with it, so we’ve been coaching him during training to try to guide him towards that discovery, but at this point we don’t think it’s being effective. Then this is the time we want to separate the Billy’s from the Johnny’s, because they’re needing different training types. At the end, remember that your role as a coach and as a club is to accelerate learning, and that implies adjusting to the specific individual you’re coaching.

Let me exemplify all of this reflection with the dynamic we’ve been using in the last couple of sessions with these teams. Here’s the last one in fact:

We separated the groups, who train at the same time, per ability level in each particular skill instead of per age group.

The top level group trained passing and receiving in activities with opposition the entire time.

The lower level group worked with myself in correcting technical mistakes in unopposed activities.

Then in the second part of the session we put them all in a game-like situation, a simple 5v5 game in which they needed three passes to be allowed to score. Now, because we had three teams, we made 5 minute games, and the team waiting outside continued to train technical aspects with me while waiting.

Now here’s one of the cool things we did within this dynamic: Not all players doing technical drills with me outside were doing the same. As we mentioned before, the levels were different, so once again we were escaping the one size fits all / formula based model. Each team had, let’s say, two Johnny’s and two Billy’s as far as their ability level, so the lower level players were literally passing through a gate in two touches, and the higher level players started by doing the same in one touch, to then progress into an oriented control drill.

Here’s the dynamic exemplified in graphics.

This can be a very useful alternative to coach your players a bit more on a case by case basis, yet not the only one. There are many ways of applying similar dynamics.

Well then, you’ve reached the end of these posts. Hopefully, through them, we’ve been successfully at giving you real life examples of:

Why it matters to work with a curriculum, but not as a magical formula. Instead, using it as an initial reference to then adjust to your player needs.

How to organize season plans using pedagogical concepts.

How to assess progress.

How to modify sessions to adjust to your players and depending on your observations.

Reach out if we can help you further coach!

octubre 23, 2024

Coaching

Diary Of A Season Coaching U9 & U10 Teams – Part III

Este artículo fue escrito por Pablo Toledo, Director de Proyectos Deportivos de Rush Soccer.

As you know by now, this is a diary in which I’m simply sharing with you my current experience coaching a U9 and U11 group, in which both of them have just come out of our recreational program, and in which we have decided to work them both with the same U9-U10 curriculum (at least to start). Like I said in the previous post as well, I’d encourage you to read Part I y Part II of this series to get some context, not only to understand what we are doing, but also why we are doing it.

So here we are, one month into season, and I’ve shown you the first two 2-week training cycles we ran, in which we started by building foundational concepts for rules of the game, dribbling, and defending, and then we moved onto a second cycle in which the priority was to introduce passing and utilization of space while still keeping instances for ‘reminders’ and ‘assessments’ of the concepts practiced in the first training cycle.

From here, we thought it would make sense to progress in the next cycle with a focus on receiving the ball, as this is an obvious resulting action from passing, and shooting with the inside of the foot. Why? Because all of these technical gestures use the same surface. By practicing receiving and shooting with the inside of the foot, you’re indirectly practicing passing (at least on the technical side of it), just with a different coaching focus. To me, this is a good sneaky way of insisting with a topic without making it annoying for the player. I had a colleague that used to tell me that ‘I don’t normally talk about passing and shooting with the inside as techniques but instead I speak about kicking with the inside’ in reference to these two ultimately being the same thing. I’ve always found that funny because Cesar Luis ‘El Flaco’ Menotti, the legendary Argentinian coach, used to advise his strikers to keep their composure in 1v1 situations versus the keeper by realizing that ‘scoring is simply passing the ball to the net’.

Here is how our three week training cycle looked like.

In every session and every game of the cycle, we used similar conditions to slightly modify games, such as:

You need three passes to score
Goals with the inside of the foot count for two.
You can only score with the inside and teams have 10 seconds to get a shot on goal

These simple conditions gave us the very desired repetition in game based and opposed environments. Outside of this, all of our sessions had short and simple ‘technical’ activities to ‘clean up the technique when needed’. A lot of people fear using these activities, I think it relates to the message they got from their coaching courses when they first got into this job, and I think that’s wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing simple, unopposed activities. The question to me is for how long and most importantly what for.

At this stage, I use plenty of these activities when I know that they don’t know something (no fixing what’s not broken). What for? To paint a clear picture, to make it as obvious for the player as I can, so if (for example) I’m trying to teach a player to receive with their back foot to turn in one move, I’ll definitely make two lines, a simple pass, and tell the forward that ‘you have two touches, one to control and one to shoot’. 10 minutes, 15 max, and I know everybody got it, it’s clear as water that you need to open your body and receive with the back foot into space to set the shot. Then let’s throw them into the game based and opposed situation and see if they can do it there.

