Author: Alan Merrick

I provide content, curriculums, topics and detailed coaching points to the MOTI Soccer Training Platform.  I am pleased that a product like MOTI Soccer Training Platform is now available to all players, coaches and soccer enthusiasts.

Soccer Solutions 101

Who would have predicted the level of chaos that COVID 19 has brought to the World. The effect of this pandemic and the shutdown has been catastrophic in scope and size. For one minute let’s look at the devastation it has created for Youth Sports, soccer in particular. COVID 19 has forced youth soccer clubs to schedule, reschedule, stay at home, go on hold, completely shut down, to be on stand bye. Then a glimmer of hope with directions of how to return to play and the phase after phase of wait and see.

Little did I know 6 years back when I got involved with MOTI Sports that several of the MOTI Organization pillars of the team, player, coach, and parents would be a natural solution for what has befallen youth soccer and how to maintain the development of young players.

MOTI is part of the new future where student-athletes learn techniques and personal skill sets via a remote device, then congregate for some practice time as a team for a rehearsal for a game-day experience. With MOTI you get Animation in 3D Training Sessions and all the relevant coaching points. It comes with Motion Capture and the ability to watch all the content on a live screen that can zoom in and zoom out, rotate, and view from any perspective.  It even has an element of virtual reality (VR) where you can select a player in an activity and watch the action from that person’s viewpoint.  

The MOTI 3D Soccer Training Platform design gives teams, players, a player in the singular, coaches, teachers, students and parents all the content, tools and bells and whistles they need to have a continuum of “learning the game from the neck up.”

It is structured to be distributed via a free App from the IOS or Google store for smartphones and tablets. The distribution in this format allows all single and multiple members to be connected and able to see a pre-selected and curated curriculum that is age and gender-specific, eliminating guesswork and ensures coaching consistency for skills and drills.

Having Training Sessions preloaded by the Club, School, Association, or a single coach proactively prepares players and coaches for great constructive practices.  These sessions can be preprogrammed to be available to everyone on the squad or team, which will allow an absent player to never miss a single teaching moment.

The format of MOTI 3D Soccer Training Platform is engaging, it improves and automates existing coaching tasks and lets all using it saves valuable time as it is always available for review in your hand wherever and whenever you need it. Playing the content is easily done once you have downloaded it onto a device.  Best of all no internet connection or data plan is needed once viewed.

The 3D Animation and Motion Capture gives a complete breakdown of important visual and auditory clues found in the game. Remember 95% of humans are visual learners.  School children are learning math, science, and languages on computer and tablet screens, so why not all aspects of Soccer?  I believe getting to see the entire practice plan and the skill development assets will reduce the learning curve, prepare players for practice, and sharpen them in their approach to game time encounters.

Engaging the parents by having them review the skill elements will help them grow in their knowledge of the game and what is expected from their child.  They will now be looking for a good first touch, combination passing, good control of the ball on the ground and in the air, 1v1 encounters, and players trying out their moves and abilities to go past the opponents.  Gone will be the days of parents hollering out “boot it.”

MOTI has a comprehensive skills development content library that players are encouraged to spend time on at home.  This is where players can do a workout for themselves guided by Motion Capture sequences of all the moves needed to play the game. Give the game back to the young player, the concept of ‘Home Work’ being on their own if need be, doing it for themselves, showing initiative, and learning to love ball mastery.

This concept of ‘Homework’ is an ideal lead in to what is part of the “Be safe – Stay in Place” regulations.  Those young players who took the opportunity to download the MOTI Foundation Skill package for free during the early stages of COVID 19 now have an accelerated understanding of the touches on the ball.  They have also received a fitness boost and a healthy dose of exercise while physical distancing.

Clubs who have adopted the MOTI 3D Soccer Training Platform can communicate through the Announcement Board on the Apps Dashboard, encouraging their players and parents to get their workouts completed and making them personally responsible for development.

The analytic function allows Clubs to monitor the amount of time and the content being viewed by players and coaches.  To increase utilization, a coach by making it into a game among a single player, a squad of players, or a whole age group across a Club or Organization.  Remember that analytics show no favor, just statistics of time, content, and the desire to pick up soccer knowledge.

Having analytics makes the player more accountable for their development.  As little as 15 minutes each day produces impressive results (simple math 365 days X 15 minutes is 5,475 = 91 hours of activity on necessary ball work). Having a ball at the feet of the player while getting ball mastery and muscle memory of repetitive action is the best form of development.

In short, the MOTI 3D Soccer Training Platform and the App it is distributed on provides many solutions to the soccer communities’ needs now! MOTI is easy to set up, is user friendly, and has all the bells and whistles needed to run successful development content for young players.

Be proactive and look at this revolutionary Training Platform.  It is available now and is so very affordable you will be surprised and thankful you spent the time researching this program.

