Plano Labor Day Tournament

If your player’s desire is to play soccer at the next level, then these types of formats are the best place to not only measure how they match up to the best players but it also helps them develop their game as well.
Last fall we got our first taste of top level competition during premier league and we competed fairly well but there still existed a gap that kept me from feeling completely confident that we were ready to compete at the top level.
As we prepared for the regional tournament last spring I could see that we were starting to take our game to a new level. When we finally played in Frisco we came out with a 2-2 tie to the North Carolina State champs a 2-1 loss to the South Texas State champs who beat us 9-0 the previous time we met and then a 2-0 loss to the eventual National runner up CASL team from North Carolina.
I came out with a better feel for what we needed to prepare for and its been a large piece of our focus this fall.

It was really odd in that we had similar results this time as we did at the regional tournament, a 2-2 tie, 1-0 loss and a 2-0 loss. I really felt in each game we could or should have won. So to leave without making it out of pool play was a bit of a let down for everyone, especially when the girls put forth the effort that they did into each game.

However, here are the positives of the tournament. Individually I saw several players begin to take their game to a new level both as soccer players and as competitive athletes.

As a team our pace of play really caught a few teams off guard, which allowed us to attack extremely well. I felt we did a really good job of stringing passes together to create opportunity, which means we played possession with intent behind it versus just keeping the ball. We had numerous legitimate opportunities to score in these matches and in a number of different ways. The girls did a really good job of mixing up our game. We had a number of long ball and seam chances. We had a large number of overlap, under lap and combination opportunities. The girls did just a great job of recognizing the different things we have been working on. The bad part of this is that we didn’t finish as well as we could or should have. Obviously, I take a lot of ownership for this failure as a coach.

I think in all 3 games we controlled the game roughly 85% of the time. When you play at this level of competition if you can keep control 55% of the time you should be able to win. It’s those minutes that we don’t have the ball that really makes a difference; you have to make smart decisions defensively. Your going to play teams that all have great attacking players so we have to execute both as a unit and as an individual because their will be one v one situations. In both situations we broke down, we didn’t transition back defensively as a unit very well leaving ourselves vulnerable in 1 v 1 situations and then we broke down in these situations as well. This allowed our opponents to get numbers or 1v1 break away runs with them ending up getting goals which should have been prevented.
Even though we had some defensive break downs that resulted in us giving up some goals, we still didn’t put the ball in the goal which we also need to do to win matches.
This team has always played hard but I saw some real passion come out this weekend. I’ve talked about this before but I don’t think a player getting on top of another about how they are not pulling their weight is a bad thing. It shows me they really want to win. I’ve talked to the girls about this before. If your teammate is getting on you then instead of getting defensive you need to think about what they are saying and change what you are doing.
I really enjoyed the tournament.
I would really like to hear everyone’s thoughts on playing in these type of formats.