Coaches Blog: Coach Stogsdill

On behalf of San Diego Soccer Club, the Directors, the coaching staff, our administrative staff, and our Board of Directors we hope that all of you are safe, healthy, and maintaining your sanity! These are unprecedented times we are experiencing, and soccer is probably the least of your worries. However, for our players, we know that soccer still has an important role for them.  Its role right now can be as simple as giving them something to do for exercise at home. However, I also think it helps give the players hope that at some point we will return to normal and players will be back together with their teammates playing the game they love.

One of the things that I am very excited about is the Rise Elite Soccer App that SDSC has purchased for each member of our club. Rise is known throughout the country as a leading app in at-home soccer development. The app has workouts that focus on skill development, speed, strength, and overall fitness. Each workout comes with a plan of about 12 exercises and each exercise has a brief demo video with instruction. The app will log the player’s progress and move to more challenging techniques as players perfect ones early on. This program should be able to challenge each player in our program to improve.

This shut down can be an important time in a player’s development. As coaches we talk all the time about the fact that players don’t get out and play the game at home or practice enough on their own. This period of social distancing provides players a great opportunity to take charge of their individual development. Players can spend quality time working to improve their mastery of the ball as well as their strength, agility, and fitness. There certainly cannot be any complaints that there is just not enough time in the day!

With two kids who play for SDSC, I am in the same shoes as many of you. My wife and I are trying to balance our jobs with having two kids at home and making sure that they are keeping themselves active both with academic activities as well as exercise.  The academic part of it is starting to work itself out as schools are slowly starting to get kids into various online learning tracks. The exercise part is where I think SDSC plays a large role. Sometimes you can tell the kids to go out and train with the ball, but they have no real idea what to do. They are not able to get a bunch of friends together to play soccer, all they really can do is train by themselves or with a sibling or parent. The hard part for players is trying to figure out what to do when they go out to work out by themselves.

The Rise app is just one of the ways in which we are helping our players through this shut down. Our goal is to make sure each SDSC player has enough content to stay challenged while working out at home. Along with Rise we have continued to add things to our Player Tools section of the website. We have always had our self-teaching program with videos available to the players but now we have put together a spring 2020 workout plan that gives the players an idea of what they can do each day for their workout. We will continually update the site with more drills and videos. Through social media we are trying to challenge the kids with contests or other ideas of things to do at home. We will have a weekly blog that will cover such things as tips for at home strength programs, nutrition, college recruiting, and more. Our coaching staff should be in the process of already running or setting up virtual training sessions with their teams. 

These are very challenging times that we are all going through. We all want a return to normalcy and our kids probably more so than anyone else. Soccer gives them a chance to play a game they love with their friends. I know our coaching staff misses being out there with their kids and look forward to that day as much as any of you. We will continue to do what we can to challenge our players and stay connected and engaged with them. Please stay tuned to social media as more fun things will be on the way. In the meantime, stay safe, work hard and know that we all can’t wait to get back on the field again!!

Peter Stogsdill

SDSC Director of Coaching