Team Training

As its name suggests, Team Training teaches individuals to use their personal talents in a way that serves the greater good of the team. A task easily understood in theory but more difficult in practice, as players may be transitioning over from individual-oriented sessions like a private lesson or repetition activity.

Team Training excludes individual work, which is addressed thoroughly in other training modes. Team Training takes both a player’s “soccer personality” (her likes and dislikes) and her technical ability, and turns them into a working piece of the machine we call a team. Using our own collection of tactical training games like Colors or Lanes or First and Second Supporter, to name a few, our players develop “communication” skills in the language of soccer which we call “support” or off-ball movement. 90% of offense is what we do when we don’t have the ball, therefore 90% of team offensive training must focus on this part of our game.

The player in possession is only as good as the support around her, or as founding father of Soviet hockey, Anatoli Tarasov put it, Better to have one player rely on four than four players rely on one. The world’s best players are usually the ones who can “see” everything around them at all times and under the most stressful of circumstances. Awareness forms a cornerstone of our Team Training, because good decisions are the result of good information-gathering.

On the defensive side of the ball, the LFA approach is less position-oriented (reliance on defensive “systems”) and more in favor of teaching how to work with teammates to maintain structure, marking and applying pressure on the ball. This way, when the player moves on to greater soccer challenges beyond LFA, she will possess the tools needed to adapt to new systems rather than being an expert at just one old one.

Many programs teach team principles in a strict, structured format that limits the creativity that makes soccer a great game. They will tell players that they are playing a specific position, such as the '10' position, or a central midfielder, and then teach those roles and responsibilities. They instruct the player how to play and react to specific situations. Unfortunately, this approach teaches the players how to succeed in an artificial situation that is rarely encountered in games; defenders tend to be more dynamic than a cone. While LFA Rush certainly has formations and positions, they only create a loose structure to the game. Players are encouraged to be dynamic and creative and this gives our teams the flexibility that most teams don't have. It is not unusual for players to play forward, mid and back within a single game. Maintaining structure and working with teammates is far more important and it translates to every position on the field which allows our players positional flexibility.

An example of this can be seen in during games when LFA Rush teams may play multiple formations within a single game, switching from a 4-3-3, to a 4-2-4 to a 4-4-2 based on the game situation and opposing team's weaknesses even though we may not practice those formations. Since we are not cemented into a specific formation with players stuck in a certain roles, we can keep one step ahead of the competition. This can only be accomplished with our unique Team Training approach.