Any changes you're making between last year and this year on SMOG
We’ve had quite a lot of changeover this year, but we’re still taking the key learnings from last year to apply them to the new team. The main new thing we’re going to try are some directional lines, rather than the traditional O and D. This is something the U24 team did with a lot of success in a performance setting, but I think this will be really beneficial for us to improve our versatility. After all, O lines need to be good at D and D lines need to be good at O, so I’m hoping this allows the team to get comfortable at doing both in high pressure environments.
This year we’re also putting a focus on having fun. That’s not to say it wasn’t a focus last year, but at Euros our primary goals were to have fun and be proud of our performance, and it made it the most fun tournament of the year. I would like to continue those goals this season for every tournament, particularly as there's no one point in the season where we really need to perform. I think this will help to get the most out of the team, both in confidence and performance, and make the season really enjoyable overall.
Our 3 goals this year are: to enjoy ourselves, to be confident, and to be proud of how we performed. For the last goal, this isn’t dependent on the game result, but rather do we think we played in a way that was representative of SMOG and ourselves and that we can be proud of. This has moved our metric for success to be more focused on our own team and how we feel about the game rather than the other team and scorelines.
I think all three goals link together! We play better when we are enjoying ourselves and we play better when we are being confident (and generally enjoy games more). It's not fun at the expense of performance, I know what we are capable of and I expect us to play at that level. I think if performance is all you focus on, fun and enjoyment can slip. It's important to remember that we give up our time and money to do this, so making sure it's something everyone is enjoying feels just as important as results.