Beth Gottung teaches you drills that will inspire the competitive spirit of your team. Using white board explanations and on field demonstration, Coach Gottung presents practice drills that will challenge your players and improve their performance.
The basic fundamentals of ball control, hitting, passing and receiving are all part of the drills, with the addition of competing with your teammates for reward or punishment that puts added pressure, by design on the players to simulate game like situations. In addition to simply presenting a series of drills that are structured to encourage competitiveness, Coach Gottung is able to continuously reinforce the basic skills that will build a better field hockey athlete.
Starting with a warm up drill designed to get the players moving, "OUR HOUSE" is a possession game within a limited space and using limited number of athletes. This is a great starting point that begins players thinking about their specific skills. Defenders need to use good communication in order to force the ball away from the offense. The offense needs to concentrate on their passing and field position in an effort to maintain possession of the ball.
To recreate the pressure of game speed shooting while at the same time encouraging each player to deliver 100% effort in ball handling and sprinting, Coach Gottung presents "Under Pressure Shooting and Fitness." This is an outstanding drill with built in motivation guaranteed to bring out your athletes maximum effort! This drill is easily scalable and can be customized to concentrate player's competitiveness where you as a coach feel they need it most.
The "1v1 Lane" is one of those rare drills that will allow you to create the specific defensive situation needed to practice while still providing the game speed competitiveness your attack players need to continue developing their skill. By creating a defensive start that mimics a "re-defend" situation, coaches can help their athletes develop their skill of defending from a defensively disadvantaged position. Another problem that the re-defend often creates, are defensive penalties. Being able to focus your efforts on this specific setting will help defenders improve their body positioning and footwork so that they can defend successfully without drawing penalties.
Coach Gottung highlights the importance of placing a high priority on your team's competitiveness during practices. She does a god job of highlighting the specifics skills that are needed for teams to be competitive within each of these drills. She demonstrates the importance of having each of these drills flow into each other with the skill taught in the previous drill becoming an important component in the successful execution of the upcoming drill.
The drills that are demonstrated in this video will without a doubt improve the ability of your team to perform better under pressure in game situations.
94 minutes. 2013.