Why Club Ohio
CLUB OHIO's culture
Our culture is deliberately values-based and clearly prioritizes the development of our student-athletes. These values permeate our interactions from the boardroom to our preparation for a national championship and all the way down to a team party for our U7 age group. While we continually strive to develop creative, disciplined, respectful, and industrious players, our ultimate objective is for our core club values of Passion, Integrity, and Progress to be exemplified by the way our players express themselves on and off the field. The core tenets of Passion, Integrity, and Progress are permanent and our players' applications of them are vast.
- Passion = Effort + Commitment
- Integrity = Discipline + Respect
- Progress = Humility + Ambition + Innovation
Fundamentally, our organization exists for a game that triggers and compounds a Passion that is innate to each member of our club. That passion is the natural energy that empowers our culture and prompts us to approach everything we encounter with Effort and Commitment.
Integrity is what guides and directs the energy that results from our passion. We steer our passion with Discipline in our intentions and Respect in our interactions with each other as well as people outside our organization.
Finally, Progress is the destination that integrity should guide us towards. At both the organizational and individual player/staff levels, we seek to develop and grow toward a vision of an improved future. To achieve that vision, we must remain Humble about our room for growth in the present moment, Ambitious about our long-term goals, and Innovative about our approach and opportunity to move in that direction.
Club Ohio's Mission
Our mission is to cultivate the best environment to promote and enhance player development by providing our players with high-level training and programming. We work to equip our players with the necessary tools and skills to facilitate technical mastery and a firm concept of tactical understanding, which will allow them to progress on their soccer journey. Philosophically we believe in adopting a holistic approach that focuses on the growth and development of the player and person. Our club’s dedicated and qualified staff utilizes a variety of strategies, training methods, and resources to promote desired player outcomes in a positive and growth-focused manner.
Club Ohio's Core Values
Club Ohio's Technical Philosophy
Our technical philosophy is based fundamentally on the fact that we are a player development organization. Every element of our philosophy exists to optimize the development of our players. In this way, our technical philosophy is merely a technical extension of our club’s broader mission.
The implications of our growth-centric development model are most vital in three (3) areas: (i) club playing style; (ii) instructional methodology; and (iii) training philosophy.
We recognize that every player in our club aspires to reach a “next level” in their respective soccer adventure. Whether that level is playing collegiately, or in a professional academy, the playing styles a player will experience across the journey of next-level play will be broad, and accordingly, we must prepare them for success at every possible opportunity. Therefore, in order to maximize development, remaining fluid in regard to system and style of play is important, along with having clear and flexible team tactical references. With this in mind, we initially structure our teams around a high-pressing, purposeful build-up 4-3-3 system with younger (7v7 and 9v9) age groups mirroring subsets of that larger team structure. From there flexibility is introduced as adjustments to that base system are introduced. Examples of some adjustments could be switching to a three (3) back by dropping a midfielder or setting up a delayed or altered timing of our pressing triggers to create more of a midblock pressing system.
The implication of player development as the main precedent for our teaching methods is that we prioritize the learner above all else. This is a learner-centered environment, so we aim for our players to learn by experiencing first and supplemented by coaches explaining later and only as much as necessary. Finally, the level of experience provided must take into account the age and developmental stage of the learner.
Club Ohio's Training Philosophy
Our training philosophy is an extension of our technical philosophy as we recognize that every player's action originates as the player is communicating with their environment. The cues perceived in that process comprise the key factors of the player’s decision-making process as they select an action. Finally, the action unfolds externally as the player is executing the decision. As such, these are the elements we aim to develop in each training session.
This basic Communicating, Decision Making, and Executing concept provides the framework for our training philosophy. The key implications of this model are: (i) training should be representative so a player can learn to perceive and evaluate realistic space-time scenarios; (ii) training should be positional and directional to maintain the realism of those space-time scenarios; (iii) playing principles guide what and how the player sees the game; (iv) playing principles steer how a player evaluates options seen; (v) decision making is owned by the player and merely guided by the coach; (vi) technique is almost always expressed as the execution of a decision; and (vii) a player learns by experiencing first and supplemented by a coach explaining later only as necessary.
Club Ohio's Player Identification Philosophy
Our player development philosophy, both internally and externally, guides us in evaluating a player based on the same characteristics we aim to develop. By evaluating players on their abilities in communicating, decision making, and executing decisions first, we can more accurately understand where the player stands at a given moment of evaluation and more effectively project where and how they will develop in the future. Additionally, we recognize that the expression of that whole process is filtered through the attitude and focus that the player brings with them, therefore we factor those qualities into our evaluation protocol. Finally, we evaluate the fitness ability of the player by observing their communication, decision making, and decision execution at a high tempo, with minimal drop off in tempo as the match progresses, and with minimal drop off in explosiveness as the match progresses.
Since we aim to evaluate game action characteristics, we recognize that evaluation happens most accurately in live match settings supplemented by live training environments. Accordingly, we aim to use those settings primarily to evaluate and scout for the construction of our “National” team rosters.
Club Ohio's Player Development Technology
Our club has begun internal discussions about the increased role of using analytics to properly interpret data, and the variety of ways it can benefit our teams, players, and club. While we use basic data to analyze player performance & workload, we do believe moving forward that data and the use of analytics can be a great asset when taking a more detailed look at basic game stats. For example, if we take a deeper look at the stats and include selected performance indicators, the data could potentially give us a more defined and complete picture of what has occurred during the game, which enables a better and more detailed analysis of the game. This deeper dive into the stats can offer a coach more information on how the team has performed and whether the performance was in line with the projected pre-game instructions and game plan. On a more advanced level, the use of data can lead to evaluating the metrics of expected goals, expected assists, performance indicators, player development, and injury prevention.
Regarding video and statistical analysis tools, our club has partnered with several companies including Veo and Hudl. Currently, we are in the process of finalizing a deal with Trace for our entire club and locations that will be our main video providers, while also incorporating Veo and Hudl as necessary. In regard to statistical tools, as we are finalizing with Trace we are looking to make a final decision on statistical software.
As a club, we manage the training load through structured planning and periodization of our training volume and training exercise selection. We work in a 6-week mesocycle to appropriately overload and then underload targeted energy systems while adapting the weekly micro cycle to external factors like fixture schedules and weather. Within this framework, we gradually increase to fitness levels of our players throughout the season and manage acute loading concerns like growth spurts or individual injuries. We don’t currently gather objective physical data to monitor the training load at this time.
