When I was coaching college soccer, I did a statistical review of my team’s throw-ins. We were a bad team that played ugly soccer. We had tried to do something different with a different formation, but the players hated it. So we reluctantly changed back to a 4-3-3: the grilled cheese sandwich of college soccer formations. Everyone knows how to make one because everyone has those ingredients at hand. The head coach and I knew we were trying to make grilled cheese with asparagus and cod. But it’s what the players wanted. So, to help me deal with the fact that I knew we were terrible and only about to get worse, I decided to try to find an edge for the team. I had remembered that training throw-ins with my high school team 4 years ago took us from losing every week to tying most games. I dove into the footage to see if we should try to replicate this.

What I found from just watching two games of film was astounding. Within 3 touches of the ball, we lost position 85% of the time on our own throw-ins. We gained the position of other teams’ throw-ins 20% of the time. We would be more efficient to just give the other team our throw-ins. I wanted to keep analyzing but, after those two games, I knew I couldn’t do that for the sake of my own blood pressure. The pattern happened almost every time; our team would pick up the ball, look around a bit and then throw the ball to a teammate that was covered by the defense. That player would either make a pass so obvious I could have intercepted it if I started running from my sideline position, or they would try to beat the defending player but miscontrol the ball. There were also numerous times where we threw it directly to the other team. The thrower would become so  panicked that there were no options available they would just throw it down the line. 

Annoyed and caffeinated, I decided to talk to the head coach of the program about it that instant. I had run this practice before with a high school team, so I knew just a couple days of working on it could be fruitful.  “I’m glad you looked into it” she said, “But I don’t think we need to do that. We need to work on our shooting and our formation. If we are better at being in the correct position, we will play better.”

I wish I had pushed her harder on the point. We had been working on formation for months. It wasn’t helping. We trained shooting and it looked like our kids were training to become NFL kickers. Everyone knows how to play a 4-3-3. These girls had been playing the formation in the middle school club days. We needed to try something else. It wasn’t working. And, yet, we continued on training formations and we continued losing.

While reading Net Gains by Ryan O’Hanlon, I was reminded of this story and the frustrations I have with college soccer. It’s an outdated game based on physicality and raw athletic talent, rather than good coaching or good soccer. It’s all recruitment to win. At most DIII schools, coaches should just be part of the admissions department since we barely coach and spend most days of the year in rental cars exploring the tristate area for some sucker who will attend an overpriced school just to say they were a collegiate athlete.  I wanted to be more and bring in better coaching and make better people. That’s not the role of most college coaches. 

As O’Hanlon points out in his book, throw-ins and set pieces are the only real part of the game a coach can get their hands on to change the outcome.Most actions in a soccer game are up to the players to execute and the game state is so fluid no amount of planning or game planning can completely orchestrate how the game will go. I can’t write up a play that shows a defender what to do when they get the ball because there are 21 independent players that are constantly moving around them.. I can’t  know who will be the open man or what the correct option is because I will never know the space that will be open. Space changes too quickly in the game/ But I can help them on a set piece. I can show them where to throw the ball or get them open by orchestrating movements of the other players in different patterns. The game has stopped and he has time to perform the set actions we talked about at practice. It’s important for us, as coaches, to know where we need to tell the athletes to cook and where we step up to the stove.

I think we, as the United States, should be ahead of the curve and start coaching this at the youth level. All youth coaches should do a couple training sessions on throw-ins minimum every season. Free kicks as well. That still isn’t even close enough to what we should be doing. We need to change how we operate quickly, or the rest of the world will finally stop being stubborn and listen to the data from Net Gains and all the sports data analytics books that are getting published. We will continue to be a perennial hopefully nation of soccer athletes who constantly underperform at the club level and an international team that looks like a start but is more flash than it is substance. That starts at the youth game.I fear that we won’t ever make that change.