The Game Within the Child

  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 r...

 I picked up this game from a book decades ago and I play it every season with any age group from U8 on up. Depending on the level of your team you can use it as one way to comprehensively assess the individual abilities of your players.  Anson Dorrance uses the 1 v 1 game it as a component of his "competitive cauldron." Players played a 1 v 1 tournament against all the other players on the team and eventually crowned a champion. His philosophy is rooted in the idea that the best team wins a majority of the 1 v 1 duels in a game.  At our level, players need to gain confidence in dribbling past a defender or winning the ball from an attacker without kicking the ball away. The best way to do that is put them in repeated 1 v 1 situations after practicing some of the skills needed to be successful in attacking (controlling the ball, setting up a move, making a move and then accelerating away) or defending (close down the dribbler, don't dive in, choose when to try and win the...

 When I took my National Youth License back in 1999, one of the big revelations I had was the concept of 100% participation. As a coach, I was comfortable having players wait their turn to participate in an activity. What I learned was that waiting reduces opportunity and breeds misbehavior. Players who are not participating in an activity are losing opportunities to learn and they are far more likely to engage in misbehaviors that distract others or get themselves into trouble. We learned the motto "no lines, no laps, no lectures." While each of these deserves it's own essay, this essay is focused on one area of coaching practice that I have always found particularly disappointing, the dribbling through cones activity.  It is a staple of practices throughout the U.S. and it features rows of beautifully spaced cones and players waiting in line to dribble around the cones and then back. It has so many features that I find disdainful, but I do have to acknowledge that it do...

If you are looking for a game that can be used to emphasize a technical skill like passing or to present players with a more tactical focus like solving problems in groups of 2-3 or creating space in the final third, then look no further than GET-OUTTA-HERE. This game has all the skill elements you need and most of the tactical elements you will need up to 4 v 4. In addition it is a competitive game that always gets your team motivated. Finally, players are forced to communicate both on and off the field to ensure success and if they cannot communicate effectively, their team will lose, so there is a real penalty. The setup of the game is simple. Break your team into two approximately equal level groups. Assemble them on the sideline on either side of you with all of the balls next to you. Give each team a goal to defend. I usually start out with 2 v 2. Set a time limit of 2-3 minutes for the game and play up to three rounds. The team that wins two out of three rounds is the winner...

In a U10 game, a player is offsides. It happens all the time because 9 year olds, like the rest of us have difficulty understanding (or accurately calling) an offsides infraction. The other team gets a free kick. The coach calls out a player to take the free kick and then has most of the team move up the field. The player taking the free kick gives it a big run up and kicks the ball as hard as possible. Most of the time, it goes directly to someone on the other team and immediately, the team which, moments before had the advantage, is now in scramble mode. They just ran up the field for the free kick and now they run back down the field to chase the other team and try to prevent a goal. Does that sound like a familiar scenario? I see this regularly every week. In addition to free kicks, it happens on throw-ins, goal kicks and almost every time the goalkeeper gets the ball. There is a rush to get the ball down the field as quickly as possible. Next time you watch a game, count how man...

We are wrapping up the season and I wanted to record some of the action so that I could see how players have grown. I have observed a great deal of growth in the players in terms of their skill and attention to the game. Many parents have commented about how their child is starting to "get it" when it comes to game play and how to use the skills we focused on in training. When I started the group training for the U5/6 in the fall of 2017, I did it because I was dissatisfied with the quality of coaching at practices and game play. I thought it would be easy to train a large group of 4/5 year olds and improve the quality of their development. As you can probably expect, it wasn't easy. Activities that are easy to do with 6-10 players on your team are almost impossible to carry out with 40-50 players. Getting 8-10 teams of players to the correct field and have the right color was crazy some weeks. Despite the challenges, I was able to modify the sessions to focus on my p...

I recently watched a practice where a coach had the players passing back and forth in pairs up and down the field. Once they completed this task, they waited for another group to go before repeating the same activity. I watched for a few minutes without interrupting the coach. One reason I didn't interrupt the coach is that he has not reacted positively to me in the past, so I figured I would let him do his thing just in case he had a similar response. What struck me later was that this activity failed to do the two things we most want our activities to do: improve skill and solve problems. The coach was obviously trying to improve the passing skills of the players, but in the time I watched the activity there wasn't a single pass that showed any real attempt by the player to make a skillful, accurate pass. There were defects in body position, foot position and contact point on all of the players involved in the activity. All of the passes were made to players who were less...

