Registration is open for the winter Season

Players will engage in a variety of activities and games designed to develop the offensive skills of dribbling, passing, receiving, and shooting.  Defensive ball skills include poking the ball away and clearing the ball.  Players will learn how to use all surfaces of the foot to control and manipulate the ball.

Players will learn how to start seeing the game beyond the ball.  Learning concepts such as off-ball movement, running to space, and staying spaced out in areas of responsibility are challenging.  Without this knowledge, games devolve into "kick clumps" because every player runs to the ball at once.  Our program focuses on the prevention of "kick clumps" by teaching players spatial awareness.

Players will learn how to work with teammates on the offensive and defensive sides of the ball.  Players will start to develop awareness of teammates and how to interact with them during run of play.  Introducing players to possession passing, maintaining relationships with teammates, and holding a formational shape are some of the basic strategies focused on.

We teach our players all the angles and intricacies to performing soccer skills.  Each skill is broken into its component parts and taught to the players.  Training activities are created that allow players to develop the muscle memory needed for skilled performance.  Our focus is on how the player's body moves more than the result of the action. Another primary focus is being able to kick with both feet.  We make a deliberate effort to develop both feet equally.  And the best time to do it is when they are learning for the first time.

Learning individual motor patterns is the first step; combining them into meaningful sequences is the next step.  This does not come naturally as a result of learning a specific skill, movement sequences must be taught and practiced.  Once basic muscle memory has been developed for skills in isolation, we start teaching players how to combine those into sequences such as receiving ball by touching to space, dribble ball, then pass the moving ball.  Another example is being able to "turn" on the ball when receiving it.  We download students with movement sequence options to choose from while playing.

The foundational rules and procedures of regulation soccer are taught with the objective of having a full, refereed game on the last day of the season.  Players are taught the procedures of throw-ins, corner kicks, goal kicks, and free kicks.  Rules such as hand ball, what is a foul, and offsides (when applicable) are taught and reinforced.  One misconception many beginner players have is that hand ball literally means "only the hand", so they will use their forearm or bicep to stop the ball thinking this is a legal play.  By the end of the program, we want our players to be able to play and watch a game of soccer knowledgeably.