2023

Parents

Understanding What The Relative Age Effect Is (RAE)

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

So apparently if you were born in January you have more chances of becoming a professional player than if you were born in December.

Ok…..Wait…. Hold on!…….. WHAT?!!

Yes, I know it sounds absurd but this is a real thing, and I promise to you: This post is not about astrology. This phenomenon is called Relative Age Effect (RAE), and is very present in youth soccer.

RAE, in Laura Finnegan’s words (Laura works for the Irish Football Federation and is one of the world leads in this research) “refers to a preference for selecting footballers born earlier in the year, often due to enhanced maturation factors (being bigger, faster, stronger physically but also are often more cognitively and emotionally mature) over their teammates born later in the year”.

The problem that RAE is exposing is that there is a tendency in the selective process to wrongly relate higher performance with ability levels when it might actually result purely from a maturity component.

Let me give you an example to clarify: Imagine that Suzie and Jenny are both U9 players, but Suzie was born in January and Jenny in December, so Suzie is a lot older (in terms of maturity) than Jenny. Now both Suzie and Jenny try to dribble past their opponents, but Suzie seems to be a lot more effective. Is it because Suzie is truly better than the others at dribbling or because she’s faster, stronger, and more mature than them?

And now, let’s think about the following: What happens as they get older and the maturity levels and these ‘temporary’ advantages level? What happens if Suzie got picked to the team and Jenny didn’t, and now Suzie gets all the great training, better coaching, best environment, etc, and Jenny doesn’t? Suzie might end up being the better player at U17 but was she really more talented than Jenny in the first place or was it a flaw in selection that had a long term impact in their development? This is where the real issue and importance of RAE resides.

In Laura’s words: “This can lead to a biased view of ‘potential’, which leads to these players being exposed to more game-time, getting selected for representational squads, receiving higher standards of coaching and leading to greater training opportunities. It’s often these physical factors that make players (especially in their early teens) stand out, stamina means it’s the fittest player still being seen to make challenges late on in games, a tall player will often stand out from the rest”.

Laura went further in this study and checked the stats of represented players by birth month in Ireland. Below are her findings.

The numbers are shocking. A poor baby from December has 4.5 less chances of playing than his counterpart from January.

RAE is an issue in every club and country in the world, including ours, so at Rush Soccer, we take it seriously, trying to constantly create awareness and provide solutions and alternatives to this problem. In the webinar below, I discuss with Ben Wilbor, Chicago Rush’s North Director Of Coaching, his findings of (RAE) within some of our programming.

“RAE is generally most common in athletes between ages 11 and 15. The players I examined for this particular study were the Regional and the National born in 2006, 2007 and 2008, and selected in the 2020 season”, Ben explains.

Ben also shows a picture of the Chicago Rush U14 Select team, in which 50% of the 16-player roster were born during the first quarter of the birth year (January/March): “If you look at the physical appearance of some of the athletes it’s notable that the ones born in January, February and March are the taller players within the group. So, it does go with that generalization of the RAE”.

KEY FINDINGS

242 (43.2%) of athletes born in Q1: 119 of 279 (42.7%) of male athletes born in Q1 and 123 of 281 (43.8%) of female athletes born in Q1.
138 (24.6%) of athletes born in Q2.
109 (19.5%) of athletes born in Q3.
71 (12.7%) of athletes born in Q4.

“Obviously, if we look at it as a whole, the percentages from Q3, Q2, and Q4 are considerably lower than the numbers in Q1, which is consistent with the generalization that the relatively older athletes are commonly identified as more talented”, Ben stated.

PT – “What can we do as coaches, as clubs, as an organization to help these individual players?”

BW – “So, one of my first suggestions would be to structure bio-banded practices within your local club programs. Another solution would be adopting a ‘Flexible Chronological Age Approach‘, this would mean treating each athlete as an individual and pinpoint the ones that would developmentally benefit from playing with an older or younger team. Also, split players by smaller age gaps, for example three or six month age categories as opposed to 12 months”.

WHY, AS A PARENT, I NEED TO BE MINDFUL OF RAE?

To analyze performance objectively and keep our sight in the long run. Whether it is because our children perform better or worse than their peers, can we distinguish if the gap is really ability based?

It is important to remember, alongside the RAE phenomenon, that chronological age and biological age can differ by as much as five years among teenagers but of course tend to level over the years, so sometimes we just need to learn to be patient, or cautious about overestimating ability.

August 5, 2024

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

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

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