“My secret is practice.” – David Beckham
Have you ever had a teammate that frequently missed team practice? Maybe there was that one player that would attend only one team practice a week and would say that he would rather train on his own? Did these teammates that missed team practice bond well with the team?
Today we are going to explore a question that Blayze professional soccer coach Mike Semenza gets a lot. “Why are team practices so important?” This is a great question and I am going to do my best to explain to you why I believe team practice is important for all players to attend.
Reasons Team Practices Are Important
There are 3 reasons why I think team practices are super important. They are as follows:
Preparation
The first reason team practices are important is individually it allows you to get the physical and mental preparation that you need in order to be more prepared and most confident when it comes to game time.
There’s only so much individual training that you can do that actually translates to the field. When you are on the field, you have all your teammates around you and your coaches are on the sidelines barking out instructions.
Individual training doesn’t translate as well as a team practice can in the preparation you get from the team practices when stepping onto the field for game time.
Team Bonding
The second reason to attend team practice is for your teammates. Going to team practice or training every day allows you to be surrounded by your teammates. Why is that important?
It is important because, in order for you to become a better player, you have to be able to build relationships with your teammates on and off the field.
On the field is obviously a lot more important because being at team training every day, you get to see your teammates go through the same stuff that you do. You can learn about their different skills or their different tendencies. You can learn how they like to play, and all of those things are going to help not only you become a better player, but they are also going to help you make that other player better as well.
That’s the whole point of soccer, to create a group of people who all have different skills and tendencies and take all those differences and ideas and mesh them into one cohesive unit that takes all of that and applies it into a game.
That is not an easy task to do without your team practicing multiple times a week. It is hard to build those relationships and to understand those different skills and tendencies that not only you have but that your teammates have. How you combine them into one cohesive unit is what makes you a team.
The Coaching Staff
Now onto our third point as to why team practices are so important – the coaching staff. You should be at team trainings all the time because the coaching staff are the people that guide everything we just talked about, from the top down.
“Most people get excited about games, but I’ve got to be excited about practice, because that’s my classroom.” – Pat Summitt, Basketball Coach
Those coaches are there to help you and guide you through your individual physical and mental development and training throughout the week as a team.
Your coaches are there to help foster the relationships between you and your teammates and they are there to help you understand the different skillsets and different tactics that you guys all have individually. They help to take those ideas and combine them into a unified team.
That is the job of the coaching staff.
Team Practice Is Worth It
These three reasons are three simple, but clear reasons as to why you should be at every team practice. You get your individual and team physical and mental preparation. You get to improve on your relationship building with your teammates, which will help you all become more of a cohesive unit in understanding more about each other as players.
You will have your coaches at each team practice to help guide all the items we just talked about. They will also pass on their knowledge to you. The coaches will help you take everything that you learned as a team throughout the week and help you apply it to your next game.
This is the goal of becoming a better soccer player. It is being able to absorb all this information you get from practices and trainings and being able to understand the information, then apply it all in a real game. Not only as an individual player, but as a team.
By attending every team practice, it changed me personally. It helped me grow within my team and become a better soccer player. Being able to understand the coaching staff and understanding their goals and expectations for the entire team is an important element in becoming a stronger player.
Take everything you can from team practice and apply it to the game. The concept of team training and building will apply to all teams you join throughout your athletic career. Team bonding will become easier each time. Focus, be attentive, ask questions, and have fun!!
“You might not feel good, and you might not want to practice, but you still go out there and practice as hard as you can.” – Logan Mankins
Learn More With Blaze!
The secret to mastering any skill is practice! Are you looking to become a stronger player? Could you use direct feedback from a professional coach on how to improve your passing skills, communication, or vision on the field?
At Blayze we give you a personalized coaching session from the very best coaches in the world. For a truly unique and personalized feedback experience, submit your performance video to one of Blayze’s highly qualified coaches. The custom-developed coaching session can help you improve your on-field skills, so you are performing at your very best in every game. One easy click here will take you to more details on our coaching sessions.
