Week one Wrap

Literally... wrap. As in come home and wrap everything with icepacks, take ibuprofen, wrap the soggy clothes in Fabreeze drenched towels till they can make their way to the wash. The first week is done and over with, but we're only half way home.

From the top then. We're very fortunate to have an extremely knowledgable and experienced education staff.
Dean Wurzberger
Dave Dengerink
Kurt Luweiler
Dan Friegang

The Oklahoma "100deg" summer days have been nice this
week with their cloud coverage keeping it below 90 all weekend.

Without going into much detail on the personnel I can only say I'm very much impressed with their credentials and can only hope that one day I will be able to say the things that they can say. The experience and varying styles they bring to the instructor sessions really set a high standard to the practice models and I think have made everyone really think more about how they are setting up their sessions.

The candidates range from college players, active and former, college coaches, high school coaches, competitive club coaches, high academy coaches, training coaches, etc. I think I'm definitely the only coach with as low an age group as U8. The level of play is pretty high, and despite their attempt to split the session groups evenly in skill by using alphabetical order we will definitely be setting up a more defensive system in our groups for the full games in our assessment sessions due to the ... "experience" available to us in our group.

A photo of the candidates taking a photo of their field session topics.
I couldn't understand why they couldn't just... write it down!

The first week totaled roughly 15 hours of lecture and 20 hours of field sessions. 6-8 hours of home work, not including watching the USA v Guatemala U17 game 4 times for analysis. 20 hours of the field sessions, I participated in about 18 of them. There will certainly be lots of learning before the end of this class on top of all that I've already learned. I'll be posting more details about some of the aspects of what I'm learning in future entries. This post is just intended to be a primer for those posts.

I also did my first (of 2) practice sessions today, before I'm unleashed on my final assessment session next weekend. More details on that later as well but still a bit of things to adjust before the final assessment. Needless to say, after 4 straight days of what was basically soccer camp I'm ready to try out for the nearest professional team... after about 2 days of sleep, and I'm not the only one.

Day 1...slash 2

Wrapping up the first night. Some basic lectures, setting expectations, yada, yada, yada. I was caught off guard when the first assignments turned up being due tonight and while I hate using conditions as an excuse I had only just learned of my candidacy in the last week and of course had a busted printer. So instead of resting up for my first day full of field sessions tomorrow I spent all night transcribing my hand written version of the assignments to a PDF, using probably the worst PDF annotation tool ever created for what I needed to do. I eventually gave up, explaining to the instructor in an email that I would draw in any of the other diagrams which he felt needed to be included despite not being instructed to include them.

Not how I wanted to start the course off. Despite this, I feel I have a pretty good shot at this. At the beginning of each of these courses the instructor speaks in a manner which makes me feel I just don't understand enough of the game to make it through the courses. Then again, I've passed all the courses I which I began with that thought in the past. Let's hope history repeats itself this time. Off to fix my HEED and water bottles for tomorrow.

It Begins

Image © ussoccer.com | http://www.ussoccer.com/coaches/licenses.aspx 

Tonight begins a big step forward into my journey as a coach: I begin my C-Course Certification classes. Based on what I hear from other C-Course candidates as well as from experiencing first hand the exhaustion level shown by my dad when he was taking the course, I have no easy task in front of me. I will try to document this experience here when I can and based on what I'm allowed to share.

So far I'm impressed with what I've learned just from the pre-course material, some USSF Best Practices as well as an expanded version of principles of play and Methods of Coaching. There is one pre-course activity which has me a little concerned, and it's always been my weakness: reading the live game.

We're watching the USA v Guatemala U17 match and analyzing it as a pre-course activity. We have to answer questions about team attacking and defending, group and individual roles, which principles of attack/defense were demonstrated and how, etc. What I realized, already knew but finally came to the crushing understanding of, is that this is the end of my ability to simply enjoy watching a soccer match. Even when I'm in the stands or sitting on the couch I will always be analyzing live games after this course. 

After I took my video production classes, there was a period of time where I was not able to enjoy movies or video productions because I was always looking at the production quality and analyzing what I would have done to make it better. The same is true with Architecture and design; I simply can't look at a building or space without scrutiny. Eventually I was able to turn off my video production analyzing and enjoy movies and critically discuss them afterwards if needed. However, I haven't been relied upon for my abilities to produce a video production in a long, long time. Without being certain in my future of coaching soccer I can't be certain that I'll ever be able to watch another match without leaning in and trying to find that principle of attack or defense a team is using. If it's any consolation, I am comfortable with this simply because I enjoy that aspect of anything I get into: the continual analysis of the game and improvement. Looking for that one unique way to give that edge to my players over their opponents.

So farewell enjoyment of watching the match. Hopefully I'll see you again sometime in the near future. Until then, teach me as much as you can!