This post is from my time coaching at the University of Exeter in England.
Life is definitely not easy for me this week. As I have been documenting (see this and this post), the university teams I coach are going through try-outs now. Most of the work of player identification took place on Friday. This week is more about refining player analysis and starting to fit together line-ups. That stuff can be tricky enough when you have to worry about fielding a single team out of a group of players. Imagine if you had to field two teams out of that same group.
That is my current situation. This season we will field men’s and women’s teams in both the Premier League and Western Division 2A of BUCS. We did the same thing last season (though it was Division 1 rather than the Premier League), basically using a split squad system whereby everyone trained together, with the first team players taking the higher league matches and the second team players the lower league.
This year we will do the same again for the men. Not much choice in the matter as the club simply doesn’t have enough male players to run two full separate competitive teams. Numbers are definitely not a problem on the women’s side. The issue there is where the talent split falls. Are there enough players of comparable level to make a 10-12 person first team? If so, running two separate teams in possible. Otherwise, like with the men, it will have to be a joint group as it was last year.
And of course running these joint groups creates its own set of challenges. How do you develop trainings that bring the weaker players along while also pushing the stronger players the way they need to be pushed?
These are the things very much on my mind at the moment.
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