Solving 2 Common Problems in Player Development
Addressing issues of being too specific with player management and training
Now that I’m coaching my son’s U8 AYSO team, there is ample opportunity to think about the player development process and how the decisions my assistant and I make today will impact these players far into the future. Just putting it that way brings the degree of responsibility into sharp focus!
My north star has always been to maximize individual player development and over the years I’ve figured out ways to keep the emphasis on this despite some of the normal challenges that threaten to derail this approach. As I’m regularly finding myself in conversations about these topics, I figured I’d take some time this week to organize them into something coherent.
TAKEAWAYS
Why specializing in a position too early is detrimental
Why highly specific training too early is a problem
Ways to address each of these issues in the common youth landscape
INTRO
The beauty of coaching is that, by and large, there aren’t clear cut ‘right answers.’ Instead we have a series of tradeoffs that must be managed differently depending on factors such as age, level of play, future objectives, team management, etc.
With that being said, I believe that maximizing individual player development should be the primary objective in the vast majority of situations. For me, winning is something I always want to achieve, but it comes as a consequence of improving the players as much as possible every day in training.
The only time that I’ll shift the focus to achieving results is when I see a need to maintain player and parent engagement. Because if players or parents become unhappy and lose faith in the coach, then there is a risk of losing talented players, if not the whole team. And since there is no player development without a team, at times I will set up and coach the team to maximize performance.
Given this perspective, there is a lot of coaching out there that I think is misaligned with maximum player development and today I feel compelled to draw some attention to these problems along with the steps I take to try and mitigate the negative impact.
THE PROBLEM: Players specializing in a position too early
Let’s take a look at the first problem - making players play a particular role or position from too young an age.
At all ages and levels I’ve seen the same thing situation. Players are put into a role that suits their current abilities within the context of that team and the competition they are playing. Makes sense right? If a player has great speed and consistently wins tackles, put them in the back where they can maximize these skills for the good of the team. For the kid who is fast and tries to outrun everyone to the goal each time he gets near the ball, put him up top and let him go to town on all the clearances and loose ball situations.
The problem as I see it is that once the team finds success, the idea is not to give players experience in other roles, but to push the team to a higher level of competition. This makes sense on some level; after all, if you’re winning a lot of your games you must be stronger than the competition! But the issue is that players are only learning to lean on their biggest strengths. And when playing against equal or stronger competition, mistakes lead to turnovers and goals conceded, which result in losses. Many players and parents will get discouraged and unhappy with losses and this of course causes all kinds of other problems.
The best way to avoid the bad results is to put players in positions where they can be successful, which means relying on their strengths and hiding their weaknesses. The problem is that finding this level of competition every single game becomes the objective. Instead of the overall player development, it’s becomes like many other aspects of society - the search for dopamine by way of winning games and tournaments.
Now we are on a path where players (and their parents) identify with a particular position or role within the team. A player becomes ‘the striker’ or ‘the center mid’ instead of a soccer player who can solve situations from a variety of positions. And the search for shinier tournaments is much more appealing than the boring work of playing ‘out of position’.
But why is this a problem? First of all players only develop a narrow range of skills - the greatest strengths they exhibit at a young age, in a very particular context. What if that same player was on a different team with different teammates? Would they end up in the same role? Very possibly not. While developing strengths is important, I believe a solid foundation is of even greater importance. I don’t have a clear idea on when players should really start specializing in a position but I would venture that starting at 11-a-side (U13 here) is probably a good rough starting point.
*In terms of role, I avoid forcing players to play a role they don’t enjoy. I believe most players will naturally gravitate toward certain roles and feel comfortable in them. Some kids want to play in the back. Others want to score goals or have space to dribble. Generally speaking I try to work with the players to find ways for them to get meaningful minutes at their preferred role. Sometimes this means changing the system to accommodate the roster, since at youth level we rarely have the luxury of players who all fit our ideal system.
THE FIX
If the problem is only playing one position, the solution is obviously to get experience playing a wider range of positions. But how can this be done in the typical youth team situation where the team is expected to play equal or stronger competition as much as possible?
While it’s hard to go ‘backward’ and play against a lower level of competition (due to parent and club expectations), I find it vital to get a variety of competition. There is a lot that can be learned playing against weaker opponents when the coach has clear plans on how to maximize the individual development within that context.
One of the main benefits is that players can gain experience playing different roles. It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as having all of the attackers play as defenders. It could be as simple as changing adjacent positions, so a winger gets time as a full back or a center mid gets time as center forward. By moving to a different role, the player will see different situations and will need to either use their skillset differently or develop other skills to find success.
