Hey team,
Yesterday was a lesson in winning and learning. Between the weather, headcount, small field, officials, and an injury we learned a lot. Here are my takeaways from the scrimmage.
- 4 players started and played their first 11 v 11 game.
- Our goalkeeper started and played their first game as a GK.
- With no subs our entire team played the full 60 minutes.
- We learned that our defensive side was strong and brave as we limited chances on goal through most of the first 40 minutes.
- We had to think about playing positional, energy conserving, off the field soccer.
- We used positional switches to rest and recover asking our 7 & 11 to flip with our 2 & 3 for recovery.
- We learned that we need to review a plan for defending corner kicks.
- We learned that we need to take charge when building our attack from our own goal kicks.
- We definitely had a hand on each others back as we worked through the game.
- Feel free to comment and any notes that I missed.
Big thank you to the parents that supplied snacks/drinks/ice for our road trip!
Reminder that pictures are after school today in the main lobby outside the gym. You will need to make a team decision on the blue or orange ball.
After pictures we will train on the baseball diamond with small sided futsal games until 4:15. I will need some help moving the goals back to the stadium after training.
Plan is some 4v4 looking to find the space and opportunities to take on the defender 1v1 and create 2v1 going to goal.
Ending today’s training with NETS, using the dugout fence.
Putting together this training session reminded me of the last time the USWNT lost a World Cup. In 2011, the US lost to Japan in the final. The game went into Penalties for a winner. The adversity Japan faced building up to the tournament forced most of their training on futsal pitches and running in the streets. Their domestic league wasn’t really functioning due to the disaster that happened before the tournament.
Four months before the beginning of the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup, on March 11, 2011, Japan experienced a natural disaster that is now globally known as the Tōhoku earthquake. The earthquake was the largest-magnitude earthquake in the country’s history and the fourth-largest since global data collection began in 1900, measuring at a 9.0 on the Richter Scale. Following the earthquake emerged a tsunami, which reached a height of 40 meters (130 feet), and affected 2,000km (~1,400 miles) of the country’s coastline. Alongside the tsunami were the destruction and subsequent radioactive leaks of 3 of Japan’s nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the worst nuclear accident in the world since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
The earthquake had innumerable consequences for the country, and the effects of the event are still seen to this day. From final tallies determined in late 2020, the official number of lives lost that day was 15,899 people, not including 2,527 people missing and assumed dead. Such a number also does not include the people injured or permanently incapacitated, people displaced, or homes and other properties that were completely destroyed. Trillions of yen worth of damage was recorded and the eastern coasts of Japan were littered with millions of tons of debris.
While the country took time to grieve, the less-important aspects of daily Japanese life, such as sport, were cancelled or postponed. Following the earthquake, the Nadeshiko League Cup was cancelled, and the league opener was suspended for a month. One of the league’s teams, TEPCO Mareeze, which was based in Fukushima, ceased operations after the earthquake. Their home stadium was converted into a response base for the disaster, and all of their players were forced to find a new team. Among those players were Japanese internationals Karina Maruyama and Aya Sameshima who had worked a second part-time job at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was owned by their club’s sponsor, TEPCO. At the time of the earthquake, they were training in the south of the country, and were only days off from being in the city when the power plant broke down. Soon after the earthquake, Sameshima left the country to play with the Boston Breakers in the United States, as she couldn’t return to her home.
https://www.footballengine.net/post/how-japan-s-2011-women-s-world-cup-team-wrote-one-of-sport-s-greatest-stories
In my search for more information on the 2011 Japan Women World Cup winner, I found a few other things on the https://www.fifatrainingcentre.com
FCArmstrong 
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