Now, what I wanted to share with you to wrap up this post is what we did after this cycle. Think about it, now we are seven weeks into season and we’ve covered many topics, yet not all of the ones we have listed in our curriculum chart (nothing wrong about that). This was when we decided it was time to put our foot on top of the ball and make a checkpoint. What do you think they’ve made progress on and what hasn’t really settled yet? So we took our curriculum topic chart and used a red-yellow-green criteria to assess and this is what we came up with.

Red for us are topics that we haven’t presented yet. Light red means we have presented them but not a lot of progress has been made, and yellows are those that have definitely improved even if far from perfect. No greens yet, we were not expecting them anyway, this is what we are hoping to master in two seasons, not seven weeks…

Based on this assessment, we decided to organize the following training cycle as a four week plan in which we’ll review all of the things we’ve already done while introducing the concepts we haven’t done at all in short blocks (remember when in previous posts I was explaining that when a concept is new we repeat almost in consecutive days and as we see behaviors settle we start spacing revisions out?), so that’s what you can see below.

My last comment in this post is that you can see on the table how as of this cycle we started separating the U9 session from the U11 session. Why? Because normally the older team seems to be evolving faster. They’re just older and more mature, so in some cases we think they might be able to do activities that are a bit more complex and cognitively demanding. In that sense, we are hoping that by the next season, they’ll have the foundations of this curriculum solid and we’ll be able to have them ‘catch up’ and start working with the curriculum made for their age group instead of one down.

I’ll let you know how it goes in one month, coach. Hope this gives you ideas!

octubre 17, 2024

Coaching

Diary Of A Season Coaching U9 & U10 Teams – Part II

Este artículo fue escrito por Pablo Toledo, Director de Proyectos Deportivos de Rush Soccer.

Ok, here comes part II. If you haven’t read Part I, I’d suggest doing so prior to reading this article so you can get a good context to frame the following ideas.

As I was explaining in part I, our goal with these two teams is not to use the season plans ‘as is’ because we are cognizant that we are needing to build some foundations. Everything is new for our players right now, so we want a couple of classes in a row (or almost in a row) about new topics to settle the idea, and then do the same with other topics, returning to the previous ones frequently, but basically spacing topics out more as we notice that behaviors start settling.

As you saw in the previous post, for the first two weeks we decided to focus on basic rules of the game, foundational defensive concepts and ball skills (running with the ball using different surfaces). After that, we did our first assessment and we concluded that defensive concepts were still far from solid so we organized the following two weeks with these goals:

Ensure defensive foundations.
Introduce the idea of passing the ball.
Encourage utilization of space (you’ve seen this, when they first come out of rec, they all just run after the ball as a big mass of players, so we want to start giving them notions about finding open space to receive).

And we came up with this two week training cycle:

Now let me tell you about the experience of running it. The first session, we actually decided to focus on basic coordination and agility skills in a competitive setting, to then let them play freely for about half of the session. The reasoning behind this was that the session took place after two weeks of introducing new concepts and the day after a big match, so we realized that the players (I should say these children) were just mentally tired and it was time to let them be for a day.

Agility and coordination are the two main physical valences I pursue in these ages until past puberty. In my opinion, this is instrumental to their development. We tend to do this twice a week for 5-10 minutes at the beginning of the session (it could be done at the end too), and to make it fun and competitive we separate them in teams and we play them as races.

In this Monday session, we decided to do it for longer and it worked well. Our reasoning behind it was that it required little thinking (no introductions of new concepts) so it would be a good fit.

The second session was great. That day, we play indoors in our club and I’m the only coach with both my groups simultaneously (about 18 players) so I’m always trying to find activities that keep everybody participating and engaged or it would get easily out of control. Then, my plan was to play 6v6 5’ games making three teams, winner stays on, for a bag of candy as the day trophy (great incentive at these stages LOL), but considering that I was pursuing to develop a specific topic (passing and spacing), I made a few tweaks on the game for the first 45 minutes. Here’s the field layout and rules of the game.

The line in the middle to use a rule of ‘flank players can’t cross to the other side when your team has the ball’ is one of my favorite tweaks at this stage. I literally call it out loud ‘FOUL!’ when somebody does. At the beginning the players hate it but after two or three sessions they get used to the idea really quickly, and you notice how they stop over sliding.

