Additional Post 2: Competing as a Team, a Tie and Learning from Mistakes

Coaching is extraordinarily rewarding.  Not only do the players have fun, but the coaches do to.  This is especially true if the team is doing well.  You get to watch a group of (in this case) girls, join together to preform in front of their parents, their friends, and coaches.  They warm up, get their heads in the game,

and score goals.  As teammates they rely on one another to keep the ball out of their half of the field, their third of the field, and most importantly, the penalty area. 

Pre-Game Warmup

" I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team, I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion."

-Mia Hamm, former Women's National Team player

Referring back to the penalty area, it is the goalkeeper's job to defend it.  It is their house; their home.  It is the job of the goalkeeper to keep the ball out of the net.  If you ask anyone of us about our least favorite sound on the field, it will always be the sound the ball makes when it hits the back of the net.  To prevent that noise from happening a goalkeeper is required to communicate, be in good form, and be aggressive.  I am putting a lot of stock into the keepers.  There is fault in that.   During play there are 10 other players on the field capable of stopping the ball before it even gets into the penalty area.  Those players are there to prevent goals.  In fact, I was once told by a wise individual that 99% of goals scored aren't the fault of the keeper, but the other 10 players that allowed the attackers to get close enough to score.

"The goalkeeper is the jewel in the crown and getting at him should be almost impossible.  It's the biggest sin in [soccer] to make him do any work"

- George Graham, former Arsenal head coach

The team I am helping coach had a game today, 9.21.13.  I went through last minute pointers with the keepers that took the field and then left them to their own devices.  A good coach doesn't scream at the players on the field, but lets them play and learn from their mistakes.  That is exactly what happened today.  The girls were ahead.  A girl from the other team controlled a ball after a corner kick and took a big swing.  She got lucky, and it went in.  Now we were tied.  After half time the opposing team scored again.  There was a new keeper in for us now.  She hasn't been at practice and hasn't benefited from any coaching.  She let in a goal at the near post.  A poor mistake, but one she'll learn from.  It took us until the last minute of the game to tie it up again.

The elation on the girl's faces after they scored that second goal that tied the game was unmatched.  There is a raw happiness that comes from the girls that you don't see very often.  There is no faking the happiness they feel when they come back from the bottom.  I remember that feeling, and I experience that still today.  But that's for a later post.

After today, the girls know they need to forget about the game, yet still learn from their mistakes.  Kim and I made the plan for the next practice.  We know what needs to be done, and together we will make the team better.

Second Interview Questions

Kim Nemeth is my mentor.  She is self employed as both a swimming coach and a goalkeeping coach. Of course, I will be focusing on the goalkeeping part of her job.

Interview 2 Questions

1. What prior experience have you before you started training keepers?  And how is it currently helping you?
2. What do you love about coaching goalkeepers?
3. What kind of experience do you think is most important to be qualified enough to coach goalkeepers?
4. Have you done anything important, or something that sticks out more than other things since you've started training keepers?
5. What experiences have you gained from training different aged keepers?
6. What originally got you in to training goalkeepers?
7. Has training goalkeepers improved your game as a keeper?
8. Do you believe there is something you do that sets you apart from other goalkeeping coaches?
9. How long have you been a keeper yourself? 
10. Obviously at different levels of soccer the level of competitiveness changes.  Do/Would you change the drills and level of training for a 15 year old club player vs. a college athlete?
11. From a training perspective, how was playing for Cal Poly different from your high school team? Different from the adult league you currently play in?
12. How has the world of goalkeeping changed since you started playing?

Blog 5: Project Reflection and Working EQ

The Pentagon:

1. I have gained a lot of new knowledge from Jeff Tackett because his training style is different from Kim Nemeth's style.  Jeff focuses more on the broad skills, assuming the small skills will trickle in.  During a normal training session, Kim will focus more on an individual skills like hand eye coordination or diving for high balls.
2. Source 3 so far has been the most interesting article.  It has provoked me to research the experiment that occurred, and I found a lead to see if I could obtain the doctoral thesis done by Gabriel Diaz, a doctoral candidate at Renssaeler Polytechnic University The article explained how penalty kicks can be defended by more accurately.  The PK has an extremely high chance of going in (numbers vary between 80% and 90% depending on the study), and are rarely blocked.  The experiment touched base on the psychological side of goalkeeping which prompted me to look more into it.  I've always realized that a goalkeeper needs to have a strong and extraordinarily calm mind to get through a game, but I've never thought about it in the psychological sense.  The entire article with the experiment gave me so many different avenues to explore.
3. Finding new ideas about goalkeeping is totally a plus.  I've never thought about the position with so many different angles.  Psychology, agility, running a clinic, and so many other ways to go.
4. With all the different avenues I've opened I'm not sure which way to go.  It's given me so many options.
5. Working EQ - What are the most important skills a goalkeeper needs to become a higher level athlete?
• For mentorship I have been helping Jeff Tackett train several groups of young goalkeepers and I am the assistant coach/ goalie coach for Kim Nemeth's Girls Under-14 team.