Play With Your Brain: A Guide to Smarter Soccer for Players, Coaches, and Parents

In soccer, most goals are scored with your feet. But as Johan Cruyff noted, soccer is fundamentally "a game you play with your brain." Technical skills are essential tools, to be sure, but (like any tools) they are useless without a clear understanding of how, when, and why to apply them.

In Play with Your Brain, Travis Norsen helps you develop your soccer brain by providing a deep and detailed explanation of some of the game's basic principles. Aimed at intermediate-to-advanced youth soccer players and their coaches (as well as parents who want to understand the game more deeply), the book presents eight key soccer concepts in illuminating detail, showing what and how, but also clearly explaining why. Specific topics include the value of possession, the importance of horizontal and vertical spacing, why the direction you face is as important as where you are and where you're going, the nature and value of speed, pressuring with a purpose, and why defense - the science of generating turnovers - requires a coordinated team effort. The book contains more than fifty detailed diagrams illustrating these principles in various concrete applications, and is written in a style that is simultaneously accessible and lucid.

Whether you are a youth soccer player who wants to develop your game to the next level, a volunteer coach who needs a clear vision of where to lead your team, or a soccer parent who just wants to more clearly comprehend your kid's passion, this book will provide the systematic understanding you want and need.

Travis Norsen played a lot of soccer between age 5 and college, then took a break to get a PhD in theoretical nuclear astrophysics, get married, become a physics professor, and raise a family. But the gravitational pull of the beautiful game was too strong and Travis again found himself involved with the sport, not only as a player and fan, but also, when his kids started playing, as a coach. "Play With Your Brain" is his attempt to explain -- with the characteristic clarity of a full-time science educator -- all of the things he wishes someone had explained to him when he was a youth soccer player and a beginning coach.