Soccer Tennis

While playing soccer in Western PA during the fall...I experienced a lot of rain outs. Days where practice was usually canceled because our field was literally underwater. In Junior High, practices were canceled because we did not want to ruin the field for the high school team's games during that week. When I got to high school however...practices weren't canceled, they were moved.

Csaba Fehr, coach of the Riverside men's soccer team from 1992-2006 is a native of Hungary and played on the Under 21 International team for Hungary. His playing career was ended early because of a terrible knee injury which led him to the WPIAL and Riverside. Playing under Csaba (pronounced Chubba) was the best experience of my soccer career. Being international all of his practices were focused on scrimmaging each other on very small fields in the hopes that our ball handling and decision making would improve. He would always say "if you can play on a small field, playing on a big field is easy"

But back to the practices, Freshmen year on a wet day in the parking lot all the Seniors were excited that it was raining. Our only guess was that the Seniors were pumped that practice was going to be canceled. Csaba showed up with the same smile on his face as the seniors and announced to the team "Let's go to the tennis courts". Thankfully we all had other shoes, and not just our cleats. So we changed and all the Seniors had on just shoes while the freshmen had on shoes guards and socks. Csaba explained the rules of soccer tennis and they were as follows:
1) 2-3 players on a side
2) Drop-Kick serve (bounce the ball once then kick it)
3) the ball can bounce ONCE on your side
4) unlimited touches per player but you could only exchange possession on your side 2 times.
I could receive serve and juggle it 100 times and then pass it to Jordan (my team mate) and he could juggle it 100 more times but he had to put it over the net eventually.

The first couple of soccer tennis days, the freshmen sucked. But as time went on what we all thought was a game really did improve our ball possession, juggling, and close quarter passing and receiving.