Covid-19 Home Learning & Review

Why?

A lot of parents actively contacted me during this current lockdown requesting me to roll out 'ball based' activities like past content I provided, meaning moving this intended block forward. The key to this technical block was to give the players the football and to do daily ball mastery tasks that would incorporate a number of difficulty levels, test their mindset and were physically demanding.

I wanted to also explore the previous psychological block within this one and try and get the players to be resilient, focus, not to give up and to push themselves out of their comfort zone.

An additional focus was to ensure the skills were also aimed at continued development of the ABCs 

How?

The strategy to this was to keep the players engaged by actively aiding and congratulating them on a regular basis via one to one interactions and to make these light hearted and funny. Also using the visual board game that has been created to give them a sense of pride if skill was completed. 

The following skills were the ones the players were asked to complete.

• Sole Roll, Opposite Foot
• Inside, Outside Tap
• Brazilian toe Taps (Neymar)
• Ronaldinho Roll, Outside Touch
• Rabona Tap/Samba Dance

Conclusion

On reflection, the focus has to be on the players that took part in this block and the positive outcomes that came from this. There was some great engagement between us and it was good for my learning process to identify aiding progressions that could help the players succeed in delivering the skills set.

A coaching improvement of mine needs to be not dwelling on people not taking part and to focus on the positives of the players that are. I find this increasing hard, giving the lack of physical and social interactions in general my players have experienced over the last 10 months (lack of school and external friendships) as well as how the players returned to football after the last lockdown. I am really concerned as I look towards our last year in 7v7 next season and beyond this with planning already in place for 9v9 and me reducing squad size.