COVID-19. The New Normal.

COVID-19 is not going away from all we are seeing.  As cases of outbreaks and peaks continue to rise in many parts of the country, and we gain more knowledge about the virus, we all face a lot of uncertainty in our planning for the next three months at least.

MOTI Sports does not have all the answers.  We are all looking for the best and most reliable information right now.  One thing that MOTI has discovered is that the MOTI MOBILE free App is a readymade solution for young aspiring soccer players.

They can download the ‘free app,’ get the free 8 Foundation Skills, watch them in 3D and enjoy a whole new experience of watching skills in a MOTION CAPTURE format.  This form of delivery shortens the learning curve and fills the neurotransmitters of the player with visual and audio prompts to practice in a perfect environment. 

Get your players to practice at home, safely perfecting their dribbling and ball manipulation skills. This can take place in the back yard, the garage, the basement even in a bedroom. These basic skills, all 24 if the player chooses to Level-UP and continues through the Advanced and Premier Levels, build and maintain the personal skill sets that all good players need to be successful while playing soccer.

Your player’s future starts today. Get the MOTI MOBILE APP and get started.

New to Coaching Soccer. MOTI has you covered!

Relax! Your search for Soccer coaching help via the internet has all been done. MOTI has curated, sorted, indexed, digitized, inserted progressive foot techniques, converted content into 3D Animation and paired it with Soccer Skills captured in Motion Capture for even more clarity. All of this through MOTI’s OneCoach.

The following information will guide anyone through a Soccer Training Platform. MOTI has set the benchmark for training and engaging youth soccer players, all while giving new volunteer coaches the confidence and direction to move their new soccer tasks forward with success.

The whole intention of this OneCoach example is to give you a hands-on demonstration of how the Mobile App can be the solution for any new volunteer coach. It can even organize an experienced coach who might run short of time before scheduling their session.

The Announcement Board is designed to get you primed on the age and gender you have selected to coach. Next, go to the instructions on understanding the system further down in the Announcement Board and try the MOTI 3D Practice Plan.

In the Welcome Practice Plan look to watch the “Quick Start Coaches Video.” This will guide you around the MOTI Training Platform.

The Plan Library (found by touching the Hamburger Menu in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen on a phone) will expose coaches to a curated set of 12 practice sessions of sensible and appropriate content for the age that was selected at sign up. Also, in the Plan Library is a lesson plan with the age appropriate foot skills for Players and Parents to review and a Practice along with the Game Day Warm up Plan.

The Coach will want to add his players and coaches to the Roster.  Through the Roster you can invite your team to download the MOTI App for themselves.  Once they download the App, the whole MOTI world is open to them!

Players who can pull up the Foot skills on the Smart phone or Pad are ‘Golden’ and will be more likely to be engaged by 3D content in their hands when they need it. What a solution MOTI is to be able to do Skill Homework in isolation if needed with a renowned Personal Professional Soccer Trainer providing appropriate instruction at their fingertips……Brilliant.

Getting into the MOTI OneCoach program is extremely easy.  Just go to https://motisports.com/ and click on the Coach tab.  Sign up on-line, then download the MOTI Mobile FREE App on your tablet or phone for easy access anywhere.  

MOTI™ Foot Skill – Dragback

A very basic move. This is a beginning Dragback Turn Technique that is key to developing ball-handling skills. This should be one of the first 4 skills new players learn immediately as they start learning the game.

Vision and Awareness

Vision and Awareness are the New Buzz Words. How important are they?

Of all the pillars of player development, the two that separate an exceptional player from a good player are the level of Vision and Awareness.

Vision is the skill of seeing things quickly and in some instances before they happen in the game.

Awareness is a combination of feeling and recognizing opportunities to make and execute plays faster than opponents.

In team sports like soccer where interactions with team members are integral to ball possession, vision can be as simple as having your head on a swivel checking in every direction for clues as to what the opponent is doing and what you and your teammates are doing.  It allows a player in control of the ball to serve the pass to an open player, perhaps starting a possession sequence that could lead to scoring goals. Vison can also include a player not with the ball moving into open spaces, placing them in a situational dominance of defenders, making their opponent unable to match their pace of play and movement.

Awareness is not only a special skill; it is almost a second sense where the player does several mindful calculations of multiple facets they see within the game.  They process it against other experiences they have had in practice and games in a nanosecond, leading them to make decisions of actions to force an advantage on their opponent, always looking to gain some dominance within the game.

Awareness can come from many experiences in sports.  I recall many personal times when I utilized coaching points given to me in a rugby training class and applied them to soccer games.  I got insights on an opponent from running cross country in school meets by reading the stride, gait and the body language of a runner in front of me, allowing me to pick my time to advance past them.  I picked up game clues on opponents from Tennis, Squash, and Basketball to the point where my awareness in soccer was a dominant force for me, driving my performance levels in games and allowing me to play for seventeen years professionally.

