UD St Albans: Summer Term Summary
April & May
Whilst our Little Dragons classes worked hard on hand, eye, ball coordination skilled sessions in a very fun way, I must say - Bravo Coach Rob and Alex!
Our Foundation & UD Girls classes focused on ball mastery, knowing and perfecting all different types of the part of the foot to use, we built up the pace when the children got more confident. Ball mastery is a vital part of any aged session and something that we'll always include.
We also worked on our ABCs - Agility, Balance and Coordination - very important for our Foundation players to understand and to add into their footballing game.
June
As our Little Dragons grew in size and ability, we were able to put them on the ball for longer, so their speed of learning grew, we were seriously impressed with the development they had made from their first session.
Our Foundation & UD Girls classes worked on small sided games and improving their decision making when in possession of the ball.
Small sided games are always a great way of ensuring players touch the ball more frequently and also face the task of making quick decisions due to the smaller field size.
July
At the start of July, we worked on Defending v Attacking, many grassroots clubs focus on the attacking side of play and often leave out the importance of defending, we think you can coach both at the same time and when overlooking each group, it was fantastic to see - you could start to see the switch in the children's game play and knowing when to commit and the actual thought process running through their mind, such as space and when to pass.
The latter of July we focused on match-play practice - again, match play often gets overlooked at the end of a training session - we like to elongate our match practices at the end of term, as it's a really good way to see each child's development and we can coach the rights and the wrongs quite easily.
All in all, for a very first UD Term in St Albans, it's been a smashing one and we would all like to thank you for being part of UD - it's amazing to see all the children out learning and developing both individually as well as a team.
Autumn Term
The future is bright for our UD players - as we continue honing our skills and perfect our game, our older children and UD Girls will represent UD in some competitive friendly matches. This is a brilliant development phase to see our players get more of an understanding and allows us to set training topics on what we need to work on for League games next year.
We'll send out all the details next month.