The day began with breakfast followed by our traditional 4 v 4 game on the small astroturf soccer court at the facility here. The speed of play is shooting through the roof as we get used to the size and it's a great way to sweat out all the breakfast jamon. During the morning there were also sightings of Vicente del Bosque and Roberto Carlos at our hotel. I'll be pestering for a photo if we see them again tomorrow. Next, we went to watch the Spain Women's Futsal Team training in the Futsal facility here. It was great to see the sort of training they do in a space like that - I know that many coaches in U.S., myself included, are forced to train large numbers of players in very tight indoor areas during the winter. There were creative technical stations followed by a possession game and then a small-sided game that focused on rehearsing their set-pieces. There was some great goalkeeper training involving repetitions of diving technique by having to keep a balloon in the air. Spain Women's Futsal - Possession game with rotational movement (20m x 20m) 3 v 3 + 1 with targets on sides. As the team in possession connects with the target on one side, the target on the opposite side must rotate into the grid while an interior players moves out. Alvaro, the Fitness Coach for the Atletico de Madrid Women's Team and also a boys' coach in the U10 Academy, came to speak with us about his role at the club. He spoke a little bit about the culture and philosophy at Atletico - emphasizing that soccer is more than technique and tactics but is also intricately linked with human qualities such as - pride, passion, and emotion. When speaking about the Atletico de Madrid 'Game Model' he noted that the purpose of having a unifying game model is so that players, when faced with a problem, will go about solving it in the same way. As the fitness coach for the Women's Team, he is responsible for the periodization of the training program and works on the scale of the whole season, broken down into mesocycles and then broken down week by week. Because the Women's Team has limited resources, Alvaro had devised his own subjective system to monitor workload and the physical condition of the players - I thought that this kind of system would be very useful for coaches working without Heart-Rate Monitors and GPS Trackers. Basically, he would ask each player how fresh/fatigued she felt on a scale of 1-to-10 prior to each day's session. Those daily numbers were recorded and looked at carefully against the intensity of duration of each exercise in training. I haven't done it justice here, but Alvaro's documentation of each player's workload was very impressive. Finally, we asked him about how the youth player development is structured at Atletico. On the boys' side, they have over 300 teams, starting as young as U5. The players play 7 v 7 or 8 v 8 until the age of 13 which is when they transition to playing 11 v 11. The non-soccer highlight of the day came when we were taken for lunch at El Rincon del Abuelo Moi - a local horse club down a dirt road on the outskirts of Madrid. We were treated to an authentic Spanish experience - the table was continually stocked with jamon, bread, rice dishes, stew paella, beer, wine and then dessert. The food kept coming and we kept eating. In a food coma, we got back on the bus to go to Rayo Vallecano's beautiful training complex that contained approximately 6 full-size pitches, some turf and some grass. A number of teams were training, including the first team, so it was difficult to focus in on one session for fear of missing something special in another one. I mostly watched the U16s and the 1st team - which was very impressive. Rayo Vallecano First Team Warm-up: Passing Pattern - 8 minutes (VIDEO) Every player (~20) got plenty of touches and was almost always moving. I enjoyed the variety of the exercise as the players were exposed to passing, receiving, give-&-gos, moving to create 3rd line passes, opening up, dribbling, and agility. Pass and move - 5 minutes Possession: 3 circle game with GKs (VIDEO) 10 v 10 possession, teams must connect with GKs in 3 circles. They played three 4 minute rounds with 3 mins rest and moved the circles each time (putting them on opposite wings as well as centrally). The game was played at maximum intensity. 11 v 11 Game in shortened field - three 4 minute games.
After the session we returned to our hotel to watch the crazy Atletico match and then capped the evening with the traditional 4 v 4 game under the lights on the astroturf. Tomorrow we are going to see Atletico Academy teams train in the morning before going to the Santiago Bernabeu for Real Madrid vs. Manchester City - I am not guaranteeing any blog posts tomorrow!
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Jeremy HurdleSoccer coach from Philadelphia traveling to Madrid for 10 days with a group of 15 coaches to experience the coaching and soccer culture at some of Spain's finest clubs.
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