Musings of a Community College Coach: Managing team time
By Liviu Bird
The college season feels impossibly long and short at the same time. Coaches plan times for training, watching game film, travel, study hall and (somehow) rest, all while being mindful of the naturally limited time full-time students have on their calendars.
In Washington, teams at every college level are fortunate to have over a month of the season under their belts before schools starts. Because we are on the quarter system, school doesn’t start until late September, meaning that even once two-a-days are over in late August, players are still essentially ours full-time for another couple weeks.
At the four-year level, most universities put players up in on-campus housing throughout the duration of preseason. When I played at Seattle Pacific, we had the option of staying until school started. It’s great for team bonding and impromptu meetings, video sessions and other scheduling interests.
At community colleges, everything gets scaled down, especially facilities and scholarship money. As such, most of our guys have jobs to help pay for school, and we have to be a bit more careful with our scheduling.
If we want to supplement training with a video session, we have to make sure it’s at the right time for everybody to attend — same with light sessions on the morning of games and team ice baths in the freezing waters of Puget Sound after practice.
On top of all that, we need to make sure our players receive enough mental and physical rest for the demands of a 20-game season plus playoffs. Squeezed into a three-month window, the amount of growth we demand is astronomical.
When your roster comprises almost entirely 18- and 19-year-olds, keeping a consistent timeline between seasons becomes nearly impossible. Every year, we start from scratch, detailing our program philosophy and building a style of play that we hope comes to a peak in late October in time for the playoffs.
Our Groundhog Day reality progresses differently each year, depending on the technical and tactical acumen of our players, but it almost always takes at least a month before we get any sort of rhythm on the field. It leads most teams to playing kick-and-chase soccer because it’s easy to coach and get results right away, but we preach a possession-based approach at Edmonds that takes longer to build.
And so we have to quickly assess training topics and how we can best build a team in two hours a day. (Not to mention, every community college coach does this as a part-time distraction. Full-time community college coaches do not exist in the NWAACC.)
It’s a stressful and humbling process. Have we worked on defensive shape too much? Is it too soon to introduce element X or Y of our system? Or are we trying to build too slowly, not leaving ourselves enough time to gel before the back stretch of the season?
We’ve finally started competitive games that count toward our season record, losing 4-1 and 1-0 to two other defending division champions, one of which beat us 7-0 at the start of last season and 2-0 again in the semifinal on the way to their eventual championship.
It’s too early to be happy, even though we’re in much better shape at this stage than we were exactly a year ago. I stalk the sidelines of training with a perpetual frown, our work far from finished.
The championship game on Nov. 17 feels so far away, but at the same time, it always comes quickly.
Liviu Bird is an assistant coach at Edmonds Community College in Washington state, as well as a reporter for SoccerWire.com and NBC ProSoccerTalk.
