Futebol de Praia

Having been a beach soccer coach for Clube de Regatas do FLAMENGO's Escolhina Fla at Copacabana Beach, Forte de Leme, Praia do Flamengo & Aterro do Flamengo, I recently demonstrated BEACH SOCCER in Los Angeles, California, July 24-August 6, 2006! We will return for the summer of 2007. Also, we offer a football training program here in Rio de Janeiro. Currently my program has 150 Brazilian players, ages 5 to 18. We provide a residential stay for foreign players at very reasonable cost.

Saturday, May 27, 2006

Brazilian Beach Soccer Comes to Los Angeles

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During the soccer season, I, Rodrigo Lopes, work for the largest professional soccer club in Brazil, Clube de Regatas do Flamengo, through its youth soccer school, Escolhina Fla, Flamengo Beach, Rio de Janeiro.

This summer, in conjunction with City Soccer Club and Pacific Coast Soccer Club, two youth soccer clubs in Los Angeles, my soccer associate, Daniel Simpson, and I are offering 14 days of beach soccer training and games from July 24, 2006, to August 6, 2006, for boys and girls aged 7 to 17, exactly as they are conducted in Rio. Lamentably, we cannot bring all of you to Rio de Janeiro. But what we can do is, for two weeks, transform Dockweiler Beach into Copacabana Beach!

Every day, from July 24, 2006, to August 6, 2006, we will have a 1-hour-50-minute session beginning at 9am, at 10am, at 3:30pm, at 4:30pm, at 5pm, and at 6pm. Some sessions already are booked (click on the calendar that will up updated daily from July 24 onwards), and we would encourage you to email and make your reservations at your earliest convenience. Email: ezpatari@yahoo.com

Cost: Each session is 1 hour, 50 minutes. : First tryout session, $5 (must present picture ID for a “tryout” session and may not repeat a “tryout”). Thereafter, it is a graduated scale: 7 sessions, $72. 14 sessions, $129. 21 sessions, $171. 28 sessions, $200. Realistically a player in good condition could undertake 2 sessions per day, either consecutively or with a 1-hour (or longer) break in between. Others may want to attend every other day or for a set number of sessions of their choosing. We are entirely flexible as to which sessions you attend (except for sessions which are “FULL” as noted below or to be advised on the website) – you need not start, for example, on July 24. Entire teams can book an open session or sessions at a 45% discount (minimum 12 players/team) - enquire for details.
There are 14 days and many different starting times for sessions. So, you will be able to come practically at any time, and we encourage flexibility as part of our approach. For example, you may be a very serious gold-level player who wants to get ready for the upcoming Coast Soccer League season. You may therefore want to undertake two sessions back-to-back, which would amount to nearly 4 hours of fairly intensive soccer (but without the tedium of running laps when you can better use the time playing on the sand with the ball). Or you may be a beginning soccer player who wants to develop technique and perhaps you have other responsibilities that limit you to one session every two days. Or you may fall somewhere inbetween. While we are focused on youth soccer, for persons aged 7 to 17, we will also entertain running sessions for adults. So, for example, we were very pleased to hear that the Chiat-Day team (competing in the entertainment industry league at the Electronic Arts facility in Marina del Rey) would like to fit in a few sessions with us as part of the culmination of their spring-summer season, and we are pleased to have worked with their top scorer, Mckinley Tennyson (an NCAA champion with UCLA), in Rio de Janeiro the prior summer of 2005. In Brazil, there are both mixed-gender sessions, and we have sessions for girls and women only. We would consider devoting sessions to girls teams. Penultimately, you can start and finish whenever you like -- naturally we would love it if you could be with us from start to finish, but we recognize that you may be a rock star or skateboard maven and have other priorities :) . Finally, we can with a little advance notice during the month of June 2006 work to schedule closed sessions for certain teams. Since we already have worked with a number of Los Angeles club players in Rio the past two summers, in point of fact we already are partially booked for a number of the sessions, and these are indicated in yellow on the calendar (or in red ink if 100% booked). We want you to enjoy a quality session and hence do not expect to have more than 12 players per coach (unless it is a single team). We would encourage team managers and coaches to contact us regarding team sessions, as the intensity, daily frequency, and cost of our sessions should be attractive to the better silver, silver elite and gold teams. Indeed for the players that have already booked their sessions, we are consulting with the regular coaches and managers to adjust the degree of difficulty of the sessions, and the content, to their desires. In this way, we hope to contribute to the preparation of some interesting teams who may surprise their adversaries this coming season! In sum, our program for beach soccer this summer of 2006 is patterned with the same flexibility that one will find on Praia de Copacabana or Praia do Flamengo in Rio.

How to Get to Dockweiler Beach State Park

It is so simple, even Garrincha (one of the greatest, if not the greatest, futebol legends of Brazil, notorious for his poor driving skills and sense of direction) could drive to Dockweiler Beach: The parking lot entrance to Dockweiler is at the western end of Imperial Boulevard. You could take the 105 Freeway west until it ends and flows right into Imperial Boulevard, and follow Imperial Boulevard west to its terminus at Vista del Mar. If you do not want to park inside the pay lot, you may want to turn right (north) onto Vista del Mar and find parking along the side of this north-south street. Be CAREFUL parking, and walk west down the incline onto the beach. You will see us approximately 150 yards north of the intersection of Imperial Boulevard and Vista del Mar. Look for the flags, cones and two sets of goals. Parents who may want to drop off and pick up without paying for parking likely will be able to do so without a problem (although your first day of registration may require you to park).