The awareness soccer players need is generated by peripheral vision, looking and seeing out of the corners of their eyes.  The soccer player is constantly taking screenshots, checking distances between players, assessing speeds of players, hearing footsteps and their breathing, measuring the field and conditions of the playing surface, the weather, etc.

On a personal note, I got into a habit of always checking out the opponent during game warm-ups.  I would develop an awareness of the traits of as many of my opponents as I could.  I would look for the player’s physical attributes.  Do they have left-footed players that can change the dynamics of service into the penalty box? How far does the goalkeeper throw, punt or goal kick?  What kind of matchups will we have on corner kicks and set plays?  I worked out in my head the best configuration for my team to win.

As a player or a coach awareness of your own player’s qualities is always the priority.  Know the range of play of your team, their speed of play, their ability to take players on 1 v 1, what service are they able to execute, etc.  Know their strengths and weaknesses and work within those qualities.

Have an awareness of how players are reacting throughout the game, determine the game status for each player and the individual challenges they are facing.  Some players with awareness become solid leaders and can give guidance, verbal prompting, and encouragement to their squad.

Offensive Awareness is seeing fast breaks and transitional opportunities to attack your opponent.  This is done with quick decisions and clinical execution of passes by those in possession.  Remember this rule does not just apply to forwards who are deemed to have awareness, every player in every position can have very positive attributes towards a team’s success by showing game awareness.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is another buzz phrase that is flooding the Education and Technology World and it is exciting to see that it is converging into Sports. A form of AI is now amongst the features of the MOTI Soccer Training Platform.

The accelerated information MOTI users can gain by watching the animation in the 3D Animated Practice Plans is huge. The visualization of seeing where players make a calculated pass and then follow that up with a meaningful dynamic run to support and back it up is available within the MOTI Mobile App.

Players and coaches can now ‘Switch On’ the trailers and tracers and get immediate feedback and complete sets of movement clues on how the game of soccer is meant to be played. These clues and visual directives place the viewer in almost a state of ‘Virtual Reality’ enabling them to rehearse the action.

Directional alterations of the screen are easily manipulated with pinch and drag finger movement or by using the joysticks to view from any angle or perspective. You can even break the action down frame by frame.  This self-selection enables the viewer to maximize the experience to their own best learning environment and preferences. 

MOTI is capsulizing the needed building blocks of a soccer player, giving them clear uncluttered views of how to practice correctly from the first time on.  Practice alone does not make it perfect within a player, practice makes it permanent.  The more perfect the technique during practice the more the player eliminates the repetitions needed to groove muscle memory of the brain and the fast-twitch muscles that propel soccer players.  I think it is time we embrace technology into soccer for as ‘Perfect a Practice’ as we can get.

MOTI™ 6v3 Rondo Variation Drill

The 6 versus 3 (6v3) Rondo Variation Drill – Girls. This drill is an excerpt from the MOTI Sports Soccer Training Platform. Get the MOTI Soccer app to be able to interact with 3D Soccer skills and drills.

How to watch and learn Soccer

I was asked last week how MOTI can help me understand the game of soccer when I watch broadcast games on TV.

Go to the MOTI Sports Activities and look for the simplest ball movement like ‘passing in pairs’ and you will witness two players facing each other delivering a ball back and forth.  This setup and format are the backbone of the game of soccer and deserve your observation as a key element to building one’s understanding of soccer excellence.

The next progression is to see the inclusion of a third player, then the fourth. With this spectator directive, your observations can now turn to the flow and effectiveness of possession and sequences of passes to move forward against the opposition. Possessions by a team will settle the game’s momentum on how a team is set up to take advantage of a perceived weak point and exploit that weakness.

MOTI has numerous sequences of passing elements in our ‘Library of Content’ where there is one group having numbers up against the other group, sometimes the difference in make-up can be one, two, three even four players less.  These situations and activities are called “Rondo’s”.  Rondo’s are an integral exercise performed at all age and development levels.  Rondo sessions are very economical training and educational format.  Both offense and defense can be instructed in their own time. 

Coaching schools invariably emphasize not to confuse young players with multiple phases all at once.  Remember, MOTI is not video.  It is 3D Animation distributed on a ‘gaming platform’ so it clearly shows the content of Rondo especially when the special effects of ‘Trailers’, ‘Tracersand ‘Paths’ of ball and players are turned on. This view gives all the clues and insight of where the ball and players travel, allowing you to compare play as seen in full glory each week while watching the English Premier League, the USA Major League Soccer, German Bundesliga, Mexico LIGA MX, Dutch Eredivisie, Italian Seria A, etc. 

Enjoy the choice and the power that coaches and players are discovering by manipulating the screen of a portable fully mobile format.  The ability of all users to be a director/producer of content is available and recommended in the MOTI Platform. Use the joystick to rotate, zoom, change your elevation and break the game down frame by frame.  With this type of total power over the viewing of content, you determine your own level of learning environments and engagement, where accelerated development is attainable.

The beauty of MOTI is that it is all visual learning with auditory guidance.  You are immersed in duplications of actions and activities in glorious 3D Animation and Motion Capture via revolutionary technology.

What can make our Soccer players improve?

Metacognition is “cognition about cognition”, “thinking about thinking”, “knowing about knowing”, becoming “aware of one’s awareness” and higher-order thinking skills. The term comes from the root word meta, meaning “beyond”, or “on top of”. Metacognition can take many forms; it includes knowledge about when and how to use particular strategies for learning or problem-solving. There are generally two components of metacognition: (1) knowledge about cognition and (2) regulation of cognition. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition)

Ok – a big concept to grapple with.  Let me try to break it down as it applies to soccer training and development, and where MOTI can assist. 

There are two key parts of Socratic teaching, questioning, and metacognition.  They work in synergy to help players think critically and develop skills for lifelong learning and self-reflection.  Socratic questioning prompts players to question their own beliefs and assumptions and to test connections between their beliefs and the situation at hand.  Metacognition assignments invite students to reflect on their own thinking and learning, which deepens learning and improves retention. 

Most Soccer Clubs have players who can kick a ball, have a decent first touch, cooperate well in a team environment, have mobility and are competent athletes.  All the main characteristics desired to be an excellent Soccer Player.  So, what is the problem?  Why aren’t their game performance levels rising and could this be an indication of why a Club is losing 50% of their membership at the U14 levels?        

Does your club have a tool for measuring ability and performance?  Do your coaches have a detailed curriculum that clearly demonstrates a path and an expectation for each player and team to attain, that is specific to gender and age?

Maybe your coaches at training pose questions multiple times within a practice to ascertain player knowledge and comprehension of soccer.  Some players get it, while many may not, even if their answer is primarily based on recall or an inferred clue in the question.  Sound familiar?  It should because this is exactly how the United States Soccer Federation is instructing its Grassroots Coaching Pathway in their Play-Practice-Play format.

All coaches and parents should be looking for ‘Curious and Brave Soccer Players’.  Players who have and will continue to work on improving and broadening their Skill and Ball Mastery.  Not only doing this in their team meetings but also at home, by themselves or with a buddy or sibling. 

The stats are there for us to embrace and change collectively wanting to keep soccer players active past 14 years of age in soccer.  60% of parents identify with Free Range parenting which delineates some rules and guidelines, at the same time giving more freedom and parameters to discover and explore in the Real World.   A high percentage of parents have read child research giving credence to the notion that unstructured play and self-discovery assist in the levels of a child’s creativity. 

The same goes for learning to be a soccer player and athlete.  With “metacognition,” coaches, parents, and teachers can expose themselves to the MOTI Soccer Platform where the skill sets, the activities, the motion capture and expert coaching points all work hand in hand to cater to short-circuiting the learning curve with the key elements for ‘Perfect Practice’ not just ‘Neanderthal’ kicking a ball around and running in circles.

Having players listening in to the coach and other players while getting instruction, then sharing their thoughts and ideas during a practice reinforces the thinking within the group and also gets players to make visual connections and responses to each other at a totally different level of engagement, leadership, and maturity at any age.  This environment and content produce a guided learning experience where players get to utilize the nonthreatening soccer field classroom.  

Players are not only thinking, but they are also learning how to retain information.  This allows them to take these small-sided tasks and activities into the vast area the big field thrusts them into when they scrimmage.  The coach and all players are facilitating collaboration, enjoying productivity, vocal leadership, empathy and strategies of good habits that will last over time. 

I know from firsthand experience that good soccer players can be produced using 3D visual and auditory learning techniques.   Observing, practicing and then executing perfect application of a skill, and witnessing how it relates to the larger game and team play elevates player knowledge, game understanding, game awareness, intuition, and self-esteem.  Think MOTI “metacognition” or  MOTI “thinking about thinking” as a solution in helping players to improve.   The MOTI Soccer Training Platform offers members of the squad an opportunity to listen to their inner voices as they look at the 3D animated practice sessions and 3D motion capture of the skill elements needed to become an accomplished soccer player.   Students of the soccer game using the MOTI App can not only view the activities and skills, but they also end up reciting key coaching points.  Unlocking the content of the game breaks this complicated game down into its building blocks that can accelerate both player’s and coaches’ understanding of this complex and demanding sport.