Now, let me tell you what my first mistake in this session was. The first rule (we play in three touches) to encourage passing was a bad idea. What the players started doing was not passing but actually shooting from almost midfield… So after 5-10 minutes I had to change and replace the rule for ‘your team needs three passes to be allowed to score’. Eureka, much much better. Now they were passing, which also led me to the opportunity of freezing it a few times to inquire what the players off the ball should be doing…

Answer: Find open space to receive

Me: Ok, great, and where’s that space now?

Answer: There, there, and there (pointing)

Me: Awesome, everybody show me, then, how you would do that.

Wonderful. I don’t want to make that a rule but personally, I do believe that at this age limiting touches is most frequently not the best alternative to get what you want.

Obviously, don’t use these things for the entire session. It will get old at some point and the players will be begging you to play with regular rules, but you can use it for the first 45 minutes let’s say, and then free it up. We repeated this session the following week (session five) when we played indoors again.

By the third session, here comes something interesting as far as planning, we decided to do a ‘Concepts Review’ session for defensive topics, so we focused on restating defensive concepts we had practiced within the first two weeks. ‘Nothing new’ was the rule, let’s reinforce the same. This is very interesting not in itself but because this was a prelude to the sixth session (the last one of the cycle) in which we decided to do a ‘Concepts Assessment’ session, in which we ran activities that required the application of the defensive concepts we had taught but our coaching behavior changed. In this case, we wouldn’t say anything and just observe to see if the players recalled the ideas by themselves and behaviors had changed. We were super happy with the result and pretty impressed about how much they already remembered and were doing on their own.

Now, here comes the most frequent mistake: Coaches, we see this and we think we are in good shape to just focus the rest of the season on other topics. No, unfortunately, they will start forgetting it. All it means at that moment is that they’re learning, but trust me you don’t want to scratch it off your list. Instead, add new reminders and checkpoints in the following training cycles but progressively increasing the spacing among them. We’ll practice these defensive topics again, but maybe now we’ll give it two weeks, and if it goes well and we still see the behaviors desired, next time we might give it three weeks or a full month. That’s what I mean by increasing the spacing.

Going back in time a little bit, let me tell you what session four was about. As said, we wanted to start introducing the idea of passing as well and we had done so at the second session when we played indoors but without the focus on technical execution or specific coaching points about the passing skill (we were trying to improve the usage of space, needed for effective passing), so now we had it in mind that we’d need to reinforce the idea of using the space and we wanted to pay close attention to the technical execution of those push passes (we limited to push passes in this cycle). Here is where I normally say that I like doing things the other way around. Most of the time I see coaches with this objective plan their sessions in stages in which they start with ‘technical work’ to then move onto ‘game-like – opposed environments’. I don’t think that’s always necessary, in fact, I rather start with a game-like scenario and check if the players are discovering the solutions or the techniques themselves. You know what I mean? Why fix something that I’m not even sure it’s broken? So we started with keep aways 3v3 + 2 Neutrals supporting the team on the ball with no specific rules. Diagram below (we started with two neutrals instead of one as shown).

Soon after I noticed that the level of success was very low, so we added a third neutral to play 3v3 + 3N. That made it a bit better. From here, I tried to encourage passing with progressive challenges. At the beginning, it was about ‘three passes to score a point’. Once they started scoring frequently, we said ‘now it’s five passes to score’. Now, the problem that after 10 minutes I was still having was that they wouldn’t spread out and utilize the space, so I had to tweak the activity and tried using one neutral inside and turning the other two neutrals into bumpers on the end lines (diagram modification below)

This helped a lot because it freed up some space inside and when I froze the exercise to ask about ‘where the open space is’ and ‘who’s the open player for us now’ it was easy for the players to point to the bumper on the opposite side.

Alright, I think that’s plenty for now. In part III I’ll show you how we run our first evaluation of progress and planned the following month based on it.

Hope it helps coach!

octubre 11, 2024

Coaching

Diary Of A Season Coaching U9 & U10 Teams – Part I

Este artículo fue escrito por Pablo Toledo, Director de Proyectos Deportivos de Rush Soccer.

After years coaching senior age groups, this year I decided to go back to coaching grassroots, so I took a U9 and a U11, both teams formed by players just coming out of our recreational program.

Alongside this new venture, I decided to start taking notes of the process. As a real study case, I’d like to share them with you, including the mistakes I’ve already made and the ones I’ll make along the season, but also hoping it will be a good source of ideas and it will also give an example of how to use and make the most out of the endless resources that Rush Soccer Development provides you with, so here we go:

As I said, my two teams are U9 and U11, and for both this is their first experience playing competitive soccer, so the first part (in my opinion of any process) was to assess o to diagnose (what they can do, and what they can’t do).

