Trials and first coaching session

During the first few weeks back at Uclan the football club had to organise trials for the freshers and any new players wanting to try and get into one of the university teams. We attended the freshers fare to advertise the club and we received 150+ contact details of players who wanted to trial. The committee then sat down to arrange enough trials throughout September and the start of October. Due to the weather, all grass pitches were unplayable so we were limited to two astroturf pitches. We separated all the lads into trials over two/three weeks and gave them two trials each so the captains can get a fair look at every player for their teams. For the 6^th team we recruited three new players to help strengthen our squad.

Once the trial period was over we then started training on Monday nights. I had planned the first training session of the year and incorporated fitness, technical and game based drills to get the team started again for the new season. When we arrived at the sports arena I was told that our pitch had been taken by the 4^th team to further trial players for their team, meaning we were left without a full training (9 a-side pitches/third of an astro) space for training. I was unprepared for this arrangement and we were forced to train in a 7 a-side cage. This put most of my plans out the window and therefore I could only use the fitness plans for the training, therefore the training session now consisted of varied fitness for 20-30 minutes followed by some passing drills and then into 5/6 a side games. In addition to this, 6 random lads turned up to the training sessions expecting to be trialed and as we are the bottom team of the club the extra lads had to join in with my team (Me and the captain then have to judge these players of their ability and if they are good enough we push them up a team etc). Due to the space we had and numbers of players we had to train/trial I changed the training session yet again. This time I scraped any further training exercises that was left to do and changed training into 5 a side games, two teams would start with one sat out. Games would last five minutes max and each team would stay on for two games. This way my existing players are getting game time to get their form and fitness back and I can look at the players who have turned up to see if they are good enough to make my or a higher team. Unfortunately all the players that turned up for ‘trials’ were not good enough to make the 6th team therefore I had to tell them that they were unable to join the team.

Looking back on the training session I feel I dealt with the situation fairly well as I was given two bits of bad news which affected my training session. I had to act fast and spontaneously to come up with a new training session on the smaller pitch we had. Then when more people arrived and we had 18 players on a 7 a-side pitch I then had to act fast to change things and keep people from standing around, therefore the best thing to do was to just play small sided matches.

The weakness of this session for me is one of my overall weaknesses from my first post, the fact that I use the same drills and can’t find new ones or don’t have the access to new drills. This has let me down by not being adaptable to new/different drills instead I changed it to 6 a-side matches. If I had numerous drills in my head that I could have used I could have changed it up and eventually progressed into a match rather than going straight into matches when numbers became too many.

Due to this I am going to focus on looking into drills, were the amount of people shouldn't matter on the learning outcome. Drills where everyone can be involved and not standing around and mainly, drills where participants are interested and enjoying themselves. I can do this by looking on Youtube at coaching sessions or asking other coaches for advice.