As my lad’s coach, at this time of the year, it can be difficult to work out just how much training is good for him from the point of view of him not training too much, keeping his enjoyment going but also still wanting him to keep improving his game.
During the season, on average, he’ll play a game a week and train anywhere between 2 and 4 hours but after a long season and finishing school for a few weeks, is this the time to be letting him relax a little? Or, is this the time to push on ready for next season? Or, do I try to keep his training on a similar level to what he’s used to during the season – once a week with his grassroots team, once a week with CYG and the odd 1:1 session with me thrown in.
As the fixtures don’t come out until some time in August, we booked time off work for our family holiday to make sure we’re back for when the season usually starts, at the beginning of September. This has been the case for the last few years to be honest. None of his football managers have ever said anything about it, but with him being a keeper, so that he doesn’t miss games we’ve always thought that our holidays need to be worked around his football.
Excuse the saying but the goalposts tend to move at this time of year as far as training’s concerned, which doesn’t help with my question of how much training he should be doing. Due to the grassroots player’s holidays, their training is hit and miss for a lot of the 6 weeks holidays. For the same reason, CYG are taking a complete break throughout August.
As the holidays start, the grassroots training can vary from nothing, to one or two sessions a week. There’s only one game left in the Friday night Summer League and there are no more friendlies arranged, so 1:1 training, just him and me, looks like it could be very important to prepare for the new season. As I’ve said before, he wants to keep improving as a keeper and specifically he wants to do as much as he can to be prepared for playing in bigger goals next season
When we’ve talked about taking a break before, he’s said that we don’t know how much other teams and in particular, their goalies, are training over the Summer. Apart from wanting to improve he also wants his team to win games and he wants to be better than the other keepers he comes up against throughout the season. As you can tell, he’s very competitive and as such doesn’t want to lose any opportunity when it comes to making progress.
So as it currently stands, his goalkeeper training at CYG has now finished until the start of September, the final game of the Summer League is at the end of this week and after playing a couple of tournaments (and the Summer League), there aren’t any more friendlies booked in, which just leaves his grassroots training and 1:1’s with me until our holiday comes round at the end of August and as soon as we’re back, the new season will be starting.
My gut feeling is to try to do an hour of 1:1 with him each week, as well as his grassroots. I suppose I’ll have to try to gauge it weekly and take it from there because if I ask his opinion, he’ll want to be doing 1:1’s most nights.
Another side of his development I can work on with him, which he tends to need a bit more encouragement is watching professional goalkeepers. He very rarely watches football on tv but with the EFL restarting this weekend, it gives us chance to watch a couple of keepers up close most weeks. Some of the time when we’re at the Lane, I try to get him to avoid watching where the ball is and instead concentrate on a keeper communicating with his defenders in case of a counter attack, shouting at them to push out of defence, or even just organising them when setting up to defend a corner.
As far as his physical training goes, I guess I’ll just have to trust my judgement and keep the faith.
Keeper of the faith 