The weekend got off to a great start with the U4 team. I wanted early on in this game to work with some of our players on staying more focused on the game, to extend the amount of time that they stay really engaged. It's something you can only build on incrementally, I just want to be sure I'm always paying attention myself to where each kid is in this process. So, I told the team at one point that the ancient kung-fu secret of great soccer was to never take your eyes off the ball. One of my repeated themes with every team is that if you use your eyes to really see what's going on your brain will know what to do, so keep your eyes on the ball. Well it usually works but Dakota was a hilarious exception to that in this game. In the third quarter he was about five yards out from our goal when a player on the other team got possession and started to move toward Dakota to get to the goal. Dakota had his eyes on the ball. So firmly on the ball that in order to continue to have a good look at it as the other kid approached Dakota made a little step to one side to make a path for the kid, all the while keeping his head down and eyes focused on the ball. He dutifully watched it all the way into the net. I said "hey, Dakota?" and kind of held up my hands in a "what was that" gesture. The look on his face made it clear that he was actually expecting my approval since he had really, really kept his eyes on the ball! Later on he nearly had a goal and he probably had his best game yet in terms of being actively engaged, even as he took moments out here and there to talk to me about his dogs at home.
And that's how it is with the little ones. They're in the game then they're out of it and you just take what you can get and let them feel their way, slowly building experience on experience. When they are anxiously talking to me about other things, like what they'll be doing later in the day, I don't necessarily consider that distracting. Often when the little kids are functioning at a really high level, like their caffeine and sugar are balanced just right (you know the feeling), they can focus on more than one thing at once or just bounce easily in and out of being focused on different things. I'd always rather have them like that than in a mood where they just want to shut down and nothing shuts them down faster than pushing them at the wrong time. Patience.
It was a really good game overall with lots of good skill in play from both teams. Diego and Will managed goals and so did Caroline. Isabelle didn't manage a goal but she certainly did manage to get in the right position a couple of times, breaking out of the pack to cross to the goal when her teammates were pushing the ball to a corner. Excellent instincts there. Her brother Samuel was like that at the start too and I expect that before long she'll be the same sort of goal-hunting ball hog. I love ball hogs!
The U6 teams had strangely opposite sorts of games. The Lions played first and they were just weirdly out of it the whole game. Chris and I couldn't make sense of it and after the first quarter we backed-off on trying to motivate them to play harder. Sometimes when they are playing tentatively you know you can motivate them to get into the game and get past their hesitancy but in this game it just felt like they weren't going to be talked out of it so we just let them play. Ava and William were all in and they played with great energy but everyone else seemed clearly to be saving their energy for something else. Oh well.
The Bats, on the other hand, were full of energy and they played with a lot of discipline too. By "playing with discipline" in this case I mean that most of the Bats were playing with good awareness of where they were on the field and where their teammates were. We still had plenty of incidences where they got into each others way but they are improving as a team. Ava sets the standard in this regard. She hasn't developed the slashing/penetrating style of play that you see from Ashley, Haley and Maddox (and now Luke E. too), where they just crash into the crowd to take the ball to goal, but Ava has always had the best sense of the field and how to use/play in it of any of the kids in this group. Anticipation comes to her naturally and you saw that Saturday in a couple of instances where she dashed out of the midfield into the goal box because she could see that things were developing in a certain way. She was anticipating that the ball might come loose in the middle and she ran in to take advantage. She didn't get the goal she was working for, missing on one shot just a bit to the right.
Late in the game I tried setting some of the other players up to play on only one half of the field, hoping that that would help them to start to see the field the way Ava does. I think it did help and I saw signs of better off-the-ball play. I don't generally like to talk to them about playing a position. Rather I talk to them about getting in the habit of looking around and knowing where the ball is and where their teammates are. I won't discourage kids from going aggressively after the ball but I do try to get them to start thinking about where the ball is and where they are and to ask themselves "is running to the ball the best thing to do here?" Some things, like dribbling technique, I can teach them, but getting the feel for the field space and how to use it/play in it is a problem they sort of have to solve on their own. I'll try again next week to get them to keep working on this.
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