Jeremy Tosaya: 'Kids must be centre of your environment'

SCW: How much should you be talking in practice?

JT: "You have to be intentional about when you talk and what you’re talking about, instead of just telling them what to do all the time. It depends on what you’re doing and who you’re talking to.

“One company that was talking to us were doing player metrics and saying active participation by players should be 75%. Here in the US, we’re usually around 50%.

“Active participation would be players playing a game versus standing or waiting in lines. So if a player leaves training with less than 75% of active participation, we’ve failed that player. 

“But again, it’s for the individual. Maybe I saw a technical breakdown three times in a row in how they receive the ball and so I might pull them off and talk to them about it. You don’t have to stop the entire activity to focus on one player’s technical breakdown.

“With my teams, even when we did bigger scrimmages - 8v8, 9v9, 11v11 - my players knew If I stepped onto the field to talk to an individual player, they kept playing.

"Overall, for each individual player, you want 75%. I don’t know where that stat came from, but it sounds pretty good to me. As a player, I would be wanting to play 75% of practice.”

SCW: Does that approach differ depending on the age group you are working with?

JT: "I think it does. My son’s eight, I’ve coached him since he was an under four. I coached for 20 years and coaching his U4s team was probably the hardest six weeks of my entire coaching career.

“In the United Soccer Coaches diplomas, they say the average child now has the attention span of their age plus seven seconds.

"When I started teaching and coaching, I thought it was their age in minutes. So I called to verify and they’re like, ‘It’s seconds’. 

“My son is eight. The attention span for him and his team is eight plus seven seconds. So you get 15 seconds to communicate information to players.

"If you give them a break for water, and I’m going to communicate to them during that break, it needs to be concise and fast. And I should probably check for understanding before we go back into the activity to make sure they comprehended what I said. 

“I just got asked to coach the local high school team. I’ve never coached high school. I’ve only ever coached high school-aged players in club. I was thinking ’this is going to be a lot better than coaching those U8s’.

“But actually it’s 14-to-18 seconds, plus seven. So It’s not going to be much different. It’s 25 seconds instead of 15 seconds.”

"They say the average child has the attention span of their age plus seven seconds..."

SCW: Do you often see a temptation for coaches to say everything they know? Or feel like they have to prove themselves?

JT: "I see it all the time in the courses we run. Coaches will bring everybody in and go through their entire list of coaching points before they start the activity. And if attention spans are 25 seconds, they get the first point out and they’ve lost the team after that.

“They’re going through nine or 10 points - ’Today we’re going to work on building out of the back, so outside backs, I want you to get high and all the way to the touchlines,  get your hips open to the field. Center-backs, I want you to get to the corners of the penalty area, receive the ball across your body with your outside foot. Goalkeepers…’. 

“They’re spending five, six, seven minutes to get their activities going. The only thing that mattered was the first 25 seconds. It’s way too long. I was definitely guilty of that. 

“We need to get the activity going. We need to get the kids engaged. My comment to coaches at the courses is, ’stop it when you see something to fix, so you don’t have to go through all those coaching points’. 

“If you’ve been working on that stuff, they should know some of them. Stop and fix the things you see as trends or that are breakdowns. Don’t try and fix everything before you even start the activity.

“That’s something we do really poorly here in the US. That’s when you’re driving by a training session and you see the coach standing and the players around them looking completely bored with the session.