My daily schedule is pretty packed, but it is a good one.  First thing when I wake up around 7:25 a.m., I head over to the breakfast buffet and have a huge breakfast.  Every other day we have “IPI training” – that’s our weight lifting, balance, and agility training program.  On those days we get up at 6:00 a.m.  Then, after breakfast, we come back and go to the trainers room to get our practice gear.  US Soccer provides all our training gear for us as well as launders it for us every day.  Around 8:00, we head to the fields in about 7-8 vans.   Once we arrive there we usually have a couple minutes to kick the ball around while waiting for all the vans to arrive.  Then we start practice, and it is always started off with a warm up.  It is either a run across the field and stretch or it is a ladder, hurdle, stretch, and competition warm up, which is 10 times more fun.  Then we usually will split the teams up and play a little 5v5 or 6v6 or some other competitive games.  Next, we usually split the defenders, forwards and midfielders up and work in our position groups.  The forwards will work on finishing, the midfielders work on moving the ball and showing angles and the defenders work on lateral movement or defending certain formations.  Some of the other things we do is work on formations, so we would just work on the forwards checking and if that's not on the second and the third options after that.  Then at the very end of practice depending on how we all did, or if we did anything wrong, we will run.  The running here is at least for 30 minutes and we have to do sprints up and down the fields in under 20 seconds and we have a 10 second rest period.

    After practice we come back to the condo, shower, turn in our clothes to be washed, go eat lunch and then go to school.  Our school is located about 10 minutes from the IMG campus in a strip mall.  It is a very small school and we are there from 12:30 – 5:00 each day.  The afternoon school is mainly just the US Soccer team and some of the IMG basketball players so the class size is very small.  The teachers are fun and you do get an education.  After school we come back to IMG and have dinner.  Our evenings vary.  Usually on Mondays we have mental conditioning.  This is where we have some team building exercises and teach us to “think outside the box.”  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, most of us go back to school for mandatory study hall from 7-9 p.m.  Wednesday nights are often team meetings or Bible Study.  Friday nights are the nights we look forward to for the ‘exciting’ trip to Walmart, the movies or some other shopping location.  Not much to do on the weekends, so you look forward to any off campus trip that IMG has scheduled.  Weekends are also when we usually play our games.  Sometimes we have games in the middle of the week, but they are mainly on the weekends. 

That is a what a day is like here at the U17 US National Soccer Team residency program.