A Complete Video Program for Youth Soccer Clubs

In our eBook we talk about 5 separate reasons video will benefit youth soccer clubs. Here are the first few lines from each of these 5 sections of our eBook.

Video for Teaching the Game

Video is now a natural component of learning everywhere -- especially for young people who can’t imagine learning without it. But in general, youth sports clubs and coaches aren’t using video as much as in other areas of education.

Video for coach development

Club directors want to make their coaches better. For one thing, the better the coaches, the less troubleshooting is required and the club’s reputation steadily improves. And then there’s success on the field.

Using video really produces results, especially when you can build a culture of feedback on coaching practice. Sure, it’s a little awkward at first, but after the camera is rolling the coaches probably relax and run their session more naturally than with a staff coach attending in person and scribbling comments on a notepad.

Video for player skills homework

Practice time is limited. Too often, especially at older age groups, individual technical skills take a back seat to drills and small-sided games. One solution is to use video to get kids to do skills homework. This has to be part of all great clubs’ video programs. All the players need is their own ball and a smartphone on a stand or in a parent’s hands.

Video for parent understanding

Club directors and us coaches need parents to understand what we’re trying to accomplish. How many times have we heard parents yelling stuff on the sideline that is counterproductive: incessant screaming of “pressure”, “great kick Taylor!”, “kick it up, Sam!”, “get rid of it”, and “send him!”.  We can ask them not to shout, but wouldn’t it be better to educate them a little so they can ask their kids the right questions after the game.

Video for player evaluations and tryouts

Finally, there’s the toughest part of every director’s job – player evaluations and team formation. How can video help?

You can use video to complement the way you do things now, or you can use it to transform player evaluation entirely.

As a complement:

For one thing, you can record evaluation (tryout) sessions. At the field, if you have 60 kids barging around you only get a few little glimpses of each player and evaluators’ judgments can be all over the map. Is it really worth having evaluators stand around and tick a few boxes or use a rating scale based on four or five touches per player? So why not record them and have staff coaches watch them later, comfortably, and use a player-rating rubric right in the video software that exports a report for you to use in team-formation meetings.

Transform your evaluations completely with video:

How much does the evaluation process currently cost in terms of registration, field costs, paying evaluators to be there in person, and getting their ratings and notes into a spreadsheet to share? Is it worth it? Are the evaluators ratings reliable, given how little they see and the artifical context the players are in? Do they correlate with the season-long judgments of your most knowledgeable, experienced coaches?

What if you put your resources into recording a couple of half-games for each team? That would help the teams, first and foremost, and your club would really stand out. (In fact it’s required by the Club License and Club Standards programs).

1. Get the Square Point of Sale App from the App Store or Google Play. Install it on the phone and the tablet. We recommend doing this at someone’s home using WiFi so you don’t use the phone data. When you’ve got the app, sign in.
2. Get everything charged up. Ideally, you’ll have power accessible and you can plug in the phone and the tablet (if using) and the square card reader. But even if you don’t, you’ll just need to have a place to store the phone and tablet and reader where they can be charged overnight. Jericho Little League had an equipment storeroom next to the concession where they had the charging set up for the tablet and card reader. They left the phone plugged in and hidden in the concession.
3. Put the SIM card into the phone. Turn it on and make sure you have 3G or LTE network service indicated in the top bar and that you can browse to a webpage. Then turn on the WiFi Hotspot on the phone.
   1. Most Android phones let you do this from the notifications bar you can swipe open from the top.
   2. You’ll need to long-press Hotspot. (Or find it in Settings-Network & Internet-Hotspot & Tethering.
   3. Find something like ‘Set up Wi-Fi hotspot’. It’s best if you don’t name the Hotspot with your organization’s name because then people will notice it. It’s probably best to leave it with the default name which is likely the model of the phone.
   4. Enter a ‘Wi-Fi Password’ that you record somewhere for your organization, but don’t share it widely, otherwise your data might get used.
   5. On an iPhone:
      1. Open Settings and select Cellular or Mobile Data
      2. Tap Personal Hotspot and set it to On
      3. It’s best if you don’t name the Hotspot with your organization’s name because then people will notice it. It’s probably best to leave it with the default name which is likely the model of the phone.
      4. Tap ‘Wi-Fi Password’ and enter one that you record somewhere for your organization, but don’t share it widely, otherwise your data might get used.
4. Important! Go into the settings and turn off the updating of apps and the phone operating system. You don’t want it using up your data plan.
   1. For iPhone, disable app updates using this guide. And disable iOS updates using this one.
   2. On Android, disable apps and system updates using this guide.
5. Set up the tablet. Put it on the stand you bought. It’s best to set up the tablet with a PIN that is only known to a few people and the people who will be setting up for sales each day.
   1. First, connect it to your phone Wi-Fi hotspot. You’ll just go to your WiFi settings on the tablet, find the hotspot name from above (probably the phone model), and enter the password. Make sure you get the usual Wi-Fi bars and can get to a simple web page on the tablet browser.
   2. Turn on bluetooth from the settings menu. Put the charged-up card reader withing a few feet of the tablet.
   3. Open the Square Point of Sale app on the tablet. Go to Settings – Card Readers. Tap the Connect a reader button. Follow the instructions there, which will get you to use the little teeny button on the side of the card reader.
6. Now test the reader. In the tablet POS app, on the main menu choose Checkout. There should be a tab or a button called “Keypad”. Choose it and enter something like $1. That’ll go into a blue bar that says “Charge $1.00”. Tap that. Then you can use the card reader by inserting a card or tapping a card or a phone that has Apple Pay or Google Pay. It should work!
7. Go to Transactions on the app and see that you’ve made the transaction. If you want to try refunding that dollar transaction you can, following the guide here.
8. At the end of each day the equipment has to be returned to the charging location.

