We had a session last night in the covered five-a-side pitch -- it's a little bigger than a basketball floor, so about the same size as most futsal courts. Given the squad hasn't trained or played in over a week, we mostly just wanted to get some touches and some competition.
Right away I noticed a difference in the personal dynamics of the squad. With a senior women's squad in England, we have a greater diversity in background, both personal and in the game, and obviously a greater diversity in age than you ever see in the college game in the US. In college, the women on the squad tend to be each other's best friends, roommates, and classmates. While we may spend fifteen or twenty hours a week together on the training pitch, at matches, and on the bus, a lot of the players are together forty, fifty hours a week or more. While it is the game that brings them together in the pre-season, the social bonds they form are ultimately based on much more than soccer.
Here, some of the women are students, but at several different universities and schools. Some are working, some are mothers, and the only thing that brings them all together is the football. Thus, the focus during training is, at first blush, a little sharper. The conversations between playing segments tend to be a little more about the game, and I think that is largely due to the fact that football is the one thing everyone shares in common.
To get everyone some work, we played a 6v6 mini-tournament. (My team, trailing badly with only four draws from our first seven matches, ended in second place, 31-35.) The technical quality is similar to what one would expect from a Division I college squad in the US, though there are some differences -- technical receiving is better, with the PNE players consistently opening to receive the ball instead of the common mistake of poking at the ball with the near foot. However, the touch of American players is maybe a little softer, a little more closely under control. When I asked after the first round of play what we needed to improve, the near-unanimous response from the players was, "we need to talk more."
I guess some things are universal . . .
