U8 Academy

Under construction

What is an academy?

 An academy is more than a soccer program. It is a philosophy, a culture and a way of doing things. The Lightning Academy motto is “Respicio et praesto ad vitam” which translated means: “Respect and responsibility for life.” Ideally we expect sport to transfer lessons of character and life skills development to our children. In reality the Academy realises that the adults involved must consistently teach and demonstrate these traits using soccer as our testing ground. Respect and responsibility are central components through- out the academy program. Following these dual standards the establishment of an academy program will also ensure that there is long-term continuity in the development of those who participate. Kanata Soccer is fully committed to the Lightning Academy and recognises the importance of the appropriate long-term development of youth.

Why did the Academy get formed?

Kanata Soccer is committed to Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD), the new Canadian model of sport development.  This is represented through the Canadian Soccer Association with their Long-Term Player Development (LTPD) model – a sport specific adaptation of LTAD.  These models are based on scientific facts associated with growth, maturation and development.  They are concerned with providing player centred programs that are age appropriate in their content and applicable specifically to Canada and Canadians.  The Academy program is Kanata Soccer’s interpretation of the developmentally appropriate soccer requirements for participants under the age of twelve as represented in the LTAD and LTPD models.

What is the goal of the Academy?

The goal of the Lightning Academy is to begin to nurture over the long-term our member’s desire to pursue the realisation of their full soccer potential. Other aims that flow from this goal include 1) the production of a larger quantity and better quality of representative soccer players; 2) better results for Kanata Soccer at a representative level within the district, region and province; and 3) more elite level soccer development opportunities for individual players.  While the Academy hopes to help produce better soccer players, the program is rooted in the fundamentals of activity for life.  Kanata Soccer understands that it is important to have programs in which our members can reach their full potential.  However, the majority of our members – including our elite participants – will eventually play the game for fun and for health benefits.  There are core values within the Academy program that contribute to developing the traits necessary to realise one’s full potential and at the same time promote activity for life.

How does the Academy go about nurturing full soccer potential?

Player identification and selection – Academy entrance is limited and competitive (maximum 60 per age level and gender). Therefore, participation in a selection process is required. Participation in the program is not a right, it is a privilege. Participants who do not follow the standards of respect and responsibility set out in the program will be asked to leave.

Individual player development – We place players with qualified coaches who are best suited to meet the developmental needs of each player. Training is competency-based and matches are performance- not outcome-oriented. Training will revolve around the individual skills necessary for both mastery of the body and the ball. Matches will be focused on the development of the individual’s tactical skills within the team environment.

Player environment – Using our facilities and equipment to full advantage, we offer players the best development program allowing them to realise their full potential by focusing on the whole person and not just the soccer player.

Who can participate in the Academy?

This summer players born in 2000 will have the option of choosing the Lightning Academy program or the Club’s more traditional House League program.

What is the level of commitment required to participate in the Academy?

The minimum requirement at the 2000 age level is one training session and one match per week (offered on weeknights).  There are no tournaments to be played and therefore no weekend soccer at this Academy level.

How will training sessions work in the Academy?

All players in the program train together once per week. In order to focus on individual skill development a station coaching approach will be used. Players, after being assessed during the initial selection process, will be placed into smaller sub-groups of similar ability levels and will rotate through each station. Players who show large improvements beyond the potential of their present sub-group will have the opportunity to move into a more appropriate sub-group. The goal is to create a challenging environment for each player.

How will games work in the Academy?

Again the goal is to create a challenging environment in which the players can develop.

Each academy program will be represented by a number of squads (i.e., teams). These squads will be created by matching players of similar ability. At the 2000 age level academy squads will take part in matches against other Kanata Soccer Club Lightning Academy squads.  

What about the coaching?

As the young players who participate in this program are developing so are the coaches.

