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Why Do WMF Essex Train Indoors for 6 Months?

We Make Footballers
02 December 2022

Each year, after the summer months have ended, we get a few questions asking why we train indoors for 6 months of the year as opposed to outside under flood lights. Here in this short blog, WMF Essex Academy Director and We Make Footballers Head of Coaching David Pipe goes through some of the reasoning behind this important decision.

 

Avoiding the Winter weather!

The first and obvious reason is due to light and weather conditions. When it's dark, wet and windy we could continue to train outside (as many clubs do) but we have found that, especially at the younger age groups, the quality of these sessions and the player engagement drops dramatically in comparison to the brighter, warmer, dryer sessions.

We also want to ensure that each player's first impression and reaction to a WMF session is vibrant and happy - standing in the cold rain would potentially dampen (excuse the pun) this experience for a child. We've very rarely seen smiling people of any age when standing in the cold rain, so for this reason we look indoors...

 

Change of surrounding environment!

Training indoors brings new challenges even before a ball has been kicked. The echoes of the hall can be a new distraction, the parents/spectators being ever so much closer, the coaches voices appearing louder. All this creates a new environment for a player, potentially placing them outside their comfort zone... and this is OK!!

Providing the player is having fun and is safe, being outside their comfort zone and becoming comfortable with new environments is healthy for their development. Good footballers must learn to concentrate on the game whilst ignoring or accepting a vast array of external distractions, indoor football is certainly a great first stepping stone down this path.

Smaller spaces to develop ball mastery!

For us this is a key component. Indoor football within our WMF halls is set up in much smaller spaces when compared to our outdoor sessions.

Less space = less time on the ball, quicker decision making, tighter ball control, more use of body and body angles to protect the ball, more repetitions, more focus required on every action and more touches of the ball!

By simply reducing the space and changing the playing surface, the list of benefits is huge - providing the drills/sessions/challenges are designed to encourage the positives, something WMF takes very seriously then player development should increase after just a few months - we've seen it first hand time and time again.

We appreciate that sometimes, with our large numbers, indoor football may look like organised chaos but that is purposely by design as we believe it truly helps aid a player's development far better than boring uniformed drills.

We like to keep our players moving, thinking, solving problems and most importantly we like to get them on the ball as often as possible.

Indoor football helps with all of that and it something we are passionate about continuing.

The WMF yearly syllabus takes into account both indoor and outdoor months. Our sessions do change according to the environment, all by purposeful design, to help ensure each player receives a fully rounded experience across their season with us.

If you have any questions about any of this, or the WMF syllabus as a whole, please contact David on [email protected]