First pre-season training session

[Matt Hallam]

Just wanted to thank everyone who turned up for the first pre-season training session of the season yesterday. Despite the weather being awful from start to finish the session went very well and was definitely a worthwhile exercises.

It was good to see everyone who attended put the effort in and do everything that was asked of them positively.

Some things that were noticed from the session were:

- Not only did Andy turn up 20 minutes late but he wasn't wearing his Lycra and despite the fact it was pi$$ing it down he was wearing sunglasses!!

- Harry has already managed to clatter a number of players. Paul and Sam in particular seemed to kop it most.

- Newbie James immediately endeared himself to the squad by clattering Harry ;D It's about time someone dished it back!!!


I know we only had 11 there yesterday but when you consider that we had seven squad members absent for legitimate reasons you can see that we will have a large squad come kick off time. And I'm hopeful that we'll have closer to 16 players present next Sunday.

A good positive start. Lets make sure we carry this forward into the season ;D

[Matt Hallam]

Oh and by the way, if anyone has any suggestions, comments or ideas about training then let me know either on here or by email, text, etc.

We're always looking to get the most out of each session, including Wednesday football, and if anyone has any ideas about how we could improve them we'd be interested to hear them ;D

[Fran]

we can do a training session on wednesday like on Sunday?

[Matt Hallam]

A few seasons back we used to but at the time it proved quite unpopular. After a hard day at work a lot of the players didn't feel like/want to do a physically demanding session. Obviously as soon as someone doesn't like doing something then they tend not to turn up so we felt that it would be better just to play football in order to try and keep the number of participants high. You'd be surprised how much your fitness benefits from just playing football though.

HOWEVER (and I'm going to keep saying this till I'm blue in the face ;D), this is YOUR football club and if enough squad members wanted to change what we do on Wednesdays then Craig and myself would be more than happy to look into it.

Fran has started the ball rolling what does everyone else think?

Thanks for your input Fran.

[gaz]

Shooting practice - we could put both the goals together?

[Matt Hallam]

Shooting practice is certainly something we could consider. Unfortunately we couldn't put the goals together to create a bigger goal because it makes the whole structure unstable and as they aren't ours and we can't afford to damage them thats not an option.

We can make them wider so they are 12' x 6' but there are a few reasons why we don't include shooting drills in our training sessions.

1, Too much standing around - When doing drills like this there ends up being a lot of people standing around in line waiting for their turn. Currently the training sessions are designed to make sure that everyone is involved all of the time.

2, Will one shooting practice session really work? - I don't think so. To be able to see a marked improvement in shooting (or any other skill to be exact) it has to be practiced regularly throughout the season. A one-off session isn't going to give us a noticeable improvement.

3, Building the goal, dismantling the goal, building the goal, etc - The flow of the whole training session would be severely disrupted as we built the large goal, then had to dismantle it to build the two smaller goals for the games at the end.


In general Gaz the idea of having a session on shooting practice, or crossing, or free kicks, etc is a good one. I don't know if you remember the training sessions T, T, T, Tony used to put on but he used to run these during pre-season and they were good.

However, the team and it's training style has changed since then. We only have two weeks of pre-season training and we now play more friendlies.

THAT SAID, and as I keep saying, if enough players thought that running these sessions through the season would be beneficial and wanted to organise something we would certainly look into it. We could perhaps arrange 30 minutes every two weeks/month to practice shooting on a Wednesday. We could try and work some specific drills for other skills in as well.

What do you think?