Friday 2 November 2012

Worcester Goalkeeping Academy Session 2


Friday 12th October: Worcester Goalkeeping Academy Session 2
This session started with me being introduced to Ashley an experienced and well qualified goalkeeping coach who I would be working with this evening. It was good to see how Ashley works as he was clearly a very good coach. We talked about what sort of things we should work on during the session and decided on footwork and handling as they are clearly key aspects of a goalkeeper’s game. We set up the 1st drill and then the goalkeepers arrived to start the session.
Ashley led a brief warm-up before asking me to do some dynamic stretching with the ‘keepers. I duly did this and took them through some basic dynamic stretching such as open the gate and close the gate. After I had finished doing this we went back over to Ashley and started the 1st drill. I went in a pair with Freddy as we had an odd number, the same as last week. We did a basic footwork drill which involved me shouting out a number and Freddie side footing his was to the cone whilst always looking forwards at me, the server. Once Freddie had touched the cone he would have to set himself back in the middle ready for me to volley the ball straight at him. This was a good experience for me has I was able to help Freddie with a number of aspects of his footwork, particularly making sure he kept his body facing forwards. After this we continued to do some work on footwork with handling and I helped Mike with his handling because he was not using the W shape in his hands, often causing him to spill the ball. Once we went through the 'W' technique for catching the ball properly I saw a large improvement of Mikes handling, I just had to keep reminding him about it so he got into the rhythm of doing it every time.
We finished with small game where the goalkeepers would have to turn away from goal wait for the shout from Ashley saying ‘turn’ then a shot would come at them from one of 3 angles meaning they had to react to it. They would then have to try and catch it. If they spilled it one of the other 2 goalkeepers could try and tap it in, ‘sniffers’. If the goalkeeper didn’t let a goal in after 3 shots he had kept a clean sheet and got 1 point. If the ‘sniffers’ tapped the ball in at any point they would also get 1 point. This was a good competitive end to our little session.
As with last week all of the small groups got together at the end to do a crossbar challenge and once again I failed to hit it. At the end Julia came up to me and explained they were short on numbers for the next 3 weeks with coaches. She asked me whether I could lead a session on my own with my own set of goalkeepers, I of course said yes as this will give me valuable experience for coaching on my own. I look forwards to next week, better get planning!

Luke Shearing

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