E License--check

Well, it's been a while since my last post, but that's because it's been a very busy time in my life. I'm getting married in 29 days, recently started a job that I love, and am finishing up my last year of school. Needless to say, it's been hectic around here.

I just found out this morning that I passed my E license course, so that's really exciting. I was not required to obtain this license, but I thought it would be beneficial because I am so young and have been away from competitive soccer for a few years now. I learned some important tips, especially with how to structure practices to maximize our limited time, and met some great people. I can take the next coaching course, the D license, six months from now. That will be right around the time that I'll be preparing for the bar exam, so we'll have to see about that. I'll probably push it back a little bit.

As for our fall season--it was a disappointment and a success at the same time. Our boys showed a lot of improvement during the season, but we had a backloaded schedule, so the progress didn't show up in the win column often. We finished our league in 4th place, but I thought we could have finished second. We were, however, the only team in our league to hold any opponent to a shut out, so that was nice.

We are now playing our first indoor season, but I've already told the kids to have fun with this first session and not worry about wins and losses. Indoor soccer is so different from its outdoor counterpart that a lot of the strategies I'm teaching them are almost inapplicable on turf. The good thing about playing indoor, though, is that the ball and game move so much faster. I try to emphasize speed with my team, so playing indoor forces them to play faster.

Now that we can defend pretty well and turn defense into offense pretty quickly, the next big theme we're going to tackle is teamwork--passing and moving. Thankfully at the coaching course I recently completed, I came away with a lot of drills that will be great for learning that.