For Orlando Pride coach Marc Skinner, the hardest part of the quarantine has been separation from his family.
His long-time partner, former England defender Laura Bassett, and their 1-year-old daughter, Saede, have been in England with family since the NWSL shutdown began. He missed Saede’s first steps. She’s gained five new teeth since the last time he saw her.
Skinner said he’s not sure what he would do if it weren’t for FaceTime. He calls Saede and Laura three times a day, showing the 1-year-old some of her toys still strewn around their Orlando home.
Amid this isolation from his family, soccer has been a welcome ews cape for Skinner.
“You must learn to kind of understand yourself a little bit,” Skinner said. “I think that feeling sometimes it allows you to kind of do a little bit of soul searching and a little bit of, ‘Who am I? What do I stand for?’ and that’s a good test of people’s nature.”
Skinner’s goal in the coming weeks is to keep life as normal as possible for Orlando Pride players. He hosts weekly webinars on Zoom, going over old film and talking about the styles and aspects of the game he hopes to improve this season.
The team use the reporting system Fit for 90 to track individual player statistics, recording data to help athletes adjust their workouts to deliver ideal results.
To Skinner, it’s important to make sure players are constantly reminded of the resources — mental health professionals at Orlando Health, the team chaplain, trainers — that are available to support them. At the start of the suspension, Pride coaches divided up the team into smaller groups, and they check on them once a week.
“As a coaching staff, we want to stay relevant to the players,” Skinner said. “We want to ensure that they’ve got enough things that will challenge them.”
Although Skinner wants to provide constant support to his team, he also feels that players need to be self-sufficient to succeed during coronavirus shutdown. He circulates surveys to get feedback from players, using their input to tailor weekly programming.
Captains Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger also hold regular player meetings via Zoom video conferencing. These meetings are less focused on tactics or fitness, instead allowing players to get to know each other. The NWSL suspension of training came as many international players were about to join the team for preseason workouts and, as a result, have yet to meet their new teammates in person.
Skinner encourages his captains to take the lead in guiding players. When the athletes request more player meetings and less technical sessions during a week, he listens.
“Ash and Ali are absolutely looking at the leadership style that they want to implement as captains,” Skinner said. “They’ve been touching base and talking about professionalism. They’re looking to themselves and their teammates to be accountable for each other and part of what Ash wanted to do is take control of that.”
For Skinner, one challenge is helping his large pool of rookies adjust to life as professional athletes. The Pride selected seven players in the 2020 NWSL Draft, and already signed three of them — Taylor Kornieck, Konya Plummer and Courtney Petersen — to contracts.
Skinner planned on helping the young players adjust to the NWSL by bringing them in for meetings before preseason training began. Now, the rookies are having to learn how to eat, train and live like professional athletes in an isolated setting.
Skinner said he has focused on helping the rookies, but he is confident in the professionalism of his youngest players. He prioritized experience and leadership when making his draft picks this year — for instance, Plummer was captain of the Jamaican national team at the FIFA World Cup last summer at 21.
Many of these young players also live together — Kornieck, Plummer, Petersen and Abi Kim share a house — which allows them to help each other achieve fitness and nutritional goals. But accountability also is coming from senior players on the team, particularly Harris.
“If they feel that a player is kind of waning or slipping, or just doesn’t know what a professional player is meant to act like, then Ash is taking responsibility for that,” Skinner said. “With the players that we have, with just a vast array of experiences they have, it’s quite a good learning mechanism to role model.”
Although Harris and Krieger emphasize team values via Zoom, it’s not the same as training and playing together on the pitch.
The Pride entered the 2020 preseason hungry to rebound from a frustrating 2019 season, bolstered by the acquisition of defender Emily Sonnett and midfielder Jade Moore.
Now, Skinner is forced to wait a little longer to build the future he’s envisioned for the club.
“The part that we can’t give them at the minute is the feeling of them being part of something bigger than themselves,” Skinner said. “When we get back into it, that’s what the aim will be.”
Like many people isolated from friends and family, Skinner said he lost himself at the start of the NWSL season suspension. He struggled to get to sleep and fell out of his routine.
After a week, Skinner snapped himself out of it. He bought a desk for his home for the first time, doing his best to recreate his office at the team’s training facility. He started working out more, taking long walks around his neighborhood.
When he’s not focusing on the Pride, Skinner is filling his time — studying film, watching the YouTube series Tifo Football, reading books such as “Legacy” by James Kerr and “Football Hackers” by Christoph Bierman.
For Skinner, the key to getting through this period is taking it day-by-day. When the NWSL suspension was extended two weeks ago, the Pride training staff created a five-week training schedule for their players. Skinner keeps this plan flexible, ready to extend it or cut it short whenever the league announces its next step.
For now, he’s doing his best to help his team wait out the suspension.
“It’s a bit weird in the way we’re preparing for it because we have no concrete dates, but we have an ability to adapt either way,” Skinner said. “If we are told next week that we’re ready to go, we’re making sure that we as players and staff are ready to jump back onto the field straight away.”
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