Every offseason, players go their separate ways to train on their own. They’re expected to come back to camp stronger, smarter and generally more skilled.
Todd Yeagley is no different.
Indiana’s head men’s soccer coach does his own training in the offseason in the form of studying. He’ll watch his own team’s film and turn to professional clubs across the world for guidance so that he comes back to fall camp a better coach for what is about to be his seventh season in Bloomington.
“I’m a student of the game,” Yeagley said. “I try and read as much as I can. At the same time, I stay within the core values of what we’re made of. I think that’s important.”
Yeagley, who played seven years for the Columbus Crew of the MLS, annually travels down to MLS preseason camps to see what professional teams are doing in training up close. He’ll also tune in and watch the international game to study from afar.
His staff does the same. Yeagley and his assistants will challenge one another to come up with new wrinkles to add into training based on things they’ve seen other clubs do.
“We bounce ideas continually off each other,” Yeagley said. “Some of that is experimentation at camps with some sessions the staff might run and, again, observation, just picking up little bits and pieces. Some of it is just watching and seeing how other top coaches lead their teams, and how we can we as a staff do a better job of managing any situation that might come at us?”
The majority of Yeagley’s work is self-study. The program documents every practice session and game so that they can periodically review as much film as possible. For that, players like senior midfielder Tanner Thompson are thankful.
“That’s huge,” Thompson said. “I’m sure we’ll be watching film this preseason, showing the new guys our defensive shape, our attacking shape. He reviews that stuff up in his office all the time, all summer long, even all spring. He has pointers for a few guys individually, and he has pointers for the team collectively. It’s big time for us.”
The Hoosiers have had a few days to lean on what Yeagley learned in the summer after opening up fall training last Wednesday.
They’ll have their first chance to put what they’ve learned in action Tuesday in an exhibition against Loyola Chicago in Bloomington.
“Every year, I feel like I get a little better at (improving as a coach),” Yeagley said. “There’ a lot to manage trying to stay on point on what you want to get done, but I do make it an effort to make sure we challenge ourselves, our staff, even internally with some kind of inner-staff challenges, on topics that we want to get better at.”
