Today was my last game in charge of my U11s team. My teenage daughter has just got herself a part in a West End play, so a lot of my spare time will now be spent travelling to and from London with her. That basically means that I won't be able to dedicate much time on a Saturday morning to my team. I've coached them since year 2 until now, half way through year 6. There have been some challenging moments, not all with the players themselves, but overall they've been a fantastic bunch of boys who have been willing and eager to learn. I've been a great believer in educating myself too by doing my FA coaching courses and found the Youth Award Modules 1 and 2 to be well worth the time invested into them. You wouldn't expect a school teacher to start off with primary school kids and then not study more to teach them through to secondary school, so why should a football coach be any different?
But anyway, this blog post isn't directly about coach education, I'll do that another day. This one is about my coaching options going into the new year and beyond. Having said that, I have done a couple of FA courses on coaching futsal, so I've already been using this brilliant variant of football for my weekly coaching sessions. For those that don't know what futsal is, it's a 5-a-side game played indoor, but with a slightly denser ball with a much lower rebound than a standard football. You play to the lines on the court so there's no using the walls, and the goals are a different size. There are a few other rules that differ, but it's a very simple game to teach and it helps players (of all ages) develop the ability to look up, pass and move and there's loads of opportunities for 1v1 situations.
I'll really miss a lot of the training in my sessions and matches with the boys, but there's an awful lot that I won't miss. Putting the goals up, often on my own, and taking them down again, although with more help normally than putting them up! Then there's the admin side of things, teamer (which is brilliant if you use it properly and the parents of your team actually reply) and the simple fact that it's often bloody cold and wet! So what does this all have to do with doors opening and closing? Well, hopefully it means that I will still be able to do my futsal coaching sessions once a week and hopefully with most of the U11s. It can only be a good thing, both for me and the kids. For me it means I'll still be coaching and I won't have all the same crap that I've had, and for the boys it means a chance to develop some great skills and maybe even get a game against other futsal sides.
If you coach a team, whatever their age, I'd really recommend that you have a look into futsal as either a standalone game, or as I do, as a coaching tool as part of a bigger picture. After all, the Brazilians and the Spanish can't all be wrong can they?
By the way, we finished off the first half of the season with a fantastic performance and I couldn't have been more proud!!!
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