Film Sessions, Evaluate and Learn

October 15

As a team, we generally hold film sessions approximately once a week, where we watch some game footage to help reinforce concepts that we work on in training. We usually watch one of our own recent games, although a few times we have watched some tape of an upcoming opponent as well. We will also occasionally watch clips from professional games that Coach Jennings puts together to demonstrate some of the key concepts he is trying to impress on us, such as how to defend with shape or how to move the ball up the field.

This year, our film sessions have generally been on Monday nights (although before playing St. Lawrence this weekend we also met on Saturday morning to watch some of our Friday afternoon match with Clarkson). These film sessions are a great way to evaluate our performance and to see a visual of how well we are executing the things Coach Jennings works on in practice with us. Watching the second half of our 2-1 loss to Skidmore a few weeks back, I was surprised to see just how much possession we had despite giving up two goals. While this might be somewhat expected as Skidmore have been a counter-attacking team this season, it was still surprising to see how good we looked on film and what we could have done in that game if we had avoided some breakdowns both on defense and around our opponent’s goal. This past Monday we watched tape from our 1-0 loss to St. Lawrence. Again, there were a lot of positives to take from the game, along with examples of some of the things we can still do better as we head into the final five games of the regular season.

Today we have a day off as everyone attempts to get through midterms and papers before next week’s break from school. We want everyone to be rested in order to have two more good days of practice in preparation for our matchup against RPI on Saturday, a must-win game.