We thank the girls for their enthusiasm & desire to learn during our Junior Academy Girls team camp. You girls rock!

Check below for a detailed camp review, covering the good and bad, and some memorable moments.

We also catalog the skills we taught, and how the girls can practice and play on their own between camp and the start of regular practices. (We get started the week of August 8th.)

Camp recap

Time has flown by, and our Team Camp is complete. We’ve got a fun group of girls! The overall group attitude is good to excellent. There’s a lot of enthusiasm, along with a will to learn. Yeah baby!

Photos

Check this link for photos from our camp week.

Team Camp video (updated 07/26/16)

What we taught:

The main theme for the camp was “keep the ball”. Young kids tend to see soccer as a kickball activity using just the feet. We worked on getting the girls to understand that soccer is really a “keep ball” activity that involves the not just the feet, but they eyes and brain as well.

Tuesday PM: We list skills below in text form, most with video demo links. Some of the video demos are old and lacking. We’ll add newer, better video demo links over the next week.

We encourage parents to help their daughters as practice partners and cheerleaders! A good way to approach this is to ask your daughter what she learned during camp, and see if this leads to her wanting to do some “show and tell” with the ball.

The girls will get better through our regular practices, but they will show even more improvement if they play on their own outside of our group practice sessions. This takes encouragement by coaches and parents — keeping it fun (lots of little games) and encouraging kids to set their own challenges — rather than making it a job.

Fast footwork:

Happy feet (inside of the foot touches): Short-term goal: 10-20 happy feet touches in 10 seconds. Longer term goal: 30-40 happy feet touches in 10 seconds. (This may take some time and effort, but with patience, your daughter can reach this goal.) Other variations:
- add sole of the foot touches (happy feet level 6)
- adding outside of the foot touches (happy feet level 9)
Pullback and turn, pullback with other foot and turn, repeat. How many reps can you get in 10-20 seconds?
Partner toe taps: sideways / forward. Start with one ball. When you have success, add a 2nd ball.

Dribbling control:

Group dribbling tag games: Wrist girl, volcano island, dribbling marbles, team knock-out.
All sorts of tag games (see above), where the girls either protect their own ball, or chase someone else while dribbling. Kids LOVE these games! The games look chaotic (because they ARE chaotic), but they do wonders for developing close control, vision and changes of direction.
Dribbling: changes of direction: inside and outside of the foot cuts, sole stops and pullbacks.
Dribbling with vision: raise colored cones (or cards or cups or whatever) while kids are dribbling or doing footwork, and see if they can call out the color without stopping the ball. Goal: see if girls can look and play at the same time, instead of stopping, looking and then playing.

Dribbling moves:

Turns: pullback, inside of the foot U-turn. Girls who attended the Saturday make-up session also learned the twist-off turn (a type of spin turn).
Stop and go moves: the pull-push (sister move of the pullback), and the cookie (sister move of the inside of the foot U-turn).
V-pulls: front and reverse. (This is a fairly high level skill for younger kids, but they can learn these moves with effort and patience.)
1v1 dribbling games: Texas draw, Texas draw and dribble, electric fence (new videos posted July 31), snow cones. These games are perfect for backyard daughter vs. parent competitions!

Other activities:

Shin bash: this game helps develop trickiness for the attacking player, and agility and quick feet for the target player. This is another game that’s perfect for backyard daughter vs. parent competitions!
Partner ball toss variations: The ball toss activities help develop vision, hand-to-eye coordination, and a sense of timing (too early is bad, too late is bad, right on time is good).
Intro to juggling: drop the ball from your hands, kick it with your laces, catch and repeat.
Ball striking (passing and shooting): We barely touched this skill during camp. (We will address it often during the fall, but the camp emphasis was “keep the ball”, not “kick the ball”.)

The good:

Personality, enthusiasm, will to learn, will to compete.
Every player showed promise!
Overall player buy-in to the Junior Academy Girls ideas and culture.
Individual skill improvement over the course of the week:
- Lots of girls are looking for open space and changing directions to find the open space.
- Some girls are already using dribbling moves to trick defenders and create space.
The fields were beautiful! (Thanks to our friend Randy — but don’t call him Bigfoot.)
Cold post-camp treats! Thanks to all the parents who volunteered to bring treats.
No foot problems or over-heating issues!
The girls got along with each other.
No major discipline issues. (The penalty box was lonely all week.)
The helpers! The regulars: Hailey, McKenna, Allison, ET, Allyson. And the one-off guests: Abigail, Avery, Ellery and Kiley. The older girls bring a sense of joy and adventure, and are wonderful role models for the younger girls. They are the camp’s hidden heroes!
A great quote from McKenna: “The girls were all amazing and the good times never stopped. They are a great group, skill wise and personality wise, and I know many of them will have a future in soccer if they keep their attitude and effort up.”

The bad:

Tuesday: the girls didn’t seem “with it” that night. (It was day 2, and the hottest day of camp.) But the girls made up for it the rest of the week.
Heat: most days started with temperatures in the 90s, with a heat index around 100.
Thunderstorms caused a canceled session, and cut about 60 minutes out of two other session. (But we were able to add two extra days, so overall field time was a net plus.)
Players would occasionally give up on themselves when they didn’t have immediate success with new moves or skills. (It’s OK to make mistakes, and it’s OK to struggle with new skills! Stay patient, keep working, and you’ll get it sooner or later. If this was easy, anyone could do it!)
Three bee stings (two to the same girl). Ouch!
Bathroom breaks just after we had taken shade / water breaks, instead of during the breaks. (Classic maturity issue: kids aren’t accustomed to thinking a step ahead!)
Trash can runs Saturday and Monday. (The girls will learn that the Junior Academy Girls program doesn’t litter!)
Boo Hoo Hoo (our crying towel) had to make two appearances. (But both appearances were thankfully brief.)
Not being able to fully participate (said coach Hailey, who is recovering from a leg injury).

The funny and memorable moments (quotes from our helpers):

The chaos during the Volcano Island game.
Playing dribbling marbles with the girls and seeing the looks on their faces when they kept the ball away from me.
Watching girls set new records in footwork activities.
Seeing the girls do moves in scrimmages that they learned earlier.
Zadie yelling “cannon ball!” while jumping belly first onto a swarm of balls during a break.
Watching (name omitted), who was not paying attention when you were explaining a move, try to do it herself without listening and fall on her booty.
When a coach (while trying to help the girls understand the results of being creative with moves) did a complicated move on one of the girls, and she almost fell down.
How the girls reacted when Vivie nutmegged someone.
Pre-camp warm-up activities: shin bash, ball toss activities, and the name game.
Silly videos.

Camp make-up sessions

Thanks for the quick responses to our make-up session date poll! We don’t have a single date that works for everyone, so we will offer two make-up sessions. Players are welcome to attend either or both make-up sessions.

Saturday, July 23, 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM at United Quest Park. We’ll meet behind the blue clubhouse. We’ll be doing some video work during the session. If your daughter has received her uniform, have her wear her yellow game day uniform. If not, regular practice attire will be fine.
Monday, July 25, 5:30 – 8:30 PM at Metro North Park. We’ll meet at field 6 behind the clubhouse. We’ll be doing some video work during the session. If your daughter has received her uniform, have her wear her blue game day uniform. If not, regular practice attire will be fine.

About the date selections

There was no combination of two dates that worked for everyone, so we picked the two dates with the most possible attendees. If your daughter isn’t able to attend either make-up session, please check back next Thursday. We’ll post videos of fun dribbling games she can play at home as make-up practice: “wrist girl”, “electric fence” and “snow cones”.