Name: Youth Soccer Ages & Stages: What Their Body Is Ready For
Uploaded: 2026-09-21
Duration: 11 min 50 s
Channel: Coach KW
Description: Go watch Part 1 - The Mind - first!

Watch on YouTube ← All videos

Part of the series: The Big Picture, New to coaching? You can do it!

About this video

Go watch Part 1 - The Mind - first! https://youtu.be/l1axAf6DQYk You're standing on the sideline at a U13 game and you think: did that kid drivehere? And two minutes later you're looking at a kid on the same team who looks like he's in fourth grade. Same age group. Same birth year. Sometimes three years apart in the body. This is part two of two on ages and stages. Part one was the brain — what kids can think about and who they can do it with. This one is the body — physical development, the growth spurt, and the part that gets glossed over almost everywhere: how differently it lands for girls and boys. What's covered: Why running laps with pre-pubescent kids builds almost nothing Physical literacy vs physical fitness — and why one of them has a closing window The skill nobody teaches: how to stop Landing mechanics, knees over toes, and why it matters most before the spurt Peak height velocity — roughly 11–13 for girls, 13–15 for boys, with a huge individual spread Why coordination gets temporarily worse during a growth spurt — and why it shows up first in the hands and feet Why the injury gap between girls and boys doesn't exist before puberty Five minutes per session that you can run from pre-K through high school I'm a coach, not a doctor — this is the general developmental picture, not advice about any individual kid. Sources on screen: US Soccer and United Soccer Coaches materials. They're not publicly linkable, but they're findable, and the United Soccer Coaches foundations course is the one I'd take if you only take one. 0:00 Did that kid drive here? 1:10 Where this comes from 2:18 Stop running laps 2:46 Physical literacy is not physical fitness 4:06 Nobody teaches players how to stop 4:35 Landing mechanics and non-contact knee injuries 5:12 Five minutes, every session 5:29 The growth spurt — peak height velocity 5:38 Why it lands two years apart 5:54 Seven inches and seventy pounds — a real example 6:52 Limbs grow faster than the trunk 7:04 Why they lose their hands and feet 7:48 Why it hits boys and girls differently 8:38 Making it practical 9:20 Coach the kid in front of you, not the roster 10:33 The superpower SC Foundation of Coaching Online Course https://hub.unitedsoccercoaches.org/lightning-product-details?id=a1BPP000001sKSb2AM https://soccercoachkw.com Full Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHQkkm5iE_Xld9p49k7dlog?sub_confirmation=1 Buy an AI camera that doesn’t break the bank - and help out my town program at the same time! https://partner.reeplayer.com/soccercoachkw Join United Soccer Coaches: https://hub.unitedsoccercoaches.org/nc__createaccount?startURL=%2FNC__Login%3FstartUrl%3D%252FNC__joinrenew Amazon Coaching Items: Kwik Goal Digital Ball Pump: https://amzn.to/4blZmoK Small Tactics Board: https://amzn.to/48Ug0tP Small Magnets (Light): https://amzn.to/43iHk3S Small Magnets (Dark): https://amzn.to/3wUh6bM Big White Board: https://amzn.to/3x0NBoU Large Soccer Tactics Board: https://amzn.to/3VhzO7d Large Magnets: https://amzn.to/48RGiNv Large Magnets: https://amzn.to/3VfQxIc Waterproof Stickers: https://amzn.to/3Vfhn3b Folding Goals - High Quality: https://amzn.to/3AEITP7 How to Coach Girls https://amzn.to/4jNrsOC Are you coaching a girls team? This little book is invaluable to understanding the different mindset and dynamics within a girls/women's team, especially if you've only coached boys - written by 2 women coaches for all to understand the subtle differences and best motivational tactics to try. The Coach’s Guide to Teaching: https://amzn.to/4hGf1BP What great classroom teachers do is relevant to coaches in profound ways. After all, coaches are at their core teachers. Lemov knows that coaches face many of the same challenges found in the classroom, so the science of learning applies equally to them. Coaching younger players? Give this a look for some innovative ideas: Scoreboard Soccer: Creating the Environment to Develop Young Players https://amzn.to/40RI9j7 Soccer Starts at Home https://amzn.to/40MuPNb

Chapters

Transcript

Transcript by Coach KW. Click a time to jump there.

Well, hello coaches, welcome back. Coach KW here.

Hope you're all well. Today we're going to address something.