Volunteers with a budding passion for youth soccer instruction will be selected for the

Academy and will work under the mentorship of Kanata Soccer Club Head Coach (Ages 4 to 9) Mario deRoia or Kanata Soccer Technical Director Joel MacDonald. All coaches must have a minimum OSA Children’s coaching certificate to qualify for an Academy coaching position. Both the coaches and players in the Academy are the future of Kanata Soccer’s representative program and both need appropriate opportunities to develop under qualified leadership.

What is the future of the Lightning Academy program at Kanata Soccer?

The Academy will continue to grow. In 2008 the program expands to include 10-year-olds.  In 2009 we will offer this program at the 11-year-old level. By 2010 this program will be in place from the 7-year-old level up to the 12-year-old level and become integrated with our representative program.

Coach Recruitment  

Like most community sport programs, Kanata Soccer is driven by a strong volunteer base.  Coaching is no exception.  The Club is willing to invest money in paid coaching at the Academy level.  The coach development program at Kanata Soccer is structured so that volunteer coaches get a chance to learn and practice their skills.  Coaching is a trade and like any trade the best development results come through a mentor-apprentice relationship.

The Ontario Soccer Association is responsible for the technical/theoretical certification of coaches.  Through Kanata’s Academy program we take the technical/theory coaches learn in their clinics and turn that into on-field practice under the watchful eye of expert coaches.  Like players, coaches learn best, retain more and get better by doing.  The Academy coach development program could be compared to a teaching hospital where medical students, interns and residents get to apply all of their book knowledge in real life situations.  Therefore, the Academy program is a development program for both players and coaches.

In many of our programs, volunteer coaches make up the majority of our staff.  These station/assistant coaches are in direct contact with the players the most.   Next come the lead/head coaches who are smaller in number but directly responsible for helping station/assistant coaches develop their skills by providing them feedback about their performance in real time.  The skills required to coach coaches are different than those used to coach players.  Coaches selected to be lead/head coaches are strong coaches of players but in most cases they need to learn the skills necessary to coach coaches.  The full-time technical staff at Kanata Soccer is there to help lead/head coaches develop their mentor-apprentice skills. 

Station/Assistant Coaches

So the progression is as follows: full-time staff coach the lead/head coaches; lead/head coaches coach the station/assistant coaches; and station/assistant coaches coach the players.  It is inaccurate though to think that lead/head coaches and technical staff do not work with the players.  They do but the percentage of time spent coaching players is reduced in relation to their more primary duties of coaching coaches.  As the saying goes, take a man fishing and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a life time.  We are trying to bring that to life through our coach development program in the Academy.

Below is the break down of the minimum numbers of coaches necessary to run the programs and the certification level they need.  If we do not have the minimum number of coaches we cannot run the program.

	01’s	00’s	99’s	98’s
Minimum # of volunteer coaches needed to run program	81	81	81	81
Minimum OSA coach certification for volunteer coaches	Children’s	Children’s	Youth	Youth
# of Lead coaches per program2 (in addition to volunteer coaches)	1	1	1	1
# of Head coaches per program	0	0	1 per squad3	1 per squad3

¹ This is the minimum and if there are the full 60 players in the program then a minimum of 12 are required which gives a player to coach ratio of 5:1

² The Lead Coach is a paid coach (either Kanata Soccer technical employee or high level volunteer on an honorarium)

³ Head coaches at the 10-year-old level will need Children’s, Youth and Senior level coaching courses in order to qualify as such with the League

The Club also provides its Academy coaches through the coach development program with in-house training.  This training is focused around soccer-specific methods of long-term development.  Kanata Soccer is committed to the new Canadian sport model called Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) and has created its own Long-Term Player Development (LTPD) model focusing specifically on long-term development as it relates to our community and our sport’s needs.

As coaches in this program are being assessed and provided with feedback in realtime, it is therefore important that prospective Academy coaches have some or all of the following traits:

-          A desire to learn and improve

-          A willingness to be assessed

-          A level of comfort in being critiqued

For those coaches who progress through the coach certification program in soccer, these traits will become more and more important the higher up the certification ladder they go.  Like instilling good habits in the players, Kanata Soccer thinks it important to do so with our novice coaches as well. 