How did I do that assessment? Easy, just taking Rush Soccer Development’s Curriculum Topic Charts. Simple as that, look at the chart and check if they seem to be proficient at the items listed.

Example (for attacking topics):

Based on this initial assessment, I realized that both my teams were at the U9-U10 curriculum topics, and this is simple yet very important to stress: Just because you have a U11 team (or U12 or U13 or whatever age group) it doesn’t mean that’s the curriculum you should be teaching.

To define this was very important for planning and also for communication, because when I organized the first parents meeting, I explained to the parents that the objective is not to teach it all but to build learning blocks, and that along the year we would only be working on these particular topics.

Now that we had that flag on the ground telling us where to start, I was pretty tempted to use Rush Coaching Manual and define two automatic season plans for the teams and just follow them (my club is RSD+ so we have this awesome feature available), but I thought it would be too premature for that. Why? Because the progressions that we are showing you on our curriculum are a starting point. It is really on you to adjust these bases to the needs of your players using some important educational concepts. Let me explain that in further detail.

When you look at these plans, you’ll notice that topics are always alternated. Is that bad? Not at all, that’s a good thing, but there are also other ways or other tweaks that you can apply.

In the case of my teams, because so many of the topics were going to be new to the players, I decided to start the season organizing blocks of training in which new topics were going to be almost repeated to build an initial foundation of knowledge, and then once that’s settled (even if still very imperfect in its execution) we’d start alternating them, or in better words, spacing them out more in time.

The idea behind this is simple. Think about it like this: If this was the first time ever that you are learning to multiply, you could use a couple classes in a row to set the bases of it, right? Then, once you get those bases, even if you’re not the best at it, we can continue to practice multiplication but without necessarily doing it every single day. It would be really unlikely to learn to multiply if you have one class and then there’s a six month gap in which you don’t review the topic again. Well then, we are following the same idea here. What I envision is that we’ll use the season planner from the Rush Coaching Manual with fully alternated topics in the second part of the season, once we’ve managed to build some foundations (but we’ll see where we are as we go).

All of this said, this came out as our first training plan for both teams, only for two weeks and in which our priority is to teach foundational concepts of:

Rules of the game:
- Throw in
- Goalkicks
- Kick offs
Basic Defensive Concepts:
- Put pressure on the ball (body stance, don’t dive in, lead to a side, keep eyes on the ball).
- Block the shot when the opponent is on our box or nearby (step to the ball instead of retreating towards our goal)
Dribbling / Running with the ball using the Instep

As you can see in our plan, we used ⅔’s of the sessions for defensive concepts and we tried to ‘build a story’ from them, just alternating topics with some sessions for basic dribbling / running with the ball skills. What story? This one:

'When we don’t have the ball, we want to defend, which means trying to protect our goal. How do we do that? Putting pressure on the ball, which means to step up to the opponent that has it, and trying to lead them away from our goal, whether it is to the sideline or back on the field, and the closer they are to our goal, the more important it is to quickly step up to the ball and try to block that shot. Why? Because the closer we are to our goal the more likely it is they’ll score if they shoot’.

That’s it. Two weeks to try to set that base, and that’s fine. Now the question that I get a lot is if I run the sessions as shown. Truth is 90% of the time I don’t. In fact, you can see in the plan that we repeated the same week (three sessions) twice but on the field, we were making small tweaks to them. I’m always tweaking them based on what I see or to support the story that I’m trying to tell. That’s how I see training overall (and this is just an opinion), especially when people ask me about session structures, which I consider quite irrelevant in many cases (not in all). I think your session should be built about your narrative, on your teaching approach. The question is: What are you trying to teach? And how are you going to try to teach it? Based on those two answers I’d build my session, so for example, when I was trying to teach ‘blocking the shot in shooting range’, my approach was to start by having the players recognize dangerous spaces. In other words, I was planning for their mistake, I wanted to see shots not blocked in spaces where we should block, to make a stoppage to ask the players which they think the most dangerous places are. Once those spaces were recognized, my planned progression was to focus on the attitude of trying to block the shot by stepping to the ball, and hopefully if that went well, move forward onto a third step in which we’d focus on the specifics (the body stance, angle, etc) of how to try to block that shot.

