A focal point of my own personal story has been picking up the sport of soccer. Now, one thing I briefly mention but never really dive into is the fact that I really only ever played maybe four games of soccer total in my life before diving in and signing up. Now, as a kid I always played foot hockey at recess (basically soccer with very small nets and using tennis ball rather than a soccer ball). However, I very rarely played as a goalie. Fast forward at least a decade and here I am taking up central position in front of the biggest net I’ve ever seen. Not only this, but I am doing it relatively successfully, playing at a relatively competitive level for “amateur” soccer and eventually winning the only championship I have very really won in my history of sport participation. So, how was I able to go from someone who could barely kick a soccer ball correctly to someone who has excelled at the sport? Some of the following tips and tricks are pretty common sense, but some of them you may not believe.
Put in the work!
This is the common sense one I am talking about. There is this common belief that you need to put in 10,000 hours to master anything. While I do not believe that the magic number is 10,000 hours, I do believe that you have to put in the time to master the skills. You have to get the reps in to master anything. You have to solidify the mind-muscle connections and make the skills needed to master any sport reactionary as oppose to a conscious thought. Think of it like auto-pilot. For example, when you see Ronaldo pulling off a sweet dribbling trick with the ball, or you see a football player make a beautiful one-handed catch, you can be guaranteed that the player has practiced that move hundreds of times. They are not even thinking about the skill they are performing, it just kind of happens. For me, this meant going to the local park or school, finding a fence or a wall, and kicking a ball against said wall or fence hundreds and hundreds of times. As a goalkeeper, I need to be able to launch a ball down the field, so I had to practice that powerful goal kick. Also, the game of soccer is evolving and goalkeepers nowadays are required to have some decent footwork skills with a ball. I had zero foot skills when I started, so much so that on the rare games I played as a striker, I had a defender laugh at me when I tried to dribble passed him. So, obviously I had to become more comfortable with my feet. As a goalkeeper, most of the work you need to do to become better involves a partner. You can’t take shots on yourself. So on the days when I didn’t have a training partner, I would set up cones in the basement or the backyard and spend hours doing common dribbling drills to catch up to my goalkeeper peers.
2.You have to be a little obsessed, in a healthy way:
This one goes against the grain with what most of the population thinks. I mean, think about it. If you want to play a sport, and you care about doing well (I’ve got that competitive gene in me), you are going to have ground to make up. Some of your competition may have been in the sport since they were 5 years old. I’m not saying you are going to make up all that experience in a week, month, or a year, but you have to put in a little bit more mental power than the average joe. Again, I picked up soccer at 25 years old. Let’s assume most kids start playing at 5. That’s 20 years of experience, watching soccer, picking up play patterns, and game cues that I don’t have. Now I am in a situation where I have to try to pick up these cues and patterns as quickly as possible. One way I did this was by becoming a little obsessed. I watched as many soccer games as I could. Sometimes this meant that I would throw on a game in the background while I studied or wrote an essay, but the game was on and I made sure to pay special attention to my position. Not only did I do this, but since there are only so many games per week that I could watch, I would also watch YouTube videos of goalkeeper save highlights. I paid special attention to the position of the goalkeeper and the form they used to save the ball. I would watch the highlight reels of the keepers I idolized, and this helped me pick up their style (more on this in the next point). The point here is that I spent a lot of time learning the sport. All my free time was spent learning soccer. I watched games, watched YouTube videos, read books, and interacted with people in the sport who knew more than I did about the sport. All the time paid off as I eventually became a coach after a year of learning the sport (and I knew what I was doing). In the words of CT Fletcher, “To be the best, you must be obsessed”. Not only is this okay to do, but it is necessary.
3. Have a role model, and use them as inspiration for your own technique:
Before I dive into this point, here is a disclaimer. This point is for those who are getting into a sport at an older age. If you are a youth athlete, and you are looking to make it pro, ignore this tip to a certain extent. What I mean by this is that you should still have role models, but do not just copy them. To make it pro, you have to make your sport your own. You have to do something that has never been done or has never been seen before if you want to be the top of the top. Now, if you are an “older athlete”, I mean like 20ish or older and getting into a new sport, chances are you won’t be getting to that pro level (not because you aren’t good, but rather because there are several stereotypes in our current ideology of sport that I don’t think are necessary true – more on this in another article). So once you are starting a new sport at this age, you can get away with (and what I believe streamlines the process) is modeling your skillset around a current player. Think about it, you have 20ish years to make up, you do not have the luxury of inventing new moves (yet) and you aren’t the first person who is trying to get good at a sport. So model yourself after this player. Be the Messi or the Ronaldo of your Sunday Rec league (for all it’s worth). Learn their skill set. This will make it easier for you to develop your skill set. This is the approach I have done with a bit of a twist. What I did was model myself after several goalkeepers that I idolize, like De Gea and Buffon. I found it was easier to develop this skills in this way.
4. Use Video Games to Supplement Your Training
Now this one is probably the most controversial point but one of the things that helped me the most. So again, you are 20 years behind the eight ball in terms of learning the patterns of the sport you are trying out. If you are lucky, you will be able to utilize video games to help learn the sport. This point is less about learning the physical skills necessary to learn the game and more about the cognitive point of the game. I even suggest this to the youth athletes I work with. The reason for this is that in scientific studies, it has been shown that a major difference between expert and amateur athletes is the ability the expert athletes have to process information regarding their sport. This is known partial as a skill called chunking. By having this ability, athletes can take in and process information much quicker than their amateur counterparts. By processing information quicker, these athletes can then react quicker and read plays better. Therefore, what I would do to get a little extra work in was that in the evenings or when I was sick/injured, I would fire up my Xbox and play the latest edition of FIFA. I would start a career as a goalkeeper and play several games through the eyes of my virtual character. By this method, I was able to learn how to read certain plays and recognize situations. I was effectively learning how to chunk together game situations. I didn’t just have to play the “Be a Pro” mode to do this either. Playing the game as it was also allowed me to put myself in my opponent’s mind. Being able to think like a striker helps me to anticipate a shot or a pass. So fire up that video game console and start the learning process.
So there are my tips in a nutshell. Of course there are extra things you can do like strength and conditioning that will yield additional benefits. I find the more in shape you are, the easier it is to make gains in the sport of your choice. But if you follow these four tips, it will definitely escalate your game to one where you are keeping pace with the rest of your league. Good luck and see you out on the field!
