When GESC first started the coaches talked a lot about our club style of play. ie. How would we want all of our teams to play? What do we want it to look like, sound like, feel like? We did not want each team to be an island but instead wanted to be a collective. So we came up with our initial club style of play that all coaches and teams have been utilizing.

 

This way, as players get older there is no need to teach everything brand new again every year or season. Each coach can instead reinforce previous concepts making them more ingrained and also introduce more complexity and details with each concept. Retention and learning of something new is superior when connecting it with information that one already knows. This also helps with consistency as players understand what is expected of them, and allows for more consistent coaching throughout the club.

​

We understand too the importance of constantly reflecting and in keeping up with modern trends. The game continues to change. Kids continue to change. We need to continue to change with everything or we could get left behind. So the coaches spent a lot of time on zoom calls this spring updating our style of play and adding more details.

​

What we have now we call our club Player Development Model. It consists of our updated Style of Play, as well as what drives that style: our core values, our holistic player development plan and goals, and specific key qualities we want to develop in our players. Then we went a step further: based on all of that, how could we maximize the connection between what we want to accomplish and how we go about it? This led us to our training methodology and training format for different age groups based on their developmental needs.

​

We know that we always want to develop players holistically with good character, confidence, competence, connection, and cognition. We want players that will try to solve problems and make decisions on their own based on what they are seeing on the field. As a result, we now model our training sessions to replicate soccer problems that kids experience in games, and then through coaching interventions, help guide players to solutions that fit within the club style of play. 

​

Presenting a problem in a training setting gets players to focus on what they need to learn in order to solve that problem and gives them something that they can see the practical use of come game day.

​

Anyway, I can talk for hours about this, and we are going to make an effort to try to dissect some of it further in our new video series Between 2 Fields (see next article), but if you want to read more about what we do and why we do it, read more at the link below. We have nothing to hide!