Walking Soccer
After a particularly physical recent soccer tournament, we coaches decided to take it easy on the u14 girls at our next practice so they could recover. That meant dialing up a session of walking soccer.
If you haven’t heard of it, walking soccer is exactly as it sounds. Invented so senior citizens could keep playing the beautiful game, running is not allowed! Before you mock it, try it. It’s more fun and strategic than you might think (just don’t let anybody video you playing because it does look ridiculous in action).
Because there’s no running, walking soccer teaches a few concepts that are critical to full-speed soccer. One is anticipation. If you start your off-ball movement late in walking soccer, you’ve missed your chance. Another is positioning. Without being able to make a sprinting recovery run, if you’re out of position defensively in walking soccer, you’re toast. Finally, close control. If you have a loose touch in walking soccer, it’s a turnover. And there is no hustling to win it back.
The point is that speed covers up a lot of sins in soccer. Take it away, and those mistakes are out in the open. You can either fix them or get punished by them.
It’s, of course, true that when it comes to individuals, teams, and organizations, there are things we do well and other things we do, well, less well. And often we use strengths to hide or paper over weaknesses. While that might seem to work for a while, the knock-on consequence is that those weaknesses persist instead of getting fixed. Left to fester, they become risks.
So lately I’ve been thinking about what the equivalent to playing walking soccer would be at Permanent Equity? In other words, how might we regularly strip away what we’re good at so we can see what we’re bad at without compromising performance? Unfortunately, I haven’t come up with anything that doesn’t feel dumb or contrived (though maybe that’s what you’re thinking walking soccer is), but I’d love to hear your ideas if you have them.
– Tim
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