Coach Training

 Like a player goes through stages and progressions as they improve, coaches also experience similar patterns in their development from novice towards expert.  Therefore, there are certain fundamental and generic skills that a coach must possess before trying to build the instructional skills and sport-specific knowledge necessary to coach soccer.

Kanata Soccer Volunteer Coach Development Pyramid

Behaviour management skills refers to the methods necessary in order to keep participants safe and on task.  These must be developmentally appropriate and personalised in nature as what works for one coach with a certain age group may not work for another. Before a coach can teach a player anything about the game of soccer, he/she must first be able to get and keep the player’s attention.

Instructional skills are common to any field of pedagogy.  They include but are not limited to the categories of observation, explanation, demonstration, rehearsal, feedback and evaluation.  Great soccer players do not always necessarily make good coaches as they lack the tools necessary to instruct.  The ability to instruct is as much of a talent as the ability to play the game.

Soccer-specific content is the technical, tactical  and other theoretical knowledge that must be imparted.  The soccer-specific coaching methods are instructional skills often associated particularly with the coaching of soccer (e.g., grid work). 

Player Identification and Placement

The Academy program believes that all children under the age of twelve have aspirations to excel in a sport.  In order to find the few exceptionally talented ones that have the true drive and determination to realise their full potential, a program must start with a large base of participants.   Gradually, as the years pass, players will weed themselves out of the pursuit for soccer excellence as they realise this journey is not for them.  Therefore, Kanata Soccer believes it is wrong as the leadership of these programs to be weeding them out through cuts.

So much can happen for an aspiring 9-year-old who at present just does not have the physical assests of some of his/her peers.  In a few years and with maturity and growth that 9-year-old could have the ability level to match his/her aspirations.  Cutting that player because they are deemed not good enough for a team for that particular season is short sighted and has long-term ramifications on the cut player’s ability to realise his/her full potential.

Kanata Soccer believes that programming below the age of 12 should be more inclusive.  Players under the age of 12 should not be split dichotomously into recreational or competitive.  That is unfair to their future ability of realising full potential and/or staying active for life.  How can program leaders expect any young person to want to stay active for life if they are being told they are not good enough to play?

Everyone is good enough to play at some level.  It is a matter of finding them the right competition and training for their present level of development and then matching them with others that are at the same point.  The Academy program seeks to do just that.  We have set our registration limit high so that anyone who wants to participate in the Academy can.  Aspiration to be better and the dream to be great at soccer are the only things required to enter the Academy program.  Time and the program itself will take care of the rest.

Technical, physical and tactical testing protocols are used to provide an objective and subjective assessment of each Academy participant.  This information is then used to group Academy participants into homogenous groups based on their level of development as scored by the tests.  It is not uncommon, for example, to see a player score very high on the tactical component but low on the technical.  Traditional programming would see this player likely making the top competitive team as they show a high level of ‘game smarts’ relying on their strengths while not necessarily fixing their weaknesses.  Eventually they would reach a point where they are not able to proceed further because the tactical requirements are exceeding their technical abilities.  For such a player, the journey to realise full potential has ended prematurely – usually around the transition to full field or shortly thereafter.

In the Academy program this player would be given the opportunity to compete with players that are at the same tactical level (i.e., the highest competitve level available for that age).  However, as the training in the Academy is heavily focused on individual skill development, that player would be matched with players that are at a similar technical level.  That could mean that the players he/she is training with are not always the players he/she is playing with on game night.  Eventually, as weaknesses are addressed and better balance is achieved, the players that he/she is training with become more and more the same as the ones he/she is playing with on game night.   This reflects the natural trends of growth, development and maturity which take a number of years to stabilise.  It is this lack of stability prior to the age of twelve that sees so many young sport participants robbed of their opportunity to develop to their full potential.