Based on that plan or narrative for teaching the topic, I built a session, so in the second activity of the sesión I took as a base, I modified the setup extending the lines of the box to what I consider a ‘shooting range’, trying to create a visual reference of it. Why? Because when I ran the activity and the opponent started shooting from there, I made my stoppage and used this extended box to help the players recognize dangerous spaces. Once they understood that, I started coaching on the flow simply stating two questions:

Where’s the ball now?
What do we need to do?

To stress it even more, it reached a point in which for two minutes I asked the goalkeeper to step outside of the field and I had the defenders playing without one, also conditioning the attacking team to “you can only shoot inside the red box”, so as to create a sense of urgency for the defense to block the shot in that area. Truth be told is that from my plan, I never made it to the third step in which I was going to teach the specifics of how to block that shot. We spent the session just trying to get the attitude of blocking the shot there and recognizing dangerous spaces, and that was fine. We’ll take them there step by step, little by little.

Ok, this is already a lot for this first part. In Part II I’ll tell you what we did after these two weeks, what our assessment was, and what we planned for the following weeks as a result.

Hopefully you found this useful coach!

octubre 1, 2024

Padres

Entendiendo Qué Es El Efecto Relativo De La Edad (ERE)

Este artículo fue escrito por Pablo Toledo, Director de Proyectos Deportivos de Rush Soccer.

Así que, aparentemente, si has nacido en enero tienes más chances de convertirte en un futbolista profesional que si has nacido en diciembre.

Ok... Un momento... ¡Espera!... ¿¡QUÉ!?

Sí, sé que suena absurdo, pero esto es real, y lo juro: Este post no es sobre astrología. Este fenómeno se llama Efecto Relativo de la Edad (ERE), y está muy presente en el fútbol juvenil.

RAE (por su nombre en inglés), en palabras de Laura Finnegan (Laura trabaja para la Federación Irlandesa de Fútbol y es una de las líderes mundiales en esta investigación) “se refiere a una preferencia por seleccionar futbolistas nacidos a principios de año, a menudo debido a factores de maduración mejorados (ser más grandes, más rápidos, más fuertes físicamente pero también a menudo más maduros cognitiva y emocionalmente) que sus compañeros nacidos más tarde en el año”.

El problema que ERE expone es que hay una tendencia en el proceso selectivo para erróneamente relacionar mejor rendimiento con niveles de habilidad cuando, quizás, sea un resultado puramente de un componente madurativo.

Déjame darte un ejemplo para aclarar: imagina que Suzie y Jenny son jugadoras de Sub-9, pero Suzie nació en enero y Jenny en diciembre, por lo que Suzie es mucho mayor (en términos de madurez) que Jenny. Ahora tanto Suzie como Jenny intentan regatear a sus oponentes, pero Suzie parece ser mucho más efectiva. ¿Es porque Suzie es realmente mejor que las demás en el regate o porque es más rápida, más fuerte y más madura que ellas?

Y ahora, pensemos en lo siguiente: ¿Qué sucede a medida que envejecen y los niveles de madurez y estos niveles de ventajas "temporales"? ¿Qué pasa si Suzie fue elegida para el equipo y Jenny no, y ahora Suzie recibe todo el gran entrenamiento, mejor entrenamiento, mejor ambiente, etc., y Jenny no? Suzie podría terminar siendo la mejor jugadora en Sub-17, pero ¿era realmente más talentosa que Jenny en primer lugar o fue una falla en la selección que tuvo un impacto a largo plazo en su desarrollo? Aquí es donde reside el verdadero problema y la importancia de ERE.

En palabras de Laura: “Esto puede llevar a una visión sesgada del 'potencial', lo que lleva a que estos jugadores estén expuestos a más tiempo de juego, sean seleccionados para equipos de representación, reciban estándares más altos de entrenamiento y generen mayores oportunidades de entrenamiento. A menudo son estos factores físicos los que hacen que los jugadores (especialmente en la adolescencia) se destaquen, la resistencia significa que es el jugador más apto que todavía se ve que hace desafíos al final de los juegos, un jugador alto a menudo se destacará del resto".

Laura se adentró en su estudio y chequeó las estadísticas de jugadores representados por el mes de nacimiento en Irlanda. Debajo están sus conclusiones.

Los números son shockeantes. Un bebé de diciembre tiene 4.5 chances menos de jugar que uno nacido en enero del mismo año.

ERE es un problema en cada club y país del mundo, incluso en el nuestro, por lo que en Rush Soccer lo tomamos seriamente, intentando crear conciencia constantemente y proveer soluciones y alternativas a dicho problema. En el Webinar debajo, dialogué con Ben Wilbor, Director de Entrenadores de Chicago Rush North, acerca de sus conclusiones sobre ERE dentro de algunos de nuestros equipos.

