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    POSSESSION: Teaching Your Team to Keep the Darn Ball
    POSSESSION: Teaching Your Team to Keep the Darn Ball
    POSSESSION: Teaching Your Team to Keep the Darn Ball
    Ebook150 pages1 hour

    POSSESSION: Teaching Your Team to Keep the Darn Ball

    By Dan Blank

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    POSSESSION is a step by step explanation of coaching points and on-field exercises for possession soccer. In this installment of the best-selling Soccer iQ series, Coach Dan Blank again distinguishes himself as soccer's finest how-to author, providing coaches with connect-the-dots solutions for teaching possession soccer. POSSESSION provides essential coaching philosophies that break down the art of keeping the ball. It includes dozens of training exercises as well as the mistakes that a coach can expect his players to make during those exercises - and the solutions to correct those mistakes. Filled with simple diagrams, POSSESSION is an easy-to-read guide for coaches who desperately want to help their teams keep the darn ball!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDan Blank
    Release dateFeb 23, 2017
    ISBN9781370010707
    POSSESSION: Teaching Your Team to Keep the Darn Ball
    Author

    Dan Blank

    When Football.com named it's Top 14 Books for Soccer Players and Coaches, seven of those titles came from a single author - Coach Dan Blank. Dan Blank has emerged as the most popular how-to author for soccer players and coaches. His first book, Soccer iQ, was named a Top 5 Book of the Year by the NSCAA Soccer Journal and has been the #1 bestseller in Amazon's Soccer and Coaching Soccer genres since 2013. It's also been an Amazon #1 best-seller in Canada and Australia. It has been featured in various soccer publications and websites and has been translated into six other languages: Russian, German, Danish, Dutch Chinese and Korean. Dan has been coaching college soccer for over twenty years and most recently served as associate head coach at the University of Georgia. He is the first coach in Southeastern Conference history to lead the conference's best defense in consecutive years at different universities (Ole Miss 2009, Georgia 2010), a feat that is detailed in his book Shutout Pizza. He has an 'A' License from the USSF and an Advanced National Diploma from the NSCAA. Coach Blank has also authored: Soccer iQ - Volume 2 Every Thing Your Coach Never Told You Because You're a Girl HAPPY FEET - How to Be a Gold Star Soccer Parent (Everything the Coach, the Ref and Your Kid Want You to Know) ROOKIE - Surviving Your Freshman Year of College Soccer Possession - Teaching Your Team to Keep the Darn Ball Shutout Pizza - Smarter Soccer Defending for Players and Coaches You can buy his books and read his blog at www.soccerpoet.com.

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      Book preview

      POSSESSION - Dan Blank

      Soccer iQ Presents…

      POSSESSION – Teaching Your Soccer Team to Keep the Darn Ball

      by

      Dan Blank

      © 2015

      All rights reserved.

      Welcome to POSSESSION, a part of the Soccer iQ book series.

      If you would like to purchase copies of this book at a bulk discount, please email me at coach@soccerpoet.com

      I invite you to read my blog and take the Soccer iQ quiz at www.soccerpoet.com.

      I hope you’ll be my Twitter friend: @SoccerPoet

      For Izzy

      Table of Contents

      INTRODUCTION

      SECTION 1 - The Coaching Points

      1 Why Possession?

      2 All Aboard

      3 Numbers

      4 Spacing

      5 Speed of Play

      6 KISS

      7 What’s Next?

      8 Play the Way You Face

      9 Passing Angles and Empathy

      10 Receiving with the Proper Foot

      11 Receiving Across the Standing Leg

      12 Playing to the Proper Foot

      13 Passing Angles, Proper Feet and Hockey Sticks

      14 Better Than Square

      15 Playing Behind the Fence

      16 The Higher of Two Options

      17 My Seam!

      18 The Three-Step Rule

      19 Face the Field

      20 The Next Pass

      SECTION 2 - Individual Possession

      21 One of Them

      22 Shielding

      23 Escaping

      Escape Tunnel 1

      Escape Tunnel 2

      Three Man

      1v1 + Targets

      3-Ball

      Checkers

      SECTION 3 - Small Numbers Possession

      24 The Small Numbers Progression

      Part 1 – 4v0

      Part 2 – 3v0

      Part 3 – 3v1

      Part 4 – 5v2

      Part 5 - Dutch

      SECTION 4 - Small Area Possession Exercises

      25 - Small Area Possession Exercises

      6-3-1

      6-3-1 Rush

      2v2 + Neutral Wingers

      Cross the River

      Border Patrol

      Four Corners

      Two-Ball

      2v2 + Targets

      SECTION 5 - Bigger Picture Possession Games

      6v6 + 1 (or 2)