I think we've all seen standing on the sideline.

We're watching, let's say, a U13 game when we look out at the fields and think, holy moly, did that kid drive here?

and conversely, you may look out and go, "That kid looks like he's in 4th grade.

Why is he playing up with the 7th graders?

Well, we're going to talk about in this part 2 video on ages and stages.

We're going to talk about physical, qualities and the maturation process in our players, and the development curve that happens through the ages and stages.

If you miss part one, that's where we talk about the brain, and it's probably the more important part, because if you're not focused on how players can learn and who they can learn with, then no

matter what they can do physically, you won't get your session plans to match up and you're going to struggle.

So today we're going to look at the body, physical maturation.

And the physical capabilities of our players.

And more importantly, when these things hit our players at different ages and stages, and how it hits the different genders at different times and how that affects them, because that's a part I think that gets glossed over.

So, again, all this information comes from research and literature.

Again, I'll show you here on the screen real quick, documents from US soccer and you united soccer coaches that have these documents.

They're not publicly available, so I can't link them.

You can Google search them. But again, as I said, my 1st video.

If you have time for only one course in your life right now, take the United Soccer Coach's foundation of coaching course.

It goes into a much broader and deeper set of how to coach in what we have, then go take a US soccer, grassroots licenses, but these documents are part of those curriculum,

and that's why I can't link them directly here.

So let's go take a look now at our ages and stages of players and talk about the body processes, the physical and the maturation timing of our players.

Next, here's a really important piece that I think is super important for volunteer coaches, and it goes back to that bit in the 1st video where we

talked about what was done to you in the past is not a plan for you in the future, and that is a lot of coaching practices in

the past were misinformed. And one of the biggest ones is physical fitness, quote unquote, making teams run, sprints, laps, et cetera, et cetera, whether it's for punishment

or in the misguided thought that in 2 practices, for 90 minutes a week, you're going to build any physical fitness or capacity in a kid prior to puberty.

I'm telling you straight up, you are not.

You don't have the skills, the time or the specialized understanding.

I don't either. But there are things you can do, and one of the things you can build from as early as 4v4, and even younger is physical literacy.

The basic building blocks of movement that will have them ready so that when they hit puberty, they're moving in the most efficient, effective manner possible to now apply

by power, endurance, aerobic, and anaerobic capacity to their fullest.

And what do those look like?

We're talking about hopping, skipping, bounding, shuffling.

A-hops, all the different little skills that you think, well, how hard can that be?

Our kids don't play outside as much as they used to.

They're not out there running around, so you'd be really shocked, even when I take my 4th and 5th grade teams, and I have to do hopping and skipping, I

have to show them how to do some of those things, and it's shocking how a 5th grader can't hop on one leg for 5 yards, and then switch to the other leg without falling over

or putting both legs down. They never learned the skill because they sadly just weren't outside like we were growing up.

And so you can start this super early.

And if you spend 5 minutes in every practice doing this, you're putting in the groundwork for them.

So when they get to this point where they can build endurance and strength, they have those basics because, you can't expect the player to do some of these movements with a ball if they

can't do it without the ball.

And there's one piece that everybody seems to fall off on, and that is, we never teach players how to stop.

And that's A, one where one of the main places players end up getting injured is trying to come to a stop, a sudden stop because the game is all about starts and stops.

But B, also, it's about, you've ever seen when players defend it, they just run by a player because they just don't stop.

They go full speed at them.

It's part and parcel of A tactical/technical component, and just a physical component, but learning how to stop to change direction is a huge feature that can protect these kids, especially if they get older,

especially on the girls, with the non-contact ACL injuries, which have something to do with their hip angle and knee angle, but teaching them how to hop, jump, skip, and

land correctly with knees, over toes, in alignment, can go a long way to help prevent one of those catastrophic injuries that seem to plague these kids when they hit 13,

14, 15, 16 years old, and can ruin an entire season for them.

So 5 minutes, every session, make it a relay race, do it without the ball, and then add the ball in there.

You can find creative ways to do that.

Well, you can't hop and kick a ball.

You can hold the ball over your head, which now is working on balance, core strength at the same time.

You can use it in lots of different ways, so they hop on one foot, hop on the other foot.

Then they put the ball down, they run the zigzag course, and you're now mixing movement with ball skill.

Now, here's another piece that I don't think gets explained, especially the volunteer coaches very often, and it's really important in U12 and U14, and that is the timing of the growth spurt.