As there is a lack of stability in performance, change happens frequently.  Therefore, testing scores at the beginning of a program may go up or down significantly.  Players in the Academy progrm have their progress monitored.  Significant shifts in performance are met with an adjustment of player groupings.  Otherwise, a player that improves faster than his/her team-mates may get bored and coast in that specific group.  A player that falls behind his/her team-mates may get discouraged and loose confidence in that specific group.  

Kanata Soccer believes that the best environment for learning and improvement is one where players are matched with and against others of like ability.    Such an environment gives young players the confidence and comfort to go out and try new things.  Taking risks and pushing comfort zones is important if players hope to realise their full potential.

The goal is to make development inclusive, fair and holistic.  Below are a number of other areas in the Academy program where we are looking to instill this philosophy.  They are contrasted with descriptions of a more widely seen approach in organised youth soccer.

Academy Program Approach	Wide Spread Approach
Everyone has the same right to be in the program, regardless of physique and ability	Usually the players selected are physically more advanced (i.e., stronger, taller) and are seen as early maturers
Everyone gets to play the game, regardless of physique or ability.	There is little room on the field for younger, less skilled, underdeveloped or late maturing players
Everyone gets the opportunity to experience different positions on the team during game play – including goalkeeper	Players specialise in particular roles prematurely.  Play is always the same and substitutes rarely get an opportunity

 Philosophy of Play and Development

The Academy program content is based on Long-Term Player Development (LTDP) and therefore tries to do provide what is appropriate for the age and stage of development of the players involved.  The way soccer is played at the grassroots level could be compared, for example, to the way hockey would be played at the grassroots level in Italy.  If you were to watch a group of Canadian children play hockey, the game would look more like what we expect to see at the older levels.  If you were to watch the Italian kids play hockey, it would very different from the Canadian kids’ version.  The way Italian children play hockey and the way Canadian children play soccer would be based on their exposure to those sports in their countries at the older levels.  Most Canadian children do not watch high level soccer live or on tv.   Their experiences with soccer are what they learn from day one when they show up to the field.  You would be hard pressed to find Canadian children that have not went to a high level hockey game or watched one on tv.  In doing so, they have heroes to emulate and skills and styles of play they can aspire to achieve.

There are a number of countries around the world that could be considered soccer powers.  While their chosen styles of play and development methods may differ slightly from country to country, there would be a number of common factors between them that could be used to represent what ‘good’ soccer looks like.  Here is a partial list of those things:

-          All players touch the ball.  They tend to make short passes and dribbling runs.  The goalkeeper usually throws the ball in order to build the next attack.

Contrast that with the typical Canadian grassroots soccer picture:

-          Players rely mainy on long passes and play faster than their skill level allows.  The goalkeeper clears the ball by kicking it long in the air with his/her foot.

A second common factor in good soccer play:

-          The ball generally advances from defenders to midfielders to forwards with the game based on communication and cooperation.

Contrast that with typical Canadian grassroots soccer:

-          Little thought is given to buidling the attack.  Usually the ball goes directly to the forwards via long passes instead of passing through the midfield

A  third common factor in good soccer play: 

-          The point of attack is changed frequently, with an eye toward creating space for forward play

Contrast that with the typical grassroots game in Canada:

-          When attacking, the ball generally goes straight down the middle of the field.  There is no use of the width of the field and there are few changes of direction (switches from left to right).  The ball is rarely played backwards towards team’s own goal even if that is where the most open space is.

Children are not miniature adults.  While the goal of good soccer is to teach the team to work together, look for and create space and move the ball mostly by passing, that is not the reality for most players under the age of twelve.  It will take a number of years for young players to reach a level where they can consistently do those things.   For the majority of players under the age of twelve the most developmentally appropriate concept is to learn to master the ball.

Individual mastery of the ball and the creativity that comes with it should be the main priority in getting players to the eventual picture of soccer played properly.  Mastering the ball makes all other skills easier – especially the tactics necessary to learn how to cooperate as a team.  The dribbler, not the passer should be the player we are looking to make and encourage at the younger levels.   Every team should be filled with them under the age of twelve.  We cannot expect a young player to make passes with any level of competence if they are having a hard time making the ball do what they want it to when it comes to them. 