      Six Goal Game (or Eight Goal Game)

      Four Target Game

      The Endzone Game

      Endzone Game

      SECTION 6 - Big Picture Possession Games

      Possession in Systems

      The Sideline Game

      101

      26 - Take What They Give You

      A Final Word

      OTHER BOOKS BY DAN BLANK

      A sample chapter from Soccer iQ

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      INTRODUCTION

      I want to be perfectly clear that I am not trying to sell you on a specific style of soccer. As the coach, it’s up to you to determine your team’s system and style, and those things need to be predicated on your personnel. If your players aren’t technically competent, a possession-based style probably won’t help you win games. In other words, you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken poop.

      Successful possession is all about the details. It’s not merely about one player passing the ball to another. It’s about all of the little things that give each player the very best chance to successfully receive and pass the ball.

      You bought this book to help you teach your players how to keep the ball. That’s exactly what you’ll get. I’ll give you the building blocks for teaching your players how to connect passes. I’ll provide you with a progression of exercises and the coaching points to accompany them. This book is heavy on diagrams. The diagrams are simple and should be easy to follow.

      Even if you prefer to play an uber-direct style of soccer, every now and then your players are actually going to have to pass the ball to their teammates, and these exercises will help them get better at it.

      This book is an if/then proposition. I’m not telling you that possession soccer is the best style for your team. All I’m saying is that if you want your team to play a possession style, then these are the things you need to do.

      None of these exercises are what I would consider groundbreaking and I didn’t invent any of them. But, over the past couple of decades of trying to teach my teams how to keep the ball, these are the ones I’ve found to be the most effective. In other words, these exercises are my favorites.

      If you’ve read the Soccer iQ books, some of the coaching points will sound familiar. Some of the chapters from the Soccer iQ books have been pulled word for word into this text. The material is no less relevant and I couldn’t exactly produce a book on possession without including those chapters. Let me put in another way: If I didn’t include them, this book would be hopelessly incomplete.

      This book is not about penetrating passes or scoring goals. It’s about the art of keeping the ball. It’s all about possession. I hope it serves you well.

      SECTION 1

      The Coaching Points

      1

      Why Possession?

      I am a possession coach. You don’t have to be, but I am. I played on a college team that emphasized possession and executed it well. And I liked it. Not only did I like it, I got to see firsthand the real value of keeping the ball. I got to see what it did to the guy I was marking. I got to see what it did to his teammates. On many occasions I was an eyewitness to the physical and emotional unraveling of an opponent who had spent too much of his afternoon chasing a ball he could never quite catch up to. And I liked that more than anything. So I’m a believer.

      Soccer fans rally around a team that can pass the ball. It makes sense. There is something intrinsically beautiful about a long run of passes culminating with a three-man combo to an overlapping outside back who puts her serve on the head of a teammate darting in at the near post. It’s soccer’s answer to the 6-4-3 double play or an alley-oop. But if you think that the value of possession is more form than function, you may be missing the boat. Because every time you pass the ball, regardless of the direction your pass goes, you are making progress. The problem is that your players might not realize it.

      The legendary coach, Graham Ramsay, taught me to think of each pass as a jab in a heavyweight fight. In the first few rounds those jabs have no significant effect. The boxers hardly seem to notice them. But each one of those jabs is making a dent, and in the final three rounds, those jabs start to feel like cannonballs. You see, it’s not about the effectiveness of a single punch; it’s about the damage done by the accumulation of those punches. The same applies for passes in a game of soccer.

      A lot of coaches mix possession drills into their training sessions on a daily basis. And as long as their team is matched up against an inferior opponent, the players can showcase their ability to keep the ball. But when an evenly matched opponent makes it difficult to possess the ball, the players will panic. They will cave to the pressure, quickly abandon their style and end up looking like any other team.

      Possession is a long-term investment and the market isn’t always going to be kind to you. You’ll have to weather some rough patches. The other team will take the ball from you. That’s how soccer works. But if you are a possession team that refuses to abandon its style, you’ll see your investment start to grow and then snowball.

      I’ll give you an example from a game my team played a few years back. In the first ten minutes we were under siege and struggled to cross midfield. Our opponent was smothering our short passes and at first we were barely able to string four passes together. But we are a possession team and we believe in the long haul. So when we couldn’t string four passes together, we strung three. And if we couldn’t string three, we strung two. But we kept passing the ball. And even those brief runs of possession, if you can accumulate enough of them, will have an effect.

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