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.