What We Did This Fall!

This is the first installment of a weekly series of updates following the DC Way Travel teams! The first update will be about what players learned this fall. The Fall season is used to get our players better at the fundamentals of the game by using the DC Way approach! DC Way Travel used the Fall to get each player more comfortable with the ball, rather than just doing heavy footwork drills. Coach Alyssa Yudelson said that in the Fall season “all players got more confident, faster, quicker, better technical skills, better decision-making skills and more focused during practices!”

Throughout the Fall DC Way travel focused on our approach to working on fundamentals, including using various games to develop valuable skills that translate on and off the field, as DC Way considers that games are the best teacher! DC Way truly believes that the most powerful skill, in both soccer and life, is intelligence. Intelligence helps build elements such as work hard, developing decision-making, anticipation, game reading, understanding, and creativity. Another priority in the Fall was focusing on injury prevention by spending time developing the correct footwork, work through unusual movements (lateral movements) and work on body awareness, such as learning how to fall correctly.

DC Way also worked on building emotional, social and mental skills throughout the Fall season by building characteristics such as confidence, attention, concentration, problem solving and responsibility. These areas are some aspects that the travel teams will continue to work on improving! One way parents can help build up their players in these areas is to remind them to be responsible for their belongings, words, and actions. For example, a special exercise our travel team has been doing until now is that each week every player is assigned a new friend, who they get to know throughout the week! Ask your player each week who their new friend is and what they have learned about this person!