HPSA's Developmental Philosophy

It's called an "Academy" for a reason

HPSA’s Developmental Philosophy

Functional Outcome rather than Instructional Cues

HPSA’s coaching is based on a developmental philosophy. This except from an article by the National Institute of Health provides a base understanding of this philosophy:

“Given how learning occurs, even as infants, it is important to focus on the functional outcome of a task, rather than instructional cues on how to perform it.¹¹² Focusing on a functional outcome provides the learner with the opportunity to explore movement and the optimal method of performing a task for their own preferred efficiency.¹⁰¹ Once the athlete has reached intermediate levels of developmental sequencing, accuracy constraints can be added to further improve completion of the task.¹¹³”

The First Years are Slow

When players join HPSA at age 6, during their first few years, coaching may appear to move slowly to a parent’s eye. However, for players, they are essentially learning how to write a story with their feet, instead of their hands. First, they need to learn how to work with the equivalent of a pencil in school, and slowly their feet and body learn how to perform a variety of tasks that may only form one skill, like a singular letter on a page. Over the course of the first two years at HPSA, players will learn how to connect with the ball as well as other players on the field in such a way that sequencing their physical abilities with the mental abilities can begin to take place during their third year and begins to come to fruition as they enter HPSA’s Select age group when they are 10 years old.

In many ways, the first two years of soccer are a test of patience more so for the parent than for the player. It may feel frustrating to watch your child and many other children on the practice field perform the same drill incorrectly time and again with no intervention by the coach. Is the coach blind, lazy or inexperienced, you might ask yourself and other parents.

Trust the Process

The answer to that question involves two words – Patience and Process.

Patience

Experienced and professional coaches, such as ours at HPSA, know that just as the article above explains, to focus on the outcome instead of instructional cues on how to perform a task will lead to better results for the player. This means that players must learn through a process involving endless failed attempts before success can be achieved.

Watching failed drills and experiencing game losses can feel like personal failure and lost opportunities for growth in our child’s confidence. As a parent, it’s easy to feel desperate and grasp for quick fixes and maybe even spend thousands of dollars trying to help our child speed through this process with the hope of creating a star athlete by age 8.

Process

However, if we look beyond what appears to be happening, we might see a child who is okay with failure because it incentivizes them to keep trying. This is a crucial turning point for the player and a critical point of the process because it is when the child decides to keep going past excuses like “the game isn’t fun” or “the coach is mean” and reach the realization that, “this is hard, but it’s worth it to me to keep trying because I want to get better.”

This is a valuable lesson we can re-learn from our children, as though it were the first time. Failure is not an option we are offered very often as adults, and we might fear that by allowing our child to fail drills and lose games, the coaches or we as parents are somehow not preparing our child properly and, even worse, we are failing your child.

Effort, not Immediate Results

Fortunately, at HPSA, we’ve got you. In our Academy ages especially, our experienced coaches are not grasping at the easy solutions, critiquing players’ every move or pulling them out of games for making mistakes. Rather, they create lesson plans for practices that involve drills to help players progress through the areas where they need to develop, and actual game situations for players to practice their reactions. Over time as players enter and progress through Select age groups, training becomes more about refining teams, rather than developing them.

At games, our coaches allow silence on the field so players can focus on using the game as an opportunity to process and apply what they’ve learned at practice. Even if they complete only one successful pass or have a single shot on goal that misses, those are what our coaches and we as parents should focus on and be sure to tell them how incredibly proud of them we are because the effort was there, and eventually the results will follow. We are proud of them for trying.

What Developmental Doesn’t Mean

Yes, we want to win. If you misunderstand “developmental” to mean passive regarding the scoreboard, you are wrong. The plan is to always outperform the competition on the field. The difference is in the intent of training, which is not simply to win, but to learn how to push through challenges, to think quickly on your feet and to communicate with teammates during an ever-changing game of attacking and defending.

The greatest reward for an HPSA coach is to have developed a winning team both on and off the field, and it takes years to accomplish. We go into team formation with this in mind, and we hope players grow to understand, appreciate and embrace this long-term outlook as well.

HPSA’s Developmental Principles

Failure is a valuable part of the learning process.

Please allow your child to experience failure here at HPSA. We are not afraid of failure, but rather just like at school, our coaches are here to help players find and reach their potential through a developmental learning process that takes years.

Let the game be their teacher.

Quietly watching is a crucial coaching skill, necessary as players process information and incorporate it into their play. As parents understand, it is very easy to want to coach a child from the sidelines at games because they seem lost or confused. Resisting the urge to tell players what to do or where to go during games is extremely valuable as players learn and process what has been taught in practice when they are in an ever-changing game environment. This is particularly true at the youngest ages and for our new players at all ages because learning and processing how to connect minds and feet is an enormous task. How to work with teammates, learning positions and scanning the field comes after players are comfortable not looking at their feet when connecting with the ball.

HPSA's Developmental Philosophy