In the basketball movie "Hoosiers" Gene Hackman plays the coach. During the season, he decides that they don't share the ball enough, so he sets up a race from one end of the court to the other. The players select the fastest player to dribble down the court. Coach Dale starts the race and then throws the ball to the other end of the court, easily beating the dribbler down the court. His point was that passing is more effective at moving the ball around the field than dribbling. Now you know that I prefer you to focus on dribbling first and there is an important reason for that which I have shared with you often enough, but that doesn't mean you should ignore passing/moving/receiving the ball as part of your player development. It is just that you need to do it at the right time. While I emphasize three core skills (dribbling, controlling the ball, shield and turn) during my group sessions, I do also work on passing with my U10 and older players starting during the ...

When you watch a first-time soccer player, regardless of age, she tends to move slowly and react to the ball instead of controlling it. The touch is too hard or too soft, not like Goldilocks, just right. When the ball is coming at him, he struggles to decide how to get it under control. If you have spent any time around novice players, these images should be familiar to you. With the start of a new season, our program always gets a lot of players new to the game in every age group. Since I never played the game until I was a junior in high school, I am the prime example of an older player just starting out. A recreational coach can never depend on all of his or her players having had prior experience. In fact, the most common comment I receive from coaches is that there is such a wide range of abilities on their teams that they have difficulty making the practice appropriate for everyone. While I have always been skills focused in my approach to player development (at the expense o...

A few weeks ago, I published an article on some common phrases I use in training. One of those phrases is "show your teammates your hips and the defender your backside." After publishing that article, I headed out to a training session where I was working on one of our core skills which is shielding/turning with the ball. I worked with both a 8U group and a 12U group that night and all but a few players had the same problem: turning into the defender. It is a frustration that both the coach and the player share. If you turn into the defender, there is a high probability that you will lose the ball and have to work hard to get it back. Unfortunately, it is also a behavior we do innately. It is the fastest way to change directions and if no one is on you, then you don't have to worry about how you turn. So when you are coaching this skill, it takes a lot of patience and focus to create the right conditions for skill development. Below, I have the text from my previous a...

So one of the most difficult tasks for our U8 and below players is changing directions, especially turning, with the ball. They are amazing at going fast in a straight line, but it takes a lot of coordination and concentration to change direction and go the opposite way. Often, you will see a player dribbling towards their own goal and the parents/ coaches are shouting at them to "turn around." I have already described in an earlier post why this is a counter-productive behavior, but today I wanted to show you how to play a game specifically designed to get players to change directions. It has a nice progression that is appropriate for the U6 and younger crew, but it can also be scaled up to U10 as well with just a few tweaks and can even be scaled up to a small-sided or expanded small-sided activity. Oh NO!! starts with a grid divided into three sections. The center section is narrow and the two end sections are wider. Have one coach/parent at each end of the grid. You get...

The lowest common denominator (LCD) "the most basic, least sophisticated level of taste, sensibility, or opinion among a group of people," according to thefreedictionary.com In youth soccer, I often hear coaches and parents relying on the LCD to relay information to their players. In the quest to make the game easier for their players, they often end up building up patterns that are hard to break later, even among the strongest players. I have compiled a short list below and will add to it as I hear more of these comments. Throw-ins "Throw it down the line" Data from youth soccer games shows that the most likely outcome of a throw in is a turnover. Players struggle to throw the ball to a teammate and when they do get it to a teammate, the pass is of such poor quality that the other team ends up with the ball either as a throw-in or as a turnover. In an attempt to simplify the game, coaches just encourage (ok, yell at) their players to throw it down the line. W...

One of the all-time favorite games that players want to play is called World Cup. There are variations on how to play it, but basically everybody on the team pairs up (so if you had 14 players, you would have 7 teams). Each team chooses a country to represent. One player plays in goal and the teams try to score. The GK plays a ball out and then there is a free-for all as the team play 2 vs everyone else. When a player shoots, they are supposed to shout out the name of their country. If they score without calling out the name, then the goal doesn't count. When a team does score, they get to sit out until there is only one team remaining that hasn't scored. Then you start round 2 with 1 less team. If played properly, then this game lasts 6 rounds. With each round seeing more players out, it very quickly becomes a game that has more watchers than participants. In addition, it takes a long time to play. If you counted the average number of touches each participant takes during th...