Our MIAC “non-traditional season” was recently expanded from a narrow 7 dates up to the NCAA sanctioned 16 dates. Our conference still does not allow a date of competition in the spring season with the concession that you can play your alumni game assuming you hadn’t played it in the fall. We have structured our spring season to start the week following spring break and we will conclude our training by testing our mettle against the alums and current seniors. This has been a fantastic opportunity to transition the seniors to the washed-up has-been side of the ledger and they enjoy the opportunity to show the younger players just how much they will each be missed. The match is set for April 13th at 2pm in Skalicky Dome for any and all that want to watch or join in on the action!
We are now a full week into our spring preparations for 2019. The boys accepted the challenge I put to them earlier this winter with their scores on the Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test. Feel free to give it a shot and report back. I set out two targets for the boys. The first target was the minimum for field players to continue participating in the spring season—and everyone nailed it. The second target was set at a level that exempted the student-athlete from extra physical work at the end of each spring session. Though only a few were required to perform the extra workouts, in true Johnnie fashion, a huge group of those that met the standard have been opting into the extra workouts. When I see moments like this I know that the boys have fully bought into our mantra, “Our FAMILY vs. their team.”
During our 2018 spring season, we decided to depart tactically from standard operating procedures. We have eschewed some commonly held soccer concepts in pursuit of a style of play that relies on work, grit, and, above all, a submission of ego. If you watched us play, you saw that we pushed the tempo and pressed our opposition. With the exception of only pockets of time in a few games, the majority of possession our opponents had was contained in their own half. . . and OUR possession was in THEIR half, too! The style of play leans more heavily on risk and free expression and less on fault and rigid structures. The boys are largely free to attack but must also work for each other doggedly the moment the ball is turned over to our opposition. Take a look at the graphic below to see just how much it moved the needle compared to 2017!
The depth of statistical information afforded us by our relationship with Instat is absolutely insane. I can, for example, with a few clicks of my mouse, determine what percentage of air challenges a specific player won in MIAC games in the middle 1/3 of the field. . .or what our possession percentage was in the first 15 minutes of a specific game vs. the last 15. This may be a topic for a future post.
I strained memories of my math major days here in Collegeville (and I hit up Google a bit) to study the correlation between winning and many different variables in hopes of finding our very own Johnnie Soccer “Moneyball” golden rules that could help us steer more games to the win column. Some of the obvious tried and true, dogmatic statistics did not correlate as strongly as you may suspect—the best example was that possession only moderately correlated (~.55) with winning. This does make sense though as we out-possessed all but 3 opponents this year. There were some very specific variables that did correlate to winning at a much higher rate. Armed with the understanding that correlation simply shows association not necessarily causation, we have created some waypoints to focus on this spring and heading into next fall. These tangible markers will help us stay engaged in the PROCESS which we can control instead of focusing on the OUTCOME which can impede motivation, effort, and creativity. In the next blog I will release to everyone (including those of you on staff at other college programs) those exact measurable variables. . .and the formula for Pepsi.
Our FAMILY vs. their team,
John