Thoughts on the Most Boring Game in History!

Well, I think the title of this post pretty much sums up my thoughts on the US v Canada game.  Despite holding the lions share of possession, the US performance was still one of the most boring to date.  I will briefly summarize some of the key points, but there is one I specifically want to address in detail as it is a systemic issue amongst coaches in the US and one of the biggest fallacies we continually coach our players into.

Talent ID Part 2

As I mentioned in my last post one of my resolutions for this year was to post more often, and I’ve settled on posting twice each month.  It’s something I feel is achievable given my busy schedule, but also allows me the time to post meaningful posts that hopefully is beyond or different than what you could find elsewhere.

To close this mini-series, I wanted to discuss the attributes I, specifically, look for when evaluating talent.

Talent ID

Again, I apologize for the delay.  One of my news years resolutions was to post more regularly and hopefully that will come to fruition.  I joined my state’s ODP staff this year and went through the tryout phase in mid-December.  This weekend we will hold our first training sessions with those selected to the state pools.  I cannot explain to you how frustrating a process this was at times.  What some people constitute as talent or lack of talent is mind-boggling and routinely during the try out process I found myself being at odds with the other evaluators.  To be honest, I found that a very reassuring fact. What I have found is that amongst the numerous issues we face with coaching and development, perhaps one of the biggest is talent identification.  If we don’t know what to look for how can we develop quality players?  Resoundingly, I have found that at every level, few have this ability.  In this post, I want to give you a glimpse at a few principles I follow when evaluating talent