During the National Women’s Soccer League “offseason,” players have less than three months to rest and prepare for the following season.
Since the launch of the league in 2012, the bar for the high level of play continues to rise across the board as players develop at an individual level and collectively. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so common to see a low-ranked team flip the switch throughout the season to then go on to win the NWSL Championship trophy as seen by the Washington Spirit when they won their first title in 2021.
As players are on their own in the offseason, the key factor behind the scenes of a traditional game day or practice comes down to the work players put in during the offseason where they develop their confidence to prepare for another cycle in their career.
Building Trust With Players In Their Journey
Since the league’s inception, David Copeland-Smith, who is an individual skills specialist, has worked with over a hundred NWSL players through his own private training system known as Beast Mode Soccer.
From training players such as Angel City FC and New Zealand captain Ali Riley while she was still in high school to training U.S. Women’s National Team star Alex Morgan for the past 12 years, Beast Mode Soccer has become a key pillar for the growth and success of players during the offseason.
“You have these incredible coaches and trainers that play this pivotal role in our careers and our lives,” said Riley. “They understand the players' needs and want us to have the best opportunity to go into preseason with our best foot forward. I’m so grateful for the coaches like Dave and how they go above and beyond to help us with the unique structure and calendar of this league, they offer a huge support for us in that gap.”
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With 20-years of training experience on his resume, Copeland-Smith trains a variety of high school, college, and professional players. With his group and individual training sessions, his key performance indicators for players strays from scoring a certain amount of goals, but focuses on their impact in a game.
“As a trainer, the most satisfying thing that you can see is something that you’ve been working with a player on for months and then you see it in a game and it’s huge,” Copeland-Smith told Forbes. “The domino effect of either hiding a pass or playing a specific type of pass and the physiological effect of that domino is now huge because then players know that they can do it and they play with no fear.”
As Copeland-Smith usually has at least one player on each NWSL team, his rhythm on the weekends during the season includes watching all six NWSL games to monitor every touch his players have on the ball.
Ahead of training sessions, he then spends over an hour mapping out each player’s exercises based on his data from their games to incorporate into their 7am training session that is tailored specifically to each individual's needs.
“When it comes to training players, I look at their desire to be the best and their work ethic to follow through,” said Copeland-Smith. “Everyone says they want to be the best but when you look at the players I train such as Sarah Gorden, Rachel Daly, and Alex Morgan, that’s what they embody because they follow through with it and show up to constantly get better and better.”
Training Environments Built For Goalkeepers
As coaches and trainers strive to provide a training environment where players can develop and use those skills to succeed in the game, Jill Loyden created a new path that didn’t exist with her company, The Keeper Institute (TKI), which is the first and only goalkeeper specific training facility in the USA.
Loyden is a former player for Sky Blue FC (now Gotham FC) and the U.S. Women’s National Team. From her playing experience as a goalkeeper, Loyden then transitioned into coaching goalkeepers at every level for the past 10 years.
“I remember having one month off a year where I was in charge of my own development and if I wasn’t with the National Team or a club, the only thing really required of me was to do fitness and strength workouts,” Loyden told Forbes. “We’re at a different point in the game now and the way we train is different. We’ve taken a lot of skill acquisition, motor control, and learning and are trying to fill in the gap.”
In the NWSL offseason, TKI hosted a week-long camp for NWSL goalkeepers to develop their strengths through various sessions with TKI coaches.
TKI trained a variety of goalkeepers across the board from Didi Haračić, Kailen Sheridan, Jordyn Bloomer, and nearly a dozen other goalkeepers as they spent the week watching film, going over specific topics, and had opportunities to communicate with one another to develop their skills from a place of collaboration.
As a former goalkeeper that has trained with the likes of players such as Nicole Barnhart and Hope Solo, Loyden has also developed a deep well of goalkeeper knowledge with her involvement as an NWSL commentator.
For the past five seasons, Loyden has analyzed every goal scored in the NWSL to track trends with how the goal was scored and how the goalkeeper responded. From her findings, Loyden has used the data to create profiles for the various goalkeepers she works with, which allows for her to develop training sessions and tactics through a situational approach.
“I’ve been working with Jill and Maria at TKI for almost a decade and I’ve gotten to see how they’re constantly evolving the way they view goalkeeping and their teaching methods,” said Washington Spirit goalkeeper, Aubrey Kingsbury. “As the demands of the position have grown, the TKI staff helps goalkeepers embrace new challenges and explore what works best for each individual. Getting to train with TKI and a group of pros was a highlight of my offseason. It’s rare to find an environment where you feel challenged, supported, and free to make mistakes at the same time.”
For both Copeland-Smith and Loyden, their roles serve a unique purpose in shaping the development of players on the field but also goes a step further in shaping the character of players off the field and who they are as people.
“As a coach, I think my role is looking at how I can support players,” said Loyden. “Every goalkeeper that we work with, I view it as their own puzzle and I’m trying to help them and we’re communicating and collaborating together to reveal what that puzzle looks like at the end. At the end of the day, each player is responsible for their own decisions and the way they want to play the game and interpret the position, but it’s a relationship and a collaboration process.”
The NWSL season is set to kick off on Saturday, March 16 as the Kansas City Current host their home opener against the Portland Thorns in CPKC Stadium, which is the first women’s professional sports stadium in the world. The full NWSL schedule can be found here.
