Audio lesson:
Player development can be broken into 5 major components:
- The structured club training influence.
- The household/parent/family influence.
- The playing on your own influence.
- The pickup game influence.
- The personal training influence.
Each of these is a piece to the full player development puzzle.
This program chiefly targets the areas you control.
The biggest dose pertains to “playing on your own”, as the activities you’ll see later are mostly solo in nature.
But this program also critically touches the household influence and the personal training influence, since you as a parent and/or trainer will be giving direction and mentorship to your player regarding not only the activities, but crucially from a philosophy and cultural perspective.
In one form or another, you are regularly transmitting to your player your vision of the game, plus influencing decisions in navigating the landscape.
All this forms the crucial foundation of a player.
A foundation which, if properly nurtured, will translate well to the team environment.
That said, let’s expand a bit as it’s important to recognize the role each of the 5 components play.
1) Structured Club Training
This is where team-specific training is, and should be, the principal focus. Remember, football is a team game, it is not a player’s game. It is not tennis, golf, boxing, or swimming – to name a few. No. Football is highly collective, not individual.
As such, you shouldn’t rely on your team training sessions to build your individual technical skills.
Those skills are going to come from countless hours of work away from your structured team training sessions. How many hours depends on how far you’d like to progress in your soccer career.
But one thing is certain, having a club team focus on “technical skills” is not going to progress a player. And here’s 3 big reasons:
(a) All the players on your team will be getting that “technical training”. Meaning, if your goal is to progress up the ladder within your own team, this won’t be a differentiator.
(b) The amount of time a team meets per week isn’t enough to develop the array of techniques required to differentiate oneself.
(c) Focussing on technical training in the team setting, takes time away from developing a player for the team game. Meanwhile, players on other teams locally, regionally, nationally, internationally are receiving and developing their team skills. And that will cost your player dearly in the future.
The vast majority of technical training must be done outside Structured Club Training.
2) Household/parent/family
Of course, parents (and brothers/sisters/aunts/uncles/etc) play an enormous role in player development. There’s a ton of things parents can do at home to properly guide a player when it comes to soccer.
In this program, parents can see examples of proper technical training and what type of work we recommend, plus be exposed to lessons that help continue to develop an eye and a feel for the game. The better one’s eye and feel, the better one can help nurture the player. To say nothing of cultural components.
This component should not be taken lightly. It is crucial.
3) Playing on your own
Yes, this is a principal reason many find themselves in this program. What activities should my player be doing? Now you’ll have a library of training videos that we’ve developed for a player to mimic, and eventually, have it translate to ever-increasing efficacy on the field.
While any time one spends playing on their own is good, what activities one specifically does during that time is crucially important and makes all the difference.
For example, suppose:
- Player A spends 100 hours learning juggling tricks that will never be used in a game.
- Player B spends 100 hours developing receiving across the body, or a daisy cutter pass.
Sure, the juggling tricks are still helping develop a certain *feel* for the ball and the body, it has its appeal, and has its place, but player B will now have developed a fundamental and directly applicable skill to the game.
This helps illustrate why it’s so crucial for a player to have proper mentorship.
4) Pickup Games
This is a significant deficiency in the traditional American player, particularly the suburban club soccer player. That’s a problem, as pickup games are perhaps an indispensable source to developing what is special in a player.
Without pickup games, the intangibles of flavor, technique, and mentality are compromised. Without pickup games, there’s an increased probability a player will never achieve the top level.
5) Personal Training
This is where someone might pay $50-$100 per hour to have a trainer spend some time with the player and work on some things.
To be frank, if the personal trainer is *legit, it may be worth it. But in most cases, if we’re looking to develop foundational technique, this program is where it’s at. You don’t need a personal trainer. The exception being if the player isn’t self-driven or motivated – then much like school, a personal trainer “forces” one to do the work.
Aside from that, a *legit trainer can offer the development of specialized training. For example, if a striker is looking to become a clinical finisher, a legit trainer can help in that department. The reason being two-fold:
- Providing real-time advice, corrections to the player, or modifying the training to fit the level.
- Efficiency in the use of time. For example, having 30 balls available instead of 1 or a few, and being able to feed those balls appropriately (with the correct weight, spin, frequency, etc) to the player.