Good luck!

Once you’ve got the setup working, you’ll want to add your items to Square so that your staff and volunteers can easily tap on squares on a grid to choose the items the customer is buying. It’s cool – you can add pictures and sort items into categories like clothing or food. You can do that in the app or on a computer. Again, it’s best to do this at home or in an office using real Wi-Fi so you don’t use up your phone data plan. But Jericho did a little bit on the fly during the season and it didn’t use much data.

Here is a Word doc with instructions you can give to the people who’ll be setting up and making sales. You can edit it a bit to fit your context.

Things to consider

Some organizations use Square for both card and cash transactions so they can track revenue and inventory. You should consider whether you do it for cash as well or just card transactions.

You might want to examine some of the alternatives to Square.

You’ll have to figure out the best setup for charging to keep the equipment secure. It may be that someone has to take them home at night and return them or pass them on to the next people working.

Why Use Video Homework?

Athletes are always looking for ways to improve, and one of a coach’s most important jobs is to help them get better. Coaches tend to focus on areas of improvement needed by an entire team. This often leads to neglecting to develop each individual with the individualized practice that they need. This isn’t the fault of the coach. After all, coaches are dealing with 10, 15, 20, even 30 players at a time. It’ll take forever to go player by player and watch them practice and fix what needs to be fixed. With today’s technology however, coaches can find ways to help individuals more easily than they ever could in the past.

When watching film as a team or as an individual, athletes have a tendency to focus on their highlights and gloss over things that could be improved. However, though looking at highlights is necessary sometimes to boost confidence, athletes would be well served to work on areas of their game that they can improve. By taking a coach’s instructions and applying them to their training, an athlete can vastly improve their technical ability. Doing this through video homework is a time-efficient way of making this happen.

In the last decade, teams of researchers worldwide have looked at video feedback in sports. Their results have been unanimously positive in showing the benefits of the use of video to record skills practice. The biggest payoff for coaches and their players is that the coach can make sure the practice actually happens! Players self-record on phones and upload. It’s that easy. The coach only has to watch a fraction of it; just a quick glance to check that the player was doing the skill that was assigned.

How to use Video Skills Homework

Coaches and their players need a private site where video can be uploaded and organized. It’s a lot like video assignments in art schools or for business presentation training. The coach can define an Assignment– like bringing down a high ball in soccer, or bumping a volleyball, or a step-back move in basketball – and then players submit the phone-camera recordings of themselves to that electronic ‘hand-in box’. The coach can go through the videos super-fast, one-by-one, or just get a report that they’ve been submitted.

The next step, if the coach can take the time, is nudging the players to see what they’re not doing properly and gently asking them to try again. With some video platforms like WeVu, but not Hudl, you can be watching an athlete-recorded video, pause it by clicking in a comment box, make a comment that sticks right to that time and place on the video, and the video resumes. (That’s also awesome if you are doing game analysis!).  Players really appreciate this personal touch. Players can join in and ask questions or respond to the coach’s pointers.