New EA SPORTS Interactive Training Features EA SPORTS Technology and Advice from U.S. Soccer Development Academy Technical Director and U.S. Men's National Team Assistant Coach John Hackworth to Help Youth Players Perfect Skills

EA SPORTS and U.S. Soccer have teamed up to introduce EA SPORTS Interactive Training, a free, online tutorial that uses EA SPORTS technology to help train the soccer stars of the future.  This interactive resource, available at www.EASPORTSinteractivetraining.com employs the EA SPORTS soccer game engine to illustrate U.S. Soccer's coaching book "Best Practices for Coaching Soccer in the United States" which serves as the sport's definitive new player development guidelines. John Hackworth, U.S. Soccer Development Academy Technical Director and U.S. Men's National Team Assistant Coach introduces each video segment with expert coaching advice for players ages 8-12 and their coaches to help them improve real-world technique.

The U.S. Soccer "Best Practices for Coaching Soccer in the United States" manual is an invaluable training guide created by U.S. Soccer's Coaching Education Department to give youth and junior level soccer coaches in the United States a set of fundamental tools to help open up the game of soccer to young players in ways that celebrate the sport's spontaneous qualities.  The Best Practices Manual is available for free download at www.ussoccer.com.  EA SPORTS uses sophisticated physics and its animation engine to bring the resource to life by helping players and coaches visualize the professional benefits of drills and convert that to precision on the field.  

Specific features of EA SPORTS Interactive Training include:

• Six videos focused on drills - Passing, Dribbling, Heading, Shooting, Receiving and Defending
• Three levels of complexity for each video module
• Expert advice by John Hackworth, U.S. Soccer Development Academy Technical Director and U.S. Men's National Team Assistant Coach

Given the insatiable appetite EA SPORTS is seeing for digital content among youth demographics globally, this online resource is likely to resonate with young players and help U.S. Soccer in its mission to help continue the development of soccer at all recreational and competitive levels. Since last June, more than 500 million online game sessions of EA SPORTS games have been played, and more than 2 million game highlight videos have been uploaded to EA SPORTS websites.

To experience EA SPORTS Interactive Training, log on to www.EASPORTSinteractivetraining.com.

Christophe Labrune here with an update on the FIFA 10 Online game.  FIFA 09 was the year of Online for the FIFA series. Usage more than tripled over FIFA 08 and each day since launch has seen more than 1 million matches completed. We even broke the 2 million-match-per-day bar in March.

Let’s step back for a bit, and see where this all came from…

FIFA console and online - the early days

I was brought on to the FIFA 2004 team as the PC and Online producer. Only PC had online play at the time, and the idea was to follow the early online success of console games like Madden. Internally, we wanted to focus on gameplay and Manager Mode, and we didn’t know what to expect of online on a non-PC platform. It was up to me to find that out!

We implemented 1-vs-1 gameplay on PS2 and focused on making the experience stable and fun. While testing and tuning, we started realizing how much potential Online had for FIFA.

For the complete entry, go to the Off the Bench blog:  FIFA 10: The Online Game