"ERE es generalmente más común en atletas en edades de entre 11 y 15 años. Los jugadores que examiné para este estudio fueron los Regionales y Nacionales nacidos en 2006, 2007 y 2008, y seleccionados en la temporada 2020", explicó Ben.

Ben mostró una foto del equipo Sub 14 de Chicago Rush Select, en el que el 50% de la lista de 16 jugadores nacieron durante el primer trimestre del año de nacimiento (enero/marzo): “Si miras la apariencia física de algunos de los atletas es notable que los nacidos en enero, febrero y marzo son los jugadores más altos dentro del grupo. Entonces, concuerda con esa generalización de la ERE”.

CONCLUSIONES FUNDAMENTALES:

242 (43.2%) de los atletas nacieron en el primer trimestre: 119 de 279 (42.7%) de los varones y 123 de 281 (43.8%) en las mujeres nacieron entre enero y marzo.
138 (24.6%) de los atletas nacieron en el segundo trimestre.
109 (19.5%) de los atletas nacieron en el tercer trimestre.
71 (12.7%) de los atletas nacieron en el cuarto trimestre.

"Obviamente, si lo vemos a nivel general, los porcentajes del segundo, tercer y cuarto trimestre son considerablemente menores a los del primer trimestre, lo cual es consistente con la generalización de que los atletas relativamente mayores son comúnmente identificados como más talentosos", indicó Ben.

PT – "¿Qué podemos hacer como entrenadores, clubes y organización para ayudar a estos jugadores en forma individual?"

BW – “Una de mis primeras sugerencias sería estructurar las prácticas mixtas de dos edades dentro de los programas de cada club local. Otra solución sería adoptar un 'enfoque de edad cronológico flexible', esto significaría tratar a cada atleta como un individuo y señalar a los que se beneficiarían en el desarrollo de jugar con un equipo mayor o más joven. Además, dividir a los jugadores por diferencias de edad más pequeñas, por ejemplo, categorías de edad de tres o seis meses en lugar de 12 meses".

¿POR QUÉ, COMO PADRE O MADRE, NECESITO SER CONSCIENTE DE ERE?

Analizar el rendimiento de forma objetiva y mantener la vista a largo plazo. Ya sea porque nuestros hijos se desempeñan mejor o peor que sus compañeros, ¿podemos distinguir si la brecha se basa realmente en la capacidad?

Es importante recordar, junto con el fenómeno ERE, que la edad cronológica y la edad biológica pueden diferir hasta en cinco años entre los adolescentes pero, por supuesto, tienden a nivelarse a lo largo de los años, por lo que a veces solo necesitamos aprender a ser pacientes o cautelosos al sobreestimar la capacidad.

agosto 5, 2024

Rush Way

The Rush Way: Greetings & Acknowledgement

The Rush Way is the embodiment of all that is Rush Soccer; the rules and manner in which Rush members hold themselves and how they expect other Rush members toconduct themselves. This is not inherent in all people, but can be learned. The Rush Way encourages passion, leadership, respect and,above all, quality. All whorepresent the Rush are representing the Rush brand and tens of thousands of people throughout the country. The Rush stands for excellence, passion, desire, commitment and respect.

The Rush Way represents our culture, our values and our tradition. It defines who we are, and who we want to be. That is why we embrace it and seek to apply in all our clubs. Every detail, no matter how small, makes a difference. In the end, every culture is built up under a set of small details which it stands for and were it is defined.

Acknowledgement:
When a coach addresses a player during training or competition, it is important the player acknowledges. Communication is two-way.

Throughout the game, tensions, confusion, and many emotions arise, and it’s there, more than nowhere, were we have to stand together. To build that connection, we have to practice it every day, and in all scenarios. By acknowledging each other’s, we strengthen in bond and in communication.

Greeting:
Players are expected to greet the Staff with a handshake for all staff local, national and international. The Rush staff across the country expect their players to shake their coaches hand each time they meet. Why?…respect, build social skills, break down barriers, learn culturally accepted behavior, the list goes on.

It is not what happens, but how we deal with it. Somethings escape our control and let us with little space for choice. It might happen that someday you will be late for practice. But values come first. So first you greet the staff, and then rejoin the team

This is the Rush. This is the Rush Way.

junio 10, 2024

Coaching

The Power of Dreams

Coaches, would you like for your players to do more reps outside of practice & games?

