06/20/2022
It’s all about development!
Just a quick shout-out to three coaches from a great weekend for the Matrix Soccer Academy… Coach Andrei (Potomac Blue), Coach Elton (Baltimore Celtic Pred’s), and Coach Stephen (SYC MLS Next). Coach Andrei for offering up Jacks, Gi and Iki to play with us - they were a joy to have! Coach Elton and Coach Stephen for setting up this awesome opportunity for our kids to play. But beyond that, I want to thank these three coaches for being part of the unfortunately small fraternity of coaches that I come across that want to play this game the right way. What we refer to as a Player-Centric approach as opposed to Coach-Centric. It isn’t as much about style-of-play - although that is representative - as it is about developing players.
In just two matches there were more pass strings and combination play than I see from some teams in my travels for an entire season. I’m not talking about just this age group, or even this gender. Watching coaches simply play back to front, punt ever handled ball, lump goal kicks and float balls into the box at every opportunity is a big reason why the US is so far behind in developing technical and intelligent footballers.
This fraternity I speak of may be small, but it is growing. Thank you Andrei, Elton and Stephen for respecting us enough to be a part of your development process. ❤⚽💪
Keep your eyes out for a new blog post coming soon on what’s wrong with at matrixsoccer.org.