The Game Within the Child

  It’s the pressure, stupid In 1992, President George H.W. Bush was coming off one of his best years ever. Riding high in the polls after assembling an international coalition to retake Kuwait from Iraqi invaders, he was expected to cruise to re-election. While the presence of a third-party candidate from the right most likely did the greatest damage (Clinton won a plurality of the vote), there was also a famous phrase from that campaign that resonated “it’s the economy, stupid” because after the war, the U.S. went into a brief recession and that phrase was meant to imply that Clinton was more in touch with the economic needs of citizens than the President.  I was reminded of that phrase after some of my coaches insisted that they couldn’t adequately coach their inexperienced players without having lines and a full-size goal for their practices. I do empathize with them. When I coached at the HS level, my teams always had access to at least one goal and up to 4 depending on th...

  4/12/23 Key Takeaways from ATLUTD coaches clinic We had a good turnout of coaches for the clinic, but I know all of you couldn’t make it, so here are some key takeaways for you to think about.  Look like you are having fun and your players will too…. All of our coaches are parent volunteers. We have tried in the past to get help from HS and College students who were knowledgeable about soccer, but it rarely works out because they are either not good with the kids or don’t communicate well with the parents. I’d rather have parents who know how they would want to be treated even if their soccer experience isn’t great.  One of the issues that crops up is that our parent volunteers have difficulty getting out of “parent mode” even when they are the coach of the team. What we saw from Leigh and Casey, the coach instructors last night, was an ability to get a little silly with the players. Their enthusiasm for the activities they were doing was infectious and the kids felt it...

 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...

American Soccer has long been derided as little more than "kickball." We have a large number of players, but produce relatively few truly outstanding players compared to a country like the Netherlands which has a much higher success rate at developing young talent. There are tons of reasons why we lag behind other countries including the lack of infrastructure and the lack of a "soccer culture" where people had grown up with the sport and therefore have parents with prior experience. Our parent coaches are often transplants from other sports that are primarily coach directed like football and baseball. Employing the same coaching strategies in soccer is not very effective due to the player-centered nature of the sport. The problem As the director of coaching for a recreational program, my most persistent problem was finding coaches for U5 and u6 teams. When I did find these coaches, they had little idea of what to do with the kids during a training session o...

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 offer group training sessions once a week during the season for U6-U14 age groups in my club. The sessions are open to all players in each of those age groups. Because these are my target age groups and comprise the bulk of the club, it offers me a chance to implement my philosophy more consistently than other approaches I have used in the past. This is the fourth season I have had the pleasure to work with these age groups in this format. I have learned a lot about how to manage a training session for a diverse group of players and keep it fresh for those who have been in attendance for each of the four seasons worth of sessions. For me, it has been a tremendous growth experience and I have had the chance to see players grow in confidence and love of the sport. A couple of weeks ago, I got this hand drawn picture from one of the U6 players and a hug. That experience reinforced my subjective opinion of the program and complemented the objective improvement in skills that I have been ...

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...

If there is one issue that crops up in youth soccer more than any other, it is when games are not competitive. As a young coach, I experienced it first-hand with my U12 boys team when we played the team where the coach was the president of the league. Even though it was AYSO and the teams were supposed to be balanced so that there shouldn't have been any major mismatches, this team dominated every other team including mine. That wasn't such a big problem for me except that every time this team scored, the team mom would hit the play button on the boom box and Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" would blast out of the speakers. It really symbolized to me that this coach didn't have any idea how it looked when you played a celebration song for the last goal in a 9-0 win. I have also been on the other side of that scoreline a few times at the HS level. The last time, my team was up 8-0 and I was encouraging my team to pass the ball around and possess it, but we ended...

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...

U12 is a great age to play soccer. The game speed is much higher than in U12 and players are starting to think ahead. There is a marked improvement in skills and players can show a wider variety of skills. Long passing enters the equation for both crossing the ball and playing it forward early to break pressure. Players are finally allowed to head the ball and they start to settle into more clearly defined positions. With our implementation of the new US Youth Soccer Association (USYSA) recommendations, the U12 grows from 7 v 7 to 9 v 9. More players on the field makes the game more complex, so the challenge for you is how do you prepare the players to first survive and then excel at the game. The most obvious strategy is to focus on the three core skills: dribbling, shield/turn and controlling the ball for your least experienced/ skilled players. Each of these can be developed using the  model training session  I have posted elsewhere on this blog. It mixes the core skil...

U6 is the entry level for many players in soccer. Because the level isn't very high, there is an idea prevalent that anybody can coach U6 players. That idea is quickly dispelled when parents go out to coach for the first time. While it may be easy to entertain your 5 year old, when you have a group of 5 year olds, the challenge is much more complex. As a high school teacher during the day, I constantly encounter peers who say that they couldn't deal with a group of children that young. With a spouse who is an elementary school teacher, I hear comments from her peers about how they couldn't handle older children. For some reason, that has never been an issue for me. I don't know why, but I can coach any age and not be intimidated or uncomfortable. For over 20 years, I have taught parent coaches how to work with the U6 player. The past seven years, I have been able to watch these coaches then go out and try to coach. This is not to say that a 4 hour training session or ...