Let’s face it, we know that answer.

It’s unquestionable that the proper physical training will take you far, but without a strong mindset, pieces can start to crumble much sooner than later.

Sports Psychology offers a mental developing playground to optimize our abilities, but our work can’t be measured the same way you measure speed, resistance, or force.

Mental conditioning is about trusting the process and believing that the tools you learn will help you even if the results take a different shape.

You’ve probably heard about breathing exercises to aid with concentration, focus, centering and much more. Visual exercises aid in a similar way – by training our mind to foresee scenarios and create actions, movements to prepare ourselves differently when the actual moment comes, i.e., reducing anxiety.

In the search of expanding our mental performance I met with Patrick Laine, Father of a young Miami Rush player, PhD scientist and founder of Dreamigos.

We had an interesting conversation about the power of dreams. Here’s a short script of our conversation:

Patrick: -A dream is a series of images, concepts, feelings, typically experienced spontaneously within the subconscious mind during specific sleep phases”-

Santiago: – “Do all of us dream?”

Patrick: – “Yes, we do. Even if we say we don’t or can’t recall our dreams, we do. It’s a way our brain has of processing stimulus. Actually, on average, humans engage in around two hours of dreaming per night (4-6 dreams per night), with each dream lasting roughly 5 to 20 minutes. Despite this timeframe, individuals often perceive their dreams as lasting much longer”-

Santiago: – “This is certainly another reason why resting well is so important”

Patrick: – “Of course. Sleep loss or poor sleep quality impairs athletic performance and limits recovery following injury. Also, our studies show that people can benefit by sharing their dreams, and actually athletes that share their dream have an edge.”

Santiago: – “How is that?”-

Patrick: – “Well number one would be that by getting players tuned into their dreams and sharing their dreams with teammates their empathy for those listening to their dreams increases – team bonding is enhanced; also when kids share dreams, their self-esteem increases; and in regards of visualizing when comparing athletes using mental imagery during lucid dreaming, their athletic performance is enhanced more than if they use mental imagery during an awake state; and finally they get extra sleep – think about it, many kids do not want to go to sleep on time, but if they can play soccer in their dreams – they will now look forward to sleep. The entire relationship with sleep transforms.

Santiago: – “Could we relate emotions with dreams?”

Patrick: “Lucid dreaming can reduce the emotional load on an athlete; the practical significance of lucid dreaming for sports is that the athlete has no need to fear mistakes or negative judgements of others in a lucid state. At the same time lucid dreaming can reduce that performance anxiety felt before a big game.

Santiago: – “That’s interesting. How could we cultivate an environment where dreams become another tool for mental performance development?”

Patrick: – “First ask your players about their dreams and listen when they share. Second, encourage them to record their dreams – we forget dreams quickly – a digital dream recorder that allows entries to be submitted in a variety of ways (verbal, typed or a photo of handwritten notes) makes it easy, and once dreams are recorded, they can be shared or saved and kept private. The foundation of a dream journaling app such as Dreamigos is that engaging in dream recording enhances dream recall. Furthermore, the more we talk about dreams and listen or read about others’ dreams, the more our brains will remember our own dreams. Dreams are stories from our subconscious. The more we tap into it, the more we learn about ourselves and our potential”.

At our Sports Psychology department we preach “know yourself to improve yourself”. How we value, perceive and understand ourselves impacts directly on our performance on the field. Dreams provide useful information that we might not always understand, but that means something specific to each of us.

Please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] if you’d like to know more about dreams and how to promote activities amongst your players.

In the end I guess our dreams do have powers.

mayo 24, 2024

Coaching

Atravesando las Pruebas - La Perspectiva de los Jugadores

As part of our Monthly Educational Campaign, Chris P. –VA Rush Developmental Director– hosted an amazing Webinar with several Rush Players, who gave their insights and shared their experiences throughout one of the most stressful stages of the season.

Cuando llega el comienzo de una temporada, las pruebas de jugadores son la parte más importante para futbolistas, padres, madres y entrenadores. Esto es obviamente un momento clave para las partes involucradas y quisimos ayudar.

Chris P., VA Rush Developmental Director, came up with an idea: ‘¿Por qué no dejamos que los jugadores nos digan cómo se sintieron y partir desde allí?', así que eso hicimos.

Queremos destacar a Chris P. y a los jugadores que participaron: Jorge de Georgia Rush, Baka de Kansas Rush, Wheeler, Isaac, Henry y Oscar de VA Rush!

