How to shake flat starts to games or after the half
I’m head coach of a u11 and assistant on u12 boys travel teams. These are lower travel teams (I’m not sure what the actual distinction is). We are a small town of under 10k forced to play in a conference with teams from cities with 50-75k people. So, we take our lumps but the idea is this core will still be together in HS whereas the clubs we play break up and go to multiple schools at that time (for context, last years HS team was one goal from a state final and the last public school left in the state tournament - that team lost its first 22 games starting about where we are. So the model works even if it involves a lot of early losses).
A recurring them I’m seeing is us losing a ton of games because we either wait too long to grow into the game early and it’s over before we do, or we start fine and look good and after half we start horrible.
A good example was last night, down 0-1 (we could have easily been up 2-1) at half against a team that typically hammers us. After half we came out horrid, and within 5 minutes it was 0-4.
Or we’ll start games flat, concede dumb free kicks/corners and it’s 0-2 before we blink.
Understand these are young kids, but how so we keep them focused/locked in. I’ve tried hyping them up, keeping them loose, rondo at half or right before start, etc.
I’d love to hear what you all do to gets youngsters to stay focused. Lapses are fine given their age, but I hate we get buried because of a single 5 minute bad spell.