La Liga Formation Methodology Course Day 2
After a highly-successful first day, the roughly 60 coaches in attendance for NorCal Premier Soccer’s La Liga Formation Methodology Level 2 course eagerly returned to the classroom at Las Positas College in Livermore for the second and final day of what was the latest in the series of excellent coaching education opportunities provided in the area.
And with the new day came a new batch of clinicians as La Liga’s Carlos Casal and Hugo Blanco were on site to help lead three classroom sessions, two collaborative activities, and a pair of workshops for our eager learners.
No stone was left untouched by the clinicians, who started the day with two classroom sessions, first on the physical training fundamentals of the development stages, followed by the technical and tactical training concepts of the development stages.
The main goal: helping some of NorCal’s best coaches better develop a methodology that is both well-planned and age-appropriate.
Following the first two classroom sessions, coaches again were expected to use what they learned in a short team assignment where they were then critiqued by Casal, Blanco, and La Liga’s Felipe Vega, who led much of the first day’s coursework.
After a short break for lunch, Blanco then delivered a presentation on how coaches in Northern California could better use technology to develop players.
“Why do we have so much technology around soccer these days?” he said. “So we can back up our opinions with objective data. We have so much information that we didn’t have even 10 years ago.”
The participants then took to the field where Vega, aided by NorCal’s U17 boys PDP squad, ran the sole practical session of the day while Casal opened up a dialogue with the local coaches in order to better explain what was happening behind him.
Before the training finished, Casal left the attendees with a final message, one that he deemed important after having worked all over the world.
“What is the most common mistake that people make worldwide?” Casal said. “It’s that we make things too complicated when we could make everything better for the development of our players by doing things easier and helping the players understand each session better.”
From there, there was one final group assignment before the day ended with heartfelt goodbyes and a little more knowledge in the heads that coaches could take back to their programs to help better the level of the game in Northern California.
“I’m super excited to be here because for a coach at any level to be exposed to a coach of this standard, a coach who has coached international clubs, just to be able to listen to him and hear about his experiences and teach us about the type of methodology that La Liga is using is just amazing,” said Belinda Halloran of Napa Soccer Academy. “It’s just a wonderful opportunity for us to learn and be able to take some of these concepts back to our own teams at any level.”
“The importance of planning and periodization is something that’s coming through,” she added. “It doesn’t matter what level you’re coaching at, you can do better at planning each stage in order to make sure the player is coming first and the coaches are always putting the right objectives into place when we’re doing our practices because I think sometimes that gets lost whether we’re busy or overwhelmed or don’t have assistant coaches, but if we’re given a format and methodology that way can implement by breaking down each section of the game or the training, it just makes it so much easier.”
“It makes the big task of coaching one, two, three teams not so hard.”
