Under Pressure!

Get the ball! Get the ball! Get the ball!

If I had a penny for every time I heard a parent yell "Get the ball!", I could buy a couple of tacos. And not taco tuesday tacos either. We're talking deluxe, over the top, guacamole on the side type tacos.

Get the ball! We yell this at (to?) our kids for years, and for good reason. The ball is where the action is. We don't want our kid, our future soccer star, to continue to chase butterflies or pick dandelions. We want them to play soccer, and playing soccer means kicking the ball!

Get the ball!

No wonder it's so hard to get our defenders to stop trying to "get the ball." They've been told to do this for years. It's ingrained in their soccer psyche. Like my dog Maisy, start yelling "Get the ball!", and players start juming up and down and salivating.

But we have to stop. We have to stop as parents, and we have to stop as players. Our first thought can't be "Get the Ball!", it needs to be "Pressure!"

Pressure!
Pressure!
Pressure!

Perhaps one of the most important fundamentals of defense is also the hardest to teach young players. The closest person to the ball does not have the responsibility to win the ball. Let me repeat that more boldly:

The closest person to the ball does not have the responsibility to win the ball.

The first defender should instead concentrate on:

• Slowing down the attack.
• Applying just enough pressure to get the attacker's head down.
• Making the attack predictable and push the attacker to the least dangerous part of the field.
• Being patient.
• Only attempting to tackle the ball if the attacker makes a mistake.

While theses principals may not apply in every situation, they give us a much better place to start than "Get the ball!"

EDIT:

We don't always mean what we say!

A few years ago, a friend of mine was trying to potty train his two-year-old boy. He was frustrated because everytime the boy needed to go to the bathroom, he would grab hold of his privates. This was a little embarassing to my friend when it would happen at the store, at church, or on national tv.

Why did his kid do this? At first, we assumed it's just something kids do. But then, I noticed something. We were driving down the road, when the little boy said, "Excuse me dear Father, I need to use the restroom (or something like that).

What his dad replied was a bit of a revelation to me. He said, "We're almost home. You need to hold it for just a minute." He literally told his son to hold it! Who can blame the kid for actually holding it?

What's my point? Well, last night at practice, I found myself yelling at players to "Get the ball." I realized it's a pretty common expression on the field that doesn't actually mean that you want the player to get the ball. Instead, every time I yelled it, I really meant for the player to pressure the player who had the ball.

Dang it! I'll try to do better and yell pressure. But, try to remember that if someone yells "Ball!" or "Get the Ball!" what they really mean is "Pressure!"