Rami Zeidan is proof that you don’t need teammates—or a field—to finesse your soccer skills and get a heart-thumping workout.
During the height of the coronavirus pandemic last year, the 34-year-old chief executive officer of Life House hotel group kept up his game on the wraparound terrace of his Miami apartment.
Mr. Zeidan reverted to the unconventional drills of his high-school soccer days in Minnesota. In the dead of winter, his coach would rent a basketball court and cram 20 players onto it.
“He’d play disco and jazz on a boom box and make us play with the ball at our feet with choreographed moves to the beat,” Mr. Zeidan recalls. “We’d do one drill until the music track was over, then he’d yell out the next drill. We’d practice for hours.”
An amateur DJ, Mr. Zeidan started making hourlong quarantine mixes. Each week he’d “play” soccer to a different mix on his terrace. “I’d touch the ball between my feet to the beat, and when the rhythm changed or beat dropped, I’d do a quick turn and then go back to passing the ball between my feet, almost like dancing,” he says.