It is common to see many grassroots players in this country taught to ‘share’ the ball at the youngest levels even though they are not developmentally ready to do so.  Our players quickly learn that the best way not to make a mistake with the ball at their feet is to kick the ball away as fast as possible.  While passing makes up a large part of the game played properly, it is not fair to expect young players to learn to share the ball with others when they cannot control it themselves.

The Academy program believes that soccer at the youngest age levels is NOT a team sport.  The focus of the Academy program at the youngest age levels is to work with the individual within the team.  Training and tactics (the limited amount that are taught) focus on the 1v1 – player with the ball or player defending directly against the ball.  Any other coaching that is done tactically focuses on team shape.  Team shape is the concept of positioning.  The goal is to have players without the ball positioning in a balanced manner across the field so that the player on the ball has the ‘right’ picture around him/her for making decisions about what to do.  As the player becomes comfortable and creative on the ball and matures cognitively, more elements of playing the game properly – tactically speaking – can be introduced.

Before a player can become comfortable controlling the soccer ball, he/she must be comfortably in command of their own body’s movements and abilities.   With a lack of physical education programs in the schools at the elementary level to teach what the body can do and a scarcity of free play time to practice what the body can do, Canadian children today are not as physically literate as in previous decades.  Physical literacy is competent and confident command of one’s body and involves mastery of the fundamental skills which form the foundation of all sporting activities.  It is hard to imagine that a young player could become a  master of the soccer ball when he/she is not very coordinated.  How good that player becomes at mastering the soccer ball is directly related to his/her level of coordination and physical literacy.  Thus, the very young player must first learn to control the body before controlling the ball.  The Academy program spends time ensuring that mastery of the body is achieved in harmony with ball mastery.

The concern of the Academy program is individual skill development – be it ball mastery or body mastery.  However, the Academy program’s individual skill development policy is an holistic one.   Kanata Soccer wants to see its young members developed in all capacities, not just physically, technically or tactically.  If sport is the great life teacher that it is supposed to be, then the programs and leadership involved are the guides and facilitators of this values-driven material.  It is important that we teach and expect the players to play proper soccer, however, it is more important that we teach and expect the players to live by proper values and principles.  The long-term vision of LTPD as interpreted by Kanata Soccer is to cultivate through soccer participation young adults that are autonomous, responsible and contributing members of our society.

Before learning to play proper soccer; before learning to master the ball; and even before learning to master the body comes the long journey of mastering values.  The Academy program is committed to teaching these life skills.  This is reflected in the Academy’s motto where respect and responsibility are the two cornerstone principles on which we base our values-driven training.

The Academy program at Kanata Soccer is an holistic individual skills-driven program using the team environment.  By working gradually on each part and adding them together in a developmentally appropriate manner, we can create the whole picture that we all want to achieve. 

Academy General Expectations

Players will be expected...

-          To follow the two R’s – respect and responsibility – while striving to perform their best

-          To complete their soccer homework on time

-          To have on the proper attire for each training session (i.e. training t-shirt, black shorts and black socks)

-          To bring their soccer ball to every training session

-          To tuck in their shirts at training and games

-          To begin and end every training session and game by shaking the coaches’ hands

-          To bring a willingness to learn and to play soccer every session

-          To consider partaking in our deliberate play event - Street Soccer Friday nights

Parents will be expected...

-          To have players at practices and games at the requested time

-          To avoid coaching or providing any instruction from the sidelines

-          To cheer and clap when they see displays of soccer skill – from any player

-          To attend all parent development forums

Coaches will be expected...

-          To provide a player to coach ratio no higher than 1 to 10

-          To provide individually focused skill and performance development

-          To provide enthusiasm and energy every session

-          To play players in all positions and to play players equally during games

-          To encourage every player to show their skills during games 

 

For more information please contact Joel MacDonald, Technical Director Kanata Soccer Club.  613-836-5787 or td@kanatasoccer.com

 

 

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