Читать книгу Get More. A Championship coach's Formula for Achieving Breakthrough Results онлайн
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On my team that year I had only one true forward. A forward is generally your goal scorer in soccer, your frontline attacking position. I could shape out the rest of the team, but I had no other forwards. So I took three or four kids who had never played forward. Most of them were defenders, and I think two of them had barely played organized soccer in their life. I told them I was going to train them to be my forwards. They looked at me a little baffled, as did the other players on the team, and I just said, “Let’s work at it. I don’t expect you to play sixty minutes a game or even score goals, but I know you can give me five, ten, or twenty productive minutes a game that can help the team.” They had some athletic ability, and best of all they were willing to do whatever I asked of them, even if they didn’t quite understand.
I explained to them what I needed them to do. Being the top line attackers, there was no expectation on them to score goals, which is different than what you might tell most strikers, but I knew that wasn’t their strength. Asking them to do it might have been too much pressure and hurt their performance. Their job was to run. Run and pressure the other team’s defenders relentlessly. Since I was playing with only two forwards and I had four or five of these guys, I told them, “Just give me your all and run and pressure until you can’t run 100 percent anymore, and I’ll sub in the next guy.” And they did. In that first game against American Heritage, a converted defender, a midfielder, and two guys who had barely played soccer were my forwards. Every 10 minutes or so I’d sub them, and they’d run. In doing so they never allowed the other team to have a good staging area to build an attack. Our opponents were positioned into hitting balls at us from 40 yards out, which played to our strengths because we had a goalkeeper who went on to be a United Soccer Coaches All-American that season. We scored on a corner kick midway through the second half and held on for the win.