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This morning, thanks very much for joining me. Firstly I'd like to say
thank you to Matt Smith, who is the founder of Epic Soccer Training, who is
joining me this morning. Hi Matt... How you doing?
Good thanks, how are you? I'm fantastic, I'm just in Los Angeles, enjoying the sun. So I hear you're
in Australia. Probably doing the same?
It is winter here but it is nice and sunny outside, so
it's good.
Firstly, thanks very much for joining me, and secondly I'd like to say congratulations
on developing
Epic Soccer Training. I've been using it myself for my own game but
also helping teach my daughter's under twelve soccer team, and I've found it really helpful, and
can't thank you enough for developing it, thank you.
No problem, glad you're using it, that's awesome.
I just wanted to ask you some questions but before we jump into the actual
program itself, really keen to find out a bit more about your background,
and your
soccer education, growing up. So what age did you start
playing soccer?
I started playing soccer about four to five years old. Usually in the
States, your parents always throw you into a couple of sports to find out which one are
you interested in. So I played baseball a little bit.
Believe it or not, broke my arm playing baseball. Really? Yeh!
And so I was like, it's boring anyway, I'm sitting here and I need a little
more action. So
they threw me into soccer as well. So I started
doing rec soccer, which is very basic, at age,
probably four.
And I started, and started progressing from there.
I'd rather kick a ball, than wait around on the field, so it worked well
for me. I'm with you there... What were your skills like when you first started out?
When I first started out... I came from a pretty athletic family but I'd say
I was pretty average, I was just a little bit quicker. I was like really tiny, I was like this
really tiny speedster.
As far as when you first start out playing soccer, I think that everybody's
skills are pretty basic.
They're at about the same level, and usually there's a specific age group
that you can get to,
and you're probably experiencing that with your daughter right now,
when they hit about seven, to eight, is when you can really propel your skills.
So you can skyrocket them quickly, and
from there on
it's as hard as you want to work but i'd say
I started out pretty basic, pretty average you know. I didn't have any
fantastic coordination and moves when I was four.
At what point did you decide that you needed to work on your skills?
You know, most of us are competitive by nature,
so when I was playing in a rec league, you always want the ball more, you always want
more playing time, you don't want to be the one that's sitting on the bench obviously.
You're there to have fun.
I was probably,
I started off pretty early, where I was, I need to get better at soccer but obviously
when you're four, five, six or seven, you're not really sure how to do that, other than just
be on a team.
So I started pretty early but as we'll get into later on, I'll tell you about
when I really started
to buckle down and and know that I needed to do a different kind of training.
So what sort of stuff did you start working on?
As far as individual training?
When you realised you needed to do the extra training, what sort of work did you do?
Well I noticed that
the big jump for me was in between my freshman year in high school, so I
would have been around sixteen years old, and I was
good but I was really small. On my driver's license I was
five-two, so I was... I don't know the age
for the metrics but that's tiny. I was a tiny guy. I
remember I was actually
in a state championship soccer game
and we were playing against some of the guys from the Bollettieri Academy, so it was DaMarcus Beasley
from the World Cup team, some of the
premier players from North Carolina coming down, as there was a specific soccer school.
We played these guys, and we were about eighty minutes in,
we were down four to one, and finally the coach was like, I'll just put
everybody in now,
just to get some experience. It was heart-wrenching for me, I felt like I was
really,
like I was really good,
in my mind but I
was tiny. I remember at the end of the game, and the coach is a really good friend
of mine too, and he told my parents, he was just too small,
and everybody else was huge, and that was the most gut-wrenching thing.
And I was like, Nooooo... it's soccer, you shouldn't have to be
a huge guy. So
on the off season, after I'd heard that, I need to do something different
because obviously just going to practice is not going to get me any better skills than
the rest of my teammates around me, and the other players that are also going to
practice from other schools.
I had to do something drastically different, I got my hands on anything I could,
I talked to my coach, I talked to
a bunch of my other club coaches that I'd had in the past, and they told me you need to work on
individual-specific
training, and work on your skills. And once you boost those up, it's only going to
boost the people around you as well, when they want to know, how did you get
so much better. So I went from being
a freshman non-starter,
to
a first team all-state player in
my sophomore year, so by the next season
I was voted
by all the coaches, and
I was one of the leading scorers in the league, I got all these MVP awards for
tournaments, and it was only one season!
So
the individual training is one of the things that I definitely harp on in the
program, it's what its central focus is because
you can go to practice all you want but
you're never going to get better than the person next to you. Obviously you can
work harder but
the drastic difference between
what I teach in Epic Soccer Training, and what most coaches teach,
it's just light years ahead because most coaches are like, let's just line up, let's just
do drills.
They're more team oriented.
Which is great, there is a time and place for that but if you
want to take your skills to the next level, you need
to do individual training.
I can
definitely see that from my own experience of the last couple of years.
I'm probably a bit different to your average customer... basically I played at high school, and haven't played for
fifteen years. And I was standing on the sideline watching my daughter's team run around last year,
and I thought, I'd really like to lace on the boots!
Believe or not, there are actually a lot of people in your shoes.
They want to lace them back-up, they have kids, they're like, I want to play with my kid, and teach them how to do...
just to improve, and take it from there. It's not
that uncommon to see people like you. I'm just happy that you're doing it.
Yeah, it's great. Last year, first year back for fifteen years... and I don't think I was a great player when I first started in high school but
I never had the coaching that you've gone through in the program.
And I can see having watched the training in my team, which is fairly non-existent
but also the training for my daughter's team, it's exactly the same, it's the
team drills, you get to touch the ball for five minutes out of an hour. And I can see
with the program you've been doing, it is about developing those individual skills.
I've been doing some extra work myself, outside of my own team training.
I was probably faster,
certainly for my age group, probably a bit fitter and faster than some of the other people.
I was in the team
from that point of view but my skills were lower than some of the other guys. So I've really been working on that
and I can say
it's definitely been helping with my performance.
It's shocking how fast you can improve if you're doing the right training.
You can lace up the boots, you can do dynamic drills
which is what we teach in the course
and your control, and your first touch
can improve so fast. Wayne Rooney,
most people know, he's one of the best players in England, one of the top strikers,
he was interviewed and was asked, what's the one thing that you should improve on, and
he was like
it's your touch, but more specifically it's your first touch. Most people don't realise, and that's
something we teach a lot of in the program. I'm sure you know if you are
teaching your daughter's... come on, get that first touch down. One
of the reasons why people need to understand that, is your first touch
can open up a lot more
avenues, a lot more places to play. You become a play maker because if you
get your first touch down quick
you have more time to survey the field. Not that you should get the ball and then think of what to do
but
if you're spending two-to-three touches trying to settle a simple
ball
by that time the defence has collapsed on you, and then you're going to rush to make a
pass that you may not be able to make.
So first-touch is definitely huge.
Absolutely, and I've seen that.
I've still got a bit to improve but I've definitely seen that in my own game.
Everybody does but that's OK. Soccer is a game of learning!