| eastbaysoccer - November 20th, 2012 23:47 GMT |
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But girls often struggle as their bodies change and Bobak has seen players who were dominant in their pre-teen years no longer make the impact on the game that they used to. The ones who manage to come through the difficult transition period are those who have a solid skill base and a high level of mental aggressiveness and competitiveness in them.
“If a player body-wise is light in her frame and gets knocked around a lot, but she still puts herself into 50-50 situations, even though she ends up on the ground, because she has aggressiveness – that player, when her body fills out, regains her productivity,” he says.
“But if from the beginning she’s a more passive player mentally, and she gets knocked around, the confidence level drops a lot where many times it cannot be regained.”
Bobak says that he’s come to the conclusion that mental aggressiveness can’t be taught.
“Thirty years ago, I found the girls needed to be more mentally aggressive in this competitive arena, so I used to work out drills where there’s a lot of 50-50 battles, a lot of physical confrontations, to bring out mental aggressiveness in the players,” he says. “I believed that I could extract that mental aggressiveness. But I found out in this 30-year process that I can’t draw mental aggressiveness if they don’t have that makeup.
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