This past week I spent about 5 days learning from Anson Dorrance and his staff at one of his camps. For those who are not aware, Anson Dorrance is the head coach of UNC Women's Tar Heels. He has created a soccer dynasty with 20 National Championships. As I coach a lot of female athletes I guess he is the best person for me to learn from. 

He requires his athletes to be fast and powerful. His 1-3-4-3 system is very dynamic and you have to work extremely hard to be a part of it. You have to be able to hit the ball more than 60mph for you to be able to shoot outside the 18 yard box in games. You have to be a competitive and exceptional athlete to be on the team. He values speed and strength training and has a great guy working for him in Greg Gatz.

I got a chance to see strength and conditioning coach Greg Gatz do a session on sprint training, which was very interesting for me.

Here is what Greg took the athletes through.

First they went through a dynamic warm-up from the bottom up, meaning he worked on feet first and went up the body. He went through various mobility and flexibility movements such as lunges through different planes and skips and hops. He then put the athletes through some knee drive exercises to promote force into the ground.

Next he took the players through some speed techniques focussing on 4 things.

The head, back, arms and knees. 

He gave 4 phrases to help the athletes with these areas.

Focus: for the head to not drop and stay up looking about 20 yards ahead. 

Arch: To keep the lower and upper back arched to promote good posture.

Rotation: to get the arms in a 90 degree position going from chin to short pockets.

Push: to drive the feet into the ground and getting the knees up for maximum force into the ground.

He then finished with a few acceleration exercises such as Tall and Fall and push up position tag.

I have already had some of my athletes try the techniques and they responded very well to them.