Tag Archives for " games "

0 #086 Arrival Activities for All Age Groups

Click Here to Listen to Podcast Click Here for the Show Notes

0 Recognizing Numbers Up Situations

By Chris Kouns USSF A License (USSF Coaching Education Instructor) – NSCAA Premier Diploma (NSCAA Coaching Education Associate Staff Coach) – Head Women’s Soccer Coach – Georgia Gwinnett College In these activities we are working on players recognizing and exploiting numbers up situations. 2 v 1 + 1 Varied Pressure Set Up There are two

1 Possession to Finish

By Chris Kouns USSF A License (USSF Coaching Education Instructor) – NSCAA Premier Diploma (NSCAA Coaching Education Associate Staff Coach) – Head Women’s Soccer Coach – Georgia Gwinnett College In these activities we are working on possession with the purpose of finding the correct opportunity to create finishing chances. The Blitz Set Up Place two

0 Fifteen Second Challenge

By Chris Kouns USSF A License (USSF Coaching Education Instructor) – NSCAA Premier Diploma (NSCAA Coaching Education Associate Staff Coach) – Head Women’s Soccer Coach – Georgia Gwinnett College Set Up: Divide group of players into two teams. Each team will begin with a ball at a starting point. From the starting point there will

0 Youth Soccer Skills Games Part 3

By Chris Kouns USSF A License (USSF Coaching Education Instructor) – NSCAA Premier Diploma (NSCAA Coaching Education Associate Staff Coach) – Head Women’s Soccer Coach – Georgia Gwinnett College In these activities we are helping children in the formative stages of their soccer development become more comfortable with the ball and adjusting the pressure on

0 Youth Soccer Skill Games Part 2

By Chris Kouns USSF A License (USSF Coaching Education Instructor) – NSCAA Premier Diploma (NSCAA Coaching Education Associate Staff Coach) – Head Women’s Soccer Coach – Georgia Gwinnett College In these activities we are helping children in the formative stages of their soccer development become more comfortable with the ball and adjusting the pressure on

0 Youth Soccer Skill Games

By Chris Kouns USSF A License (USSF Coaching Education Instructor) – NSCAA Premier Diploma (NSCAA Coaching Education Associate Staff Coach) – Head Women’s Soccer Coach – Georgia Gwinnett College In these activities we are helping children in the formative stages of their soccer development become more comfortable with the ball and adjusting the pressure on

1 Four Fun Ways to Start Training Sessions

This was a topic of a podcast on CoachingSoccerWeekly.com but I'm sure their are some coaches that read this blog that haven't heard the podcast or visited  the web site.

I've also included the printable show notes that I created for this episode at the bottom of the page.

The warm-up activity you choose is important to get your players mentally and physically ready for the session. Your players are usually coming from school or other activities and you need to get their attention and focus before they’re ready to learn what you have to teach.

Fun warm-up games are a great way to engage players of any age. I think we sometimes forget that unless we’re working with professional teams ( and I doubt that anyone listen to this podcast is )we’re coaching kids. These kids are playing soccer mostly because they enjoy it. The more they enjoy what they’re doing the more eager they will be to listen and learn what you have to teach them.

Some of these games have names that might indicate to you that they are only for young players. I’ve used them with teams of every age from U8 to U18. I suggest that

6 1 v 1 Continuous Game

I recently did a podcast episode on 1 v 1 Training For Every Situation on CoachingSoccerWeekly.com. One of the games I use a lot is a continuous game. The players love it because it is fast paced and fun.

I like it because the players have to transition quickly between attack and defense. There is also an emphasis on quick attacking that I've seen transfer well into match situations.

The attacker must get the ball into the

3 Winter Outdoor Training

With more and more turf soccer fields being installed around the country an increasing number of coaches are training their teams outdoor during the winter months. This provides a great opportunity to continue to focus on playing 'Real Soccer' when we used to be limited to practicing and playing small indoor versions of the game.

0 The Purpose of a Set Drill

By Lawrence Fine, Author of the FineSoccer Coaching Bible.

Welcome to the FineSoccer Drills Newsletter. Todays topic is a bit different in that it looks at the purpose of drills instead of at a particular drill.

At some of the coaching courses they teach you to NOT use the word “drill”. Instead, we should use “game”, “exercise” or “activity”. Part of the reason seems to be that “drill” seems to have a

0 Keeping Sessions Fresh During the Winter

With our harsh Midwest winters we are forced to do most of our training indoor. This usually means training in school gymnasiums. They vary in size but most are much smaller than the spaces we use outdoor and severely limit what training topics can be covered.

We do a lot of technical dribbling and passing work during this time because the players get a lot of touches, the sessions are easily scaled to the number of players at training and small spaces actually help to increase the pressure on the players. It requires them to keep closer control and be more aware of open space.

While these sessions are great for technical development, they are

0 How Do You Play 5 v 2

If there's one standard possession game that just about every coach uses it must be 5 v 2.  It's a great introduction to possession play because the intensity of the defending is easily controlled by the size of the area. The attackers have enough of an advantage that they can gain confidence from being successful but it is still a challenge. Once the players achieve a certain degree of comfort you can put a limit on their touches and challenge their ability to think quickly and read where the open pass is.

The most common way I've seen the game played is with five offensive players

0 Progressive Finishing Game

As the year progresses I like to add more functional activities to replace purely technical exercises. Not only do the players enjoy activities that are game related more I've also seen a greater transfer of training when I use them.