How to Get to Centinela Park

While most of our sessions are at Dockweiler, a few will be at Centinela Park in Inglewood. Directions: From the 405 and 105 Freeways, go East on the 105, exiting at Prairie. Go north on Priaire to Florence, and turn right (west). Go west on Florence to Redondo Blvd and turn left. Immediately turn left again onto High, and turn left into the park. We will be at one of the two soccer fields nearest the parking lot.

How to Get to Penmar Park

A number of evening sessions will be at Penmar Park, at Rose Avenue and Penmar Avenue, in Mar Vista/Venice. Penmar Avenue is about 4 blocks east of Lincoln Boulevard.

A little background about us as coaches . . .

Rodrigo Lopes, Brazilian, age 33, 8-year Escolhina Fla beach soccer coach; has trained Los Angeles players from Pacific Coast Soccer Club in Rio de Janeiro for both June-July 2004 and 2005. Daniel Simpson, age 31, Brazilian (despite surname!), beach soccer coach, US Soccer Federation “D” License, former coach at Real Colorado youth soccer club in Denver, former trainer at Colorado Rockies Major League Soccer franchise.

. . . and a warm thanks to our ball boys . . .

We are pleased to have some of our Rio graduates of the past two summers undertake the responsibilities for our registration desk, escorting players to/from the drop-off/pick-up parking area, water station, heach hut, first aid, and, importantly, chasing down the wayward balls (!): Pedro Alonzo, Jaime Cano, and Malone Inzunza. They will be assisted by Misael Moreno, Juan Quinonez and German Sanchez. Congratulations to their team, who won their bracket games 6-0, 5-0 and 3-0 this weekend at the Pateadores Cup.

Beach Soccer in Brazil

Most boys can be found playing soccer at the beach, not on a grass pitch. Indeed, despite their lucrative contracts and extended match schedules, there is still a bit of the boy left in both Ronaldo and Ronaldinho, as in their short summer vacations they are inevitably drawn to the soccer of their youth, on the beach, but now at the posh Barra de Tijuca. If you hang around Posto 8 long enough in Barra from mid-June to early-July, in a non-World-Cup-year, you will see Ronaldo and possibly also Ronaldinho. Beach soccer is in their blood. What is even more exceptional is not that the estrellas will float in for a kickabout but that those who congregate at the beach pitches hardly seem to take notice that they are there. That may be a slight exaggeration, but the elite players certainly are not mobbed. It is if at least for the moment the Ronaldo's have rediscovered the soccer of their obscure youth. There are probably as many youth soccer schools on the various beaches as there are professional football clubs in Brazil. The largest clubs in Rio, Flamengo, Fluminense, Botafogo and Vasco da Gama, are all well represented (In Sao Paulo, the schools operate not on sand pitches but on natural pitches with little grass or artificial turf pitches where the sun has discolored the nylon blades from green to a foamy blue-grey-brown).

Coaching

The biggest stylistic difference between Brazilian coaches and USA coaches that you will instantly observe is that the Brazilians teach by playing. There is very little standing-around-coaching. The Brazilian coaches just love to sweat and show-and-tell. Perhaps because they love to play the game, the second difference is that there is a significant emphasis on technical skills. Even when the focus of a particular session is something else, technical skills can be a required component. There are indeed very few American coaches who have the same emphasis on technical skills -- indeed, after Nico Marinez (a Coerver disciple) in the Los Angeles area, we cannot think of another. The third difference is that Brazilian coaches shy away from fitness for fitness' sake; fitness is achieved through playing football. The average silver-or-higher male club player in southern California has more endurance than the average Brazilian escolhina boy through about the age of 15. For sixteen year olds and up, fitness reverses in favor of the Brazilians, simply because they are playing literally every day (and are consuming fewer calories!), not because the Brazilian coach suddenly has become a follower of Ajax' Jos Geysel and Laszlo Jambor. The fourth difference is that the Brazilian coaches not only shun physical play but admonish it -- part of the reason is that a single training session may involve players from a broad age range -- it simply wouldn't work if the olders were permitted to whack the youngers. The fifth difference is that often a Brazilian coach will structure one or more segments of a training session with two to four different activities occurring simultaneously, with the players rotating from station to station with negligible downtime (and I do mean REALLY fast transitions); American coaches rarely do this. The sixth difference, and one that is tentative, may be that, despite the foregoing point, there is more repetition in the content of the training sessions, at least in the lower age levels up to 15, of Brazilian coaches. Across 14 days of training, however, you may not see much repetition; beginning in a third week, however, you may see some patterns and drills that were demonstrated in the first week.

Camiseta, not required!

Unlike some other soccer camps that force you to buy yet another t-shirt (usually disguised into the registration fee), we simply want you to have fun and have the option to buy our t-shirt (or not!). We have been very fortunate to have located Delta Apparel's Magnum t-shirt as our suppliers, and we are offering a 6.1 ounce 90%-cotton athletic heather t-shirt for just $9. If you are not familiar with Delta Apparel, they are the makers of the fashionable Junkfood label that you will find at Nordstrom's, but they also make this heavyweight, seamless-rib-knit-collar t-shirt with cover-seamed front neck, taped neck, and shoulder seams, with the short set-in sleeves needle hemmed as well as the bottom. Not bad for a $9 t-shirt. We only have a small number available in sizes Small, Medium and Large (in fact, of our first delivery of shirts, we already have sold exactly half to the teams booking closed sessions). You will also see our ball boys and some of the teams (who have booked closed sessions) wearing the official Nike Flamengo black-and-red home game jerseys, and if fortune smiles our way we may make a few of these available at a considerable discount.



We close with a tribute to the one and only Garrincha: