Avoiding the three L's at your practice

 Avoiding the 3L's

Sam Snow, former Director of Coaching for Louisiana Youth Soccer Association, introduced me to this term and it clarifies so many things for me that I feel compelled to share it with you. The three L’s are Lines, Laps and Lectures. I will deal with each of these separately, but the basic idea is that the 3L’s will eventually cause your players to look at practice as work and not play.

Lines reduce the number of touches a player will get on the ball and will reduce the reality of the game. There is no element of the game where the players line up for anything except a handshake at the end. I once counted the number of touches a player got during a 5 minute period while participating in a shooting activity. There were 12 players on the team and no goalkeeper. During that 5 minutes he got 4 shots and his touch count was 8. The rest of the time was spent holding his ball so that other players wouldn’t knock it away or chasing his errant shot, retrieving it and running back to the end of the line.

Many of the difficulties of coaching are directly related to behavior management. When a player is disruptive, you have to take time to get him under control. If a player is engaged in the game or activity, they are much LESS likely to be disruptive. However, when they have plenty of time to stand around, it gives them MORE chances to misbehave. So the structure of an activity can lead directly to the coach having to employ behavior management techniques that may be unpleasant for him and the player.

If activities are game like or have elements of competition in them where the player is constantly engaged, they are much less likely to behave inappropriately. How can you eliminate a line activity and replace it with a more dynamic activity? In a shooting activity that we used as an example, the simplest way is to increase the number of goals to shoot at. If 12 players are shooting at 3 goals, you reduce the wait time by 67% compared to shooting at one goal. If parents are chasing errant balls, then players can get more chances to shoot in a given time period.

How many times have you got to practice and had no clue what you were going to do? Laps are meant as a warm up activity, but serve no other purpose than to waste time while the coach thinks about what to do during practice. If you are really having trouble, then you tell the players to run a second lap because they didn’t do the first one very well.

If you need a good warm up activity, then get the kids dribbling in an area defined by cones or parents. Give them different conditions under which to dribble (only with left foot, only with side of foot, etc... ) this is much more game like and is a more appropriate activity for a warm up. Remember that players do not benefit from a training effect until they reach puberty. Although running laps does warm up the body, it  does nothing to improve their relationship with the ball and the game. Some coaches may say “Yes, but I make them dribble while they run the lap.” Once again this lap running fails the “game-like” test which is important for a good activity. Also, try running with the ball around a field a few times, you will be bored to tears.

Lectures are for college professors who never learned how to teach. Children have a limited attention span. You need to be very aware of the attention span and not exceed it under any circumstances. One of your greatest challenges will be to make your point quickly and effectively before the player's minds wander. Change your tone of voice, the speed at which you talk and your body language to keep the kids attention. Many short breaks are better than one long one and these are an excellent time to make a point and keep it fresh in the minds of the players. Get the attention of the players, make your point and move on.