I prefer drills, exercises and games that are progressive; moving from low pressure to full pressure. They allow the player to have initial success but then be challenged by the ever increase pressure of

0 Increasing Confidence in Possession

Teaching players how to protect the ball until the option to shoot or pass is available is extremely important if you want your team to keep possession and learn to build an attack. There will be times when there isn't an open team mate and they need to buy some time and create some space before support arrives.

The first thing I do when working on this topic is to have the players focus on the quality of their first touch. A player's first touch can put them into a tackle

0 Encouraging Combination Play

For me, the beginning of the season revolves around getting a group of players to work together within a framework of a system. Lately that system has been the 4-3-3. This involves teaching each player the role and responsibility of their position: How the defenders work together to stop attacks and win the ball. How the midfielders connect the team together. How the attackers create goalscoring opportunities. All of this gives the players a starting point but the most important learning comes next.

Helping the players to think and act creatively within the framework of the system is what will

6 Juggling - Developmentally Important or Just a Nice Trick

Our club recently established a set of benchmarks for how many times the players should be able to juggle at a given age. Here are those targets:

U8 - 10 with feet only - 10 with thighs only - 4 with head only
U9 - 20 with feet only - 20 with thighs only - 6 with head only
U10 - 10 with feet only - 10 with thighs only - 12 with head only
U11 - 80 with feet only - 80 with thighs only - 24 with head only
U12 - 100+ with feet only - 100+ with thighs only - 50+ with head only

Unfortunately, most of our players in the club are below these standards so we'll be working to improve that this year.

When you talk about juggling with coaches you usually

0 Using Small-Sided Games to Develop Players

Most coaches use small-sided games as part of their training sessions. Sometimes this is limited to a 10 minute scrimmage at the end of the session.

During the spring season I will often run an entire session that revolves around two or three small-sided games to reinforce technical or tactical topics that we have covered a number of times during the fall and winter. As the session continues the players move in and out of the two or three different games. Each one has a slightly different challenge for the players to solve. The players enjoy the change of pace and the games help the players connect the skills we've developed to the game itself.

I'm always on the lookout for games that are a bit different. A book that we recently released has given me a number of good games that my players have really enjoyed.  Check it out here.

Developing Creativity Through Small-Sided Games, is written by Brazilian soccer coach, Eduardo Andriatti Paulo. He feels that the Brazilian system has moved away from

4 Shooting Drills Competition Winner

It was difficult to choose a winner in our recent shooting drills competition because we received so many good entries. In the end we picked this exercise from Dennis Hillyard of New York. We were looking for drills that were easy to understand, used equipment all coaches have access to, provided a lot of repetitions for the players, were scalable to larger and smaller numbers and provided progressions that could be used as the players develop. This exercise meets all of those criteria.

Shooting Competition - First Time Shooting

4 FC Barcelona - Style and Domination

FC Barcelona has become the world’s top club and has set the standard for all other clubs to follow.  With more than a dozen major championships and counting over the past four years, the team has achieved remarkable success in La Liga, the Copa del Rey, the Champions League and also the FIFA World Club Championships.  Further, the bulk of the 2010 World Cup Champion Spanish National Team mainstays call Barcelona their home club.

What has prompted this run?  Certainly talented players including the likes of Lionel Messi, Xavi Hernandez, Andres Iniesta, Gerard Pique and others are critical to the team’s stunning run.  However, the Barcelona model is much more complex, as the coaching, philosophy, tactics, team culture and more all contribute to the spectacular results and consistency that have been the hallmark of the club in recent years.

A new book that we've just released call, FC Barcelona: Style and Domination, A Tactical Analysis of FC Barcelona examines the special qualities and practices that have been critical to the club’s recent success.  From a profile of the manager and summary of the club’s overall

3 Defending Against the 3-5-2

Every systems has it's strengths and weaknesses. In previous posts I've described why I feel that the 4-3-3 is a great system to teach players the game. While I believe in playing our own best game regardless of what the opposition is trying to do, playing against other systems provides challenges that the players need to learn to deal with. In the next few weeks I'll show you how I've taught my teams to handle these differences.

Teams that know you are playing with three in the midfield might try to overwhelm these players by having five in the

0 4 v 4 Game Environments

During the winter season my older teams continue to practice outdoor one day per week. As I've mentioned before, we're fortunate to have one of the best turf field complexes in the nation with 12 lighted fields. So with the only weather that will stop us from practicing is ice or snow.

Since many of our training sessions will be in pretty cold conditions, I tend to play a lot more small sided game tournaments during the winter. The players enjoy this practice format and it keeps them moving so the cold is less of an issue.

We have three different books that I look to for new ideas when it comes to small-sided games. One of them is 'Coaching Soccer Champions'. The author, Terry Michler, is the winningest high school coach in the country. He's been the Head Coach

6 Transitional Possession Game

This is my favorite possession game because it includes so many aspects of the game as well as a great fitness component. It's also very scalable to the number of players you have as well as the ability level of the players.

Two teams of players are assigned one half of the field. They're also numbered

3 Building Conditioning Into Regular Training Routines

There are many ways to work on a soccer teams fitness.  These can range from sprints, to longer runs to ladder work, to plyometrics, to resistance work to weights to any number of other activities.  One thing that is often forgotten is much of the fitness work can be built into the various games and activities.

One of the most valuable games I like to play with teams is the 5 yard sprint rule after every pass.  This can be a 3 v 3 scrimmage up to full sided 11 v 11.  It’s a regular game with the only restriction being that after every pass there must be a hard 5 yard sprint by the passer.  Any passer who doesn’t sprint after