“Dan Blank is the Associate Head Coach of the Georgia Bulldogs women’s soccer team. His new book, Soccer IQ, covers 54 topics in 54 chapters, all in 119 pages.
It is a small book filled with coaching tips, observations, critiques, suggestions and guides to make young soccer players be better young soccer players. Written with humor, it is a book that both players and coaches need to read.
If you only own one soccer book, it should be Soccer IQ. His chapter on “Hunting Rebounds” follows. (SSS Editor)”
Any player I’ve ever coached will tell you I’m a freak for hunting rebounds. And I have no idea why any player or coach wouldn’t share my zeal.
At the highest level of men’s soccer, goals are commonly scored from rebounds. As a matter of fact, a rebound provided the most exciting moment of the 2010 World Cup for the United States. Landon Donovan’s goal in the 90th minute that defeated Algeria was a very simple rebound finish.
Rebounds happen in men’s soccer all the time. But they happen even more in the women’s game.
Women use the same size goal as the men but the goalkeepers aren’t as tall and their arms aren’t as long. That means shots that a male keeper can reach and hold, a female keeper might only be able to reach.
Males and females also use the same size soccer ball, but the hands of a female goalkeeper are smaller and more prone to coughing up rebounds.
In addition to goalkeepers, there’s also the matter of goalposts and crossbars. Plenty of shots find their way off the woodwork and back in front of the goal. My point is, rebounds happen. They happen a lot. And a smart player can cash in on them.
The key to hunting rebounds is very simple: EXPECT THEM. The reason that most players don’t capitalize on rebounds is that they don’t go after them until after they appear. They aren’t proactive.
When a shot is taken, there is usually at least one defender between the attackers and the goal. When a rebound occurs, that defender will have a head start on the attackers and therefore she will usually be first to the ball.
To be an effective hunter of rebounds you have to negate her head start. That requires two things.
1).You have to recognize when a teammate is about to shoot and
2). when you see that, you have to crash the goal. It’s that simple.
To eliminate the defenders’ head start, you’ve got to hunt rebounds before they actually materialize. You have to crash the goal and hope there will be a rebound. That’s the whole key to this. The vast majority of attackers aren’t proactive in hunting rebounds. They wait until a rebound happens and then they react to it.
And that’s why they finish second in the race to the ball. Smart forwards know to run as the shot is about to be taken… just in case.
In 2011, our team at Georgia was tied 1-1 with a very inspired and hard- working team from Mercer University. Mercer had kicked our tail for the first
45 minutes, but we had retaken control after half-time.
We outshot the Bears 15-5 in the second half, but we couldn’t manage to actually put the ball into the back of the net, so the game went into Golden Goal overtime.
It was a nerve-wracking night for us because a loss to Mercer would likely extinguish any chance we had to make the NCAA Tournament. We couldn’t afford to lose or tie that game. It was without question, a must-win.
Nine minutes into the first overtime, our center forward Ashley Miller, took a shot from 18 yards that was blocked. The ball deflected back to Jamie Pollock who sidestepped a defender then laced a drive at the Mercer goal. The goalkeeper stretched out to make a diving save but the ball trickled along the goal line where it was tapped in by our left wing, Lex Newfield.
Lex’s finish was simple, but her work leading up to it was sheer brilliance. It was the quintessential work of a rebound hunter.
Everyone watching the game saw Lex follow up on Pollock’s shot. What no one probably noticed was that Lex initially made a run at the goal when Miller was about to shoot. When Miller’s shot was blocked, Lex quickly about- faced to sprint back onside and then immediately spun back toward the goal as Pollock prepared to shoot.
When Lex got to the ball, there wasn’t a defender anywhere near her – all of them had stopped to watch the goalkeeper make the save.
Because Lex anticipated that a rebound might materialize (twice!), she got to score the game-winning goal and be a hero in front of 1500 very excited fans. Now isn’t that worth running six or seven yards… just in case?
In my book EverythingYour Coach Never ToldYou BecauseYou’re A Girl, I go into great detail about a team that practically made a living hunting rebounds.
That team was so notorious for scoring rebounds that as its reputation for second- chance finishes grew, opposing goalkeepers were rattled before the games even kicked off.
Those goalkeepers knew that if they didn’t hold every single shot that came their way, they were going to get punished. And ironically enough, that panicked mindset actually led to more dropped balls, more rebounds and more goals.
One of the best goalkeepers I’ve ever coached, a consensus All-American, confirmed my affinity for hunting rebounds. She said that rebounds were cyclical – the more you hunt them the more likely they are to materialize because goalkeepers get unnerved when an opposing forward is bearing down on them. She was right.
Become a fanatical hunter of rebounds. In soccer there is nothing else that offers such great rewards for such a minimal amount of work. Rebounds win games!
Note for Coaches: Hunting rebounds is not about talent. Hunting rebounds is a mentality that gives otherwise average players a chance to make an impact on your results. I like to develop that mentality in my teams through small-sided games where rebound goals are worth two points and all other goals are worth one.