Baka y el resto de los jugadores compartieron con nosotros que, en las pruebas, generalmente están entusiasmados por reunirse con sus compañeros y hacer nuevas amistades, pero la ansiedad y el estrés también juegan un rol clave: “En las pruebas de Rush Select, estaba muy nervioso porque había muchos grandes jugadores y el sistema de juego era muy diferente, después de que me metí y fui yo mismo pude disfrutar de la experiencia”, expresó Baka.

Los jugadores también destacaron el estrés post pruebas, ya que debían esperar para saber si finalmente habían sido seleccionados. El consejo de Isaac fue intentar mantenerse ocupado y desconectarse, mientras que Henry indicó que trató de no pensar demasiado en el proceso.

Así que les propusimos que nos dieran algunos consejos e/o ideas para mejorar el proceso, y esto es lo que sugirieron:

Las pruebas deberían durar tres días y no dos, para que los jugadores tengan más tiempo y chances de demostrar sus habilidades.
Asegurar que haya una conversación 'mano a mano' independientemente del resultado, para honrar la relación construida. "Yo quisiera hablar cara a cara para entender el razonamiento de las decisiones y saber en qué debemos trabajar", remarcó Henry.

mayo 6, 2024

Padres

Atravesando las Pruebas - La Perspectiva de los Padres y Madres

Continuing with our Monthly Educational Campaign around Tryouts, Chris P. -Rush Soccer Development Director- spoke with Rush Parents from Virginia Beach, Kansas and New Mexico. In this discussion, parents shared their feelings on how to survive and thrive through tryouts and how they can support their children.

Esta es la segunda parte de nuestra Campaña Mensual. Previamente, Chris P. organizó un fantástico Webinar con jugadores de Rush. ¡Haz click AQUÍ para ver y/o leer!

Podríamos decir que nosotros, como entrenadores, siempre nos centramos en nuestros jugadores, ya que son los protagonistas del juego. Durante las Pruebas queremos que puedan disfrutar y rendir de la mejor manera, sin perder la posibilidad de divertirse con sus compañeros y amigos. Pero muchas veces dejamos de lado a una parte fundamental del proceso: los padres y madres.

Mientras atravesamos el período de Pruebas de Jugadores nuevamente, quisimos escuchar qué tenían para decir los padres y madres de Rush sobre este proceso, cómo se las arreglan los niños y cómo mejorar la experiencia para todas las partes involucradas.

Chris P., Director de Desarrollo de Rush Soccer, tuvo una gran conversación con fantásticos padres y madres de Rush, en la que debatieron sobre las Pruebas y la posibilidad de mejorar el proceso para los niños, los padres y los entrenadores. ¡Mira a continuación!

Durante la discusión, los padres compartieron que experimentaron ansiedad y se sintieron incómodos porque no sabían en qué equipo estaría su hijo/a y quiénes integrarían el grupo de padres. Es por esto que Jenny Mick, de Kansas Rush, trató de mantenerse involucrada: "Me sentí muy ansiosa durante el proceso de las Pruebas, por lo que me ofrecí como voluntaria para el registro en las Pruebas de Kansas Rush; esto me ayudó a estar conectada".

“Tener conversaciones abiertas y honestas con entrenadores a lo largo del año es clave para una Prueba satisfactoria de cara a la temporada entrante", añadió Antonia Bynum, de Nuevo México. Antonia y Daylon explicaron que también modelan los comportamientos que pretenden de parte de los niños al mantener una mentalidad y actitud positivas.

Haciendo eco de lo que los jugadores de Rush le contaron a Chris P. durante el Webinar anterior, algunos padres sugirieron que los clubes deberían comunicar claramente a los padres si el niño estará en el mejor equipo o en otro, dando a los padres y madres la idea de en qué lugar se encuentra su hijo/a. James Mick de Kansas reflexionó 'a medida que los jugadores crecen, es clave para ellos saber dónde están parados y el orden jerárquico del equipo para que puedan sobrellevar el proceso'.

Chris P. recibió algunas ideas y sugerencias fantásticas, pero hay una que emergió por encima del resto: La comunicación es clave, al igual que la consistencia en las devoluciones y la continuidad de las relaciones, para que haya transparencia de ambos lados.

Los padres y madres continuaron compartiendo sus recuerdos favoritos de Rush hacia el final de la conversación y surgieron fantásticos momentos. ¡Nos encantaría oír de parte de otros padres sus ideas sobre qué podemos hacer para mejorar las Pruebas de Jugadores y también sus mejores momentos!

mayo 6, 2024