Brown recaps one month since reporting
9/2/2015 7:20:00 PM | Soccer
From The Pitch: "Getting Started" by eighth-year Sam Houston soccer coach Tom Brown.
The team is closing in on one month of having reported for preseason camp. The team has shown great commitment by coming in during the second summer session to get ready for the season. All of our freshmen and quite a few other players combined summer school with strength and conditioning work to get prepared. The players were able to improve individual fitness and train together during this time. It allowed our players to get familiar with each other on the field and improved our start. With our fitness testing, we found that a majority of our players had reached fitness levels that were higher than when the finished our spring season.
Based on everything above, we decided that we did not need to do traditional “two-a-days” and focused on one very good session every morning. Multiple sessions each day lead to fatigue and eventually injuries. I feel many programs use this time to focus on improving fitness instead of improving their team's familiarity with each other and helping the players understand their tactical roles. We were able to plan our program to increase our understanding, decrease fatigue, and provide the appropriate recovery for our players throughout the weeks. We have each of our players wear the POLAR Team2 heart rate monitoring system so that we can monitor their training loads each session.
So far we have played two scrimmages and four games this season. We are 2-2 at this point. We have tried to play opponents that would stretch our limits and put us under pressure. These games have given us a learning opportunity to help us get ready for Southland Conference play in about two weeks. This weekend we play Baylor. They are a very high-tempo team that will put each of our players in some uncomfortable situations throughout the game. I am interested to see how each player handles that pressure and how they try to solve it. This will probably be one of the fastest games we play and we expect an end to end game.
For me, the last six months have been very busy. Besides our work here, I have been serving as an assistant coach with the NWSL's Houston Dash. The opportunity to work with those players on a daily basis has been a great experience. I have been mainly responsible for training the goalkeepers each day and then providing the scouting reports on our upcoming opponents each week. Being able to work with Randy Waldrum again (I started my coaching career with him 23 years ago), has been fantastic. I have been able to discuss tactics, player management and many other topics that we have been able to bring back and enhance what we do here.
After Friday's game against Baylor, the team will have a short recovery session on Saturday and then not get back together until Tuesday morning. Hopefully this extra time off will allow a few bumps and bruises to heal. I will follow up with another update in a couple of weeks.