I encourage coaches to be cognizant of how much time players are spending in particular roles and identify potential weak points in each individual that could be addressed by spending time ‘out of position’.
PROBLEM: Training is too specific
This is a big one that I struggled with for a long time. When I would watch the game on TV, I’d see it through the lens of the specific roles the players were performing. “When the ball moves here, the full back goes there, the winger comes here, etc.” Instead of seeing 3 players passing and moving to progress the ball forward, I only saw the specific positions or roles.
So what happened when I went to training?
I designed so many situations based on players playing in specific positions. I’m ashamed to admit that this was with U10-U12 players!
I’ve witnessed many colleagues suffering from the same problem. And when training becomes highly specific, players do not get the broad base skill development necessary to play other roles in the future. What happens when they take a step up to the next level but need to perform a different role? What about players who are never capable of taking the step up because their talent is too limited?
This goes hand in hand with specializing in a role/position at too young an age. When players are tasked with consistently playing a particular role at too young of an age, it’s easy to view game problems in terms of roles and positions. It’s no longer a general problem across the whole team, but a specific breakdown involving a particular game situation.
And the future problem is the same - a player who lacks enough skills to be successful when the play becomes faster, the coach asks the player to perform their role differently, or the team situation changes and they are required to play a different position altogether.
THE FIX
After identifying break downs in the game, the specifics need to be removed so that the more general concepts remain. A process I’ve used to help me derive more general situations and principles from specific game situations is to first remove the positions involved and then remove the field space.
Let me explain. In the game, I’m playing a 4231 with a 9 and a 10. When the ball reaches the 10, too often we lose possession when trying to beat the two center backs to create a shot. We fail for reasons like misunderstanding from 9 on how to support (when to offer a wall versus when to run behind), misplayed passes from 10 (too hard/too soft), mistiming (too many touches from 10, 9 runs too early/late), etc. Unless I’m working with high level U16 or older, there is probably more value in teaching this in a general sense.
*4231 against some opponents
First let’s remove all the other players. We’ll focus on just the 9 and 10, along with the two center backs that are defending against them.
*Same as above, but all the ‘noise’ has been stripped out. Only the two attackers, two defenders, and goalkeeper remain.
Now let’s remove the specific positions. We have two attackers against two defenders. The defenders start side by side and the attackers have one player high and one player low.
Let’s also remove the specifics of the field space. What we’re really focused on, in the situation above, is not finishing, but getting the ball beyond the two center backs. So with that in mind, what we really need is a rectangular space that represents the area on top of the box where this situation is occurring. And instead of a goal and goalkeeper, we need some kind of zone for the attackers to get into. That leaves us with something like this:
*After starting from our specific game situation, we’ve removed specific context step by step until we’ve arrived with a game that simulates the same kind of actions but in a general sense. This can now be a game that involves all the players and is now about 2v1, 1v1, and other technical/tactical details instead of position specific training.
Now, we’ve worked backward from the game situation to create a more generalized activity that will allow us to train basic individual and collective concepts, rather than being focused on the position specific stuff. There is a lot of ways you could run this activity, adjusting the starting points of the defenders, the way in which both groups can score, etc. But a very simple way would be to allow the 10 to start with a dribble and then it’s a free 2v2 with attackers attempting to dribble or receive a pass in the yellow zone. The boundary between the playing area and the scoring zone would act as an offside line so an attacker wouldn’t be able to wait in this ‘offside’ position.
*Here I’ve overlaid the created activity over the playing space with all players involved so you can see the two together.
By following this logic, instead of creating a highly specific situation and teaching content that only applies to a few players, we have an activity that works on more fundamental skills that are important for all players.
From here we can coach the players on any kind of basic individual or collective fundamentals, such as supporting movements both short and long, protecting the ball under pressure, 1v1 or 2v1, etc. From starting at the specifics of the game situation, we’ve worked backwards to create a more general activity that will help all the players.
SUMMARY
There are many factors at play when managing a team at any level. While many coaches focus on the management aspect (basically focusing on results), putting this first can be detrimental to the individual player development as it leads the coach to emphasize performance at a suboptimal time. The players suffer in the long term because despite the state cups they may have on their mantle, they’re lacking overall skill in solving a greater variety of game situations that their career may present them with in the future.
Giving players more time in different positions and making training more general at the young ages are great ways to ensure players are getting more individual development rather than focusing on results or the team level performance. While these are important for older ages, emphasizing them at the wrong time leads to worse player outcomes.