Practice – a bit of routine is good

Many coaches get a couple of books with a ton of different SSGs (Smal-Sided Games) and/or drills to run for their players and every practice is different. Variety is the spice of life, but it may be hurting your ability to develop your youth players.

Academic routines help children learn better, concludes researcher Gaea Leinhardt of the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center. In her studies of mathematics teaching in elementary classrooms, she found that the major difference between expert and novice teachers was the use of well-practiced routines.

If you are changing the warm-up games and skill sessions every practice, you are doing double duty. First, you are teaching a game with new rules and strategy that the kids are trying to figure out, then you are trying to work on technique and skills. Throwing this at kids all at once is very overwhelming and may lead to frustration for you, the coach, and for the player because it is too much for them to process.

I highly recommend having a routine for your practices and keep your warm-up games to a couple that you can rotate (assuming a 2x per week practice). This way the kids learn the games and you can then help them concentrate on skills that you’d like them to improve.

I use the following routine for my practice:

1) Dribbling skills warm- all kids with a ball and with a variety of dribbling drills in an area of the field.  They carry cones and drop them on a magic word to dribble between, they just dribble in an area and I call out different skills to work on. (I use 3 different warm-up for dribbling)

2) Small warm-up game that has a focus for the day – dribbling or passing/shooting (depending on age, I use 2 or 3 different games, so they aren’t learning new rules). The game should lead into your subject for the day. Either it sets the stage for a dribbling technique or a passing/shooting technique.

3) Technique session – this changes often and depends on what the kids did during the previous game. If they are young it is just important to hit the major technique issues. This is where variety is good, so long as the kids are ready for the work.

4) SSG – with U8 and below I like to keep the SSG to a max of 3v3. The kids love 1v1 and as the most important aspect of soccer play, I work with 1v1 at least once per week..

If you keep some routine to your practice, you will keep your frustration and the players frustration to a minimum. You will also see an increase in the absorption of the skills you are teaching.

Here is an example of a warm-up game that I use that can cover many different “techniques”, but the kids don’t know it and they don’t have to learn a new set of rules each time:

I use a game called pac-man, the kids run around in a rectangle or circle are “pac-men”. The kid in the middle with the ball is the “ghost” and has to hit the players running around with a shot to their legs (they have to hit them below the waist for the pac man to become a ghost). The other rules are the pac-men have to always be running/jogging and they can’t run out of the field. This game allows, you as a coach to work on a number of things. The kids run to space so they don’t get hit, they need to always keep their eyes on the ball and they need to make sure they are aware of the field. The ghosts are working on dribbling and getting their heads up, hard shots/passes where they lead the player running and dribbling skills.

As you can see, you can reinforce many things with this one warm-up game, but you don’t have to explain rules at every practice. Practices will move faster and be more focused. You and your players will get more out of every practice.

You can read more about teaching routines HERE.