Response to a question about preparing for Walk-On tryouts in college.

Your level of success will depend on how hard you are willing to work. I’m sure you know that it won’t be easy. If you feel that you are reasonably ready now then you should ask the coach if you can join in on the team’s workouts this spring. They are probably training 3 or 4 times a week right now.
There is certainly a minimum level of physical fitness required to be competitive but I would suggest that your time between now and August will be utilized most effectively by sharpening your basic skills.  At 5’6″ and 140 lbs you fall significantly below the average size of a college soccer player.  You will not be a dominant player physically, but you could excel in terms of skill and ideas.  Obviously I have no way to know your starting point.  You can make significant improvement, but there is no way to know if you can make the team at (U of xx).  Even if you fall just short you will be in position to enjoy the game on a much deeper level for the rest of your life.  For improvement in skill and ideas I recommend playing as much “small-sided” soccer as possible.  On a college campus you can always find pick-up games or start your own.  There will even be people who will stop by on their way to class and jump in for a few minutes.  It’s a great way to meet new people and you will find that some will be very decent players.  Especially those who come from foreign countries where soccer is deeply woven into the culture.  This will not only help in terms of skill and ideas, actually playing soccer is the best fitness training for playing soccer.
If you are training alone then I recommend passing against a wall.  Try tennis courts, they usually have a wall to hit against.  Or possibly the side of a building where there is no risk of hitting a window or putting the ball on the roof.  This repetition of passing and receiving is some of the best skill work you can do.  Then for physical training you should concentrate on sprint work.  Soccer is an intermittent sprint sport.  When you think about it, the game consists of a series of explosive actions with periods of rest in between.  That’s what your training should look like too.  The greater your ability to recover (the shorter your required rest), and the more explosive actions you are capable of producing within a 90 minute game defines your fitness level.  The best training for this outside of playing games is to train what’s called your “repeated short sprint capacity”.  You do this by running a series of short sprints with rest in between. You can certainly find workouts on-line, but I recommend that you go straight to the coach for access to the trainers who work with the team.  This is a great way to introduce yourself to the coach and demonstrate that you are showing up ready to work.  There is a paid athletic training staff, but there are student trainers too.  You could probably convince one of them to take you on as a project.  They could design a training program to get you maximally fit for tryouts in August.  That gives you a pretty big list of things to look into, I wish you the best of luck.  For instruction and training on how to perform the skills mentioned above, check out:  www.soccerskillology.com/products