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 runnin...

  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...

 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...

Working with 6-7 year old players means that you will be asked to engage, entertain and entreat them. While it is a chore to keep their attention sometimes, there are other times where they will act like a sponge and pick up everything you ask them to do. As a high school teacher during the day, I constantly encounter peers who say that they couldn't deal with a group of 6 and 7 year olds. 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 U8 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 a season's worth of experience will make someone a master coach, but I should expect to see some i...

One of the reasons why I have stayed in this game so long is that I am constantly learning new things and I get excited about trying them out with the teams and coaches in my club. The exercise I am going to describe today was one I learned from a State Instructors Seminar run by my state DOC, Jacob Daniel, back in 2010. From the title, it sounds like a typical 3 v 3 game, but over the years, I have expanded it out to 7 v 7 and even larger. The great thing about it is that it can work with a U10 rec team as well as a high level select team. The setup is simple, 3 players on a 15 x 25 yard grid with a 5 foot goal at each end. Depending on the size of your team, you can have up to 3 grids going at once in the first level. In a typical 3 v 3 setup, all of the players are moving and switching positions. In this game, there is one designated player who is the nominal GK. In a real game setup, this would be your #6 (defensive mid or holding mid), or possibly your #4 or 5 (center backs) pla...

Among the most successful activities for U6 players is this game that requires the parents to chase their children as they try and score a goal as quickly as possible. "Don't Let the Bird Bite You in the Bootie" works on three key skills for U6 players: dribbling at game speed, vision and shooting. The setup is very simple. Line players up on a line about 15-25 yards from a small goal. Have their parents line up behind them and act like birds (trust me, they will do it). On your command "Don't let the bird bite you in the bootie" players dribble as fast as possible to a point where they can take a shot on goal. Their object is to get the ball into the goal before they get "bit." Obviously, this one works because you sell the kids on the risk of getting bit by a bird. In an earlier iteration, it was "don't let the bird bite you in the back." I observed several kids dribbling while putting their arms behind them to keep from getting b...

I have used red light, green light as a dribbling activity on occasion, but have never been happy with it except for use with U6 players. I felt it was too static and didn't have many elements of the game that would challenge the kids. I have modified it by adding a goal at the end so that the U6/8 players are encouraged to shoot from longer distances, hence the name Red Light, Green Light, Goal!!! It worked reasonably well, but was not nearly as fun or intense as " Don't Let the Bird Bite you in the Bootie " which is an absolute blast and works well for even large groups of players. Having said that, I was working with a large group last night where the coach introduced colors other than red and green. He used the colors to denote specific moves that the players would have to perform instead of dribbling in a straight line. So, for example, Orange was a step over and Blue was a scissors move. This modification made the game harder and tied in more closely to the ...