Otherwise known as the peak height velocity between boys and girls.

And it lands about 2 years apart, if you can see in this graphic, right?

But individually, you can actually run up from about 9 to 15 to girls and 12 to 17 for boys, which, you know, means 2 kids on your team with the exact same birthday, could be 2

years different in terms of their growth spurt and size.

My oldest son was always the biggest kid on the field playing in a club environment where everyone was born in the same year for a good three,

four, 5 years through 6th grade.

He was literally 7 inches taller and 70 pounds heavier than some of his teammates.

Now he's 6'1" and everybody's the same size, but that size difference was enormous.

You've seen that on the field where you joke with your partner, or somebody on the sideline, I was like, wow, somebody check that kid's birth certificate.

looks like he drove here for the U9 game.

There's always those kids and vice versa.

The younger, the smaller looking kids.

They always seem small to you.

Maybe you lose contact with them, coaching at U14, They go to high school and 2 years later you run into them and they're staring you straight in the eyeballs because they jumped 7 inches,

but that didn't happen to for them until they were 15.

Whereas some of their peers, it happened at 12.

That's just how it works, right?

So. When these things are happening, you have to understand that limbs grow faster than the trunk.

And coordination stats from the core center of the body, it works out.

That's why you see babies, their arms flare about, and then as they grow, they start to be able to crawl and everything else as they get that coordination.

It's the same with boys and girls when they grow quickly, what they lose is at the extremities.

They lose their fine motor control at their hands and at their feet, which is important for soccer.

And it's really important to recognize this because, again, tie this to socially, the thing that was easy for them all of a sudden becomes hard.

They become embarrassed because now they feel like "I'm not good at this anymore" and I don't want to look like a fool in front of my friends.

And so they're reluctant to try and sometimes around this age, they just walk away from the game.

So you really need to be hyper focused about this and understand what's happening with these kids through these ages and stages to help support them through this.

The other piece that settles in with here is with boys, when they get that big growth spurt, the game, the testosterone, which allows them to build strength faster, which helps them control those

extremities and limbs much quicker, then girls who get less testosterone.

So you find that they are even more gangly, right?

They seem stretched out and long and struggle with those long things.

They have less musculature, so they have a harder time controlling what's out there on the ends, and that's where once that puberty hits.

That's where that big injury gap jumps in the females versus the males because they don't have as much muscle holding everything together.

If we don't train it correctly, it can lead to that big jump in injury as they get older.

So that's why it's super important to maintain this physical literacy throughout the ages so that they maintain good habits, even when their bodies are growing basically out of control.

All right, so let's make this practical.

Let's connect all these 4 things, right?

One, before you plan anything, ask what they can hold in the head, right?

What the drill diagram wants doesn't matter.

It's what is they can hold based on the age, right?

So. If they can only hold one thing, Cut one thing and just focus on the one thing in your practice.

You can do the 2nd thing, the next practice.

It's okay. 3. Add that 5 minutes movement to every practice, make it a relay race, do it without the ball, find creative ways to add the ball.

Deceleration, acceleration, change of speed, all those things, you can do that from, honestly, from pre-K, all the way through high school and they're going to get something out of it every single time.

And four, and this is probably the biggest one, right?

You're gonna coach the kid that's in front of you, not the age the roster says, because we have these 4 things, and no one kid is the same age across

all 4 of these domains. They could be 12 on the cognitive, and 11 on the physical, and 14 on the social, and on the maturation they could be 11.

They never line up as neatly as you would like them to be.

And so you have to recognize what's in front of you and coach to that reality, not.

They're all 14. They should be able to do X.

They're not carbon copies, they're not clones.

They are what they are. They're human beings growing through their ages and stages at different speeds, and it's our job to figure that out.

So that practice that fell apart was probably not your fault.

It was probably just a mismatch on what you picked for the session and what the kids were ready to do in any one of those 4 categories.

So, coaches, that's the end of the physical, the body part.

I think between these 2 videos.

Again, if you miss the brain part, go watch that 1st one because that might be even more important because knowing how players learn and then knowing what they can do physically

to match those 2 up. That's the real superpower for really good coaches.

That's my superpowers, I've said before, having that teacher education background, knowing how they're thinking and how they're learning and making sure I'm doing things really within that realm across their whole spectrum of these 4 components,

really makes my job a lot easier.

When I ignore one of those at my own peril.

I tend to bang my head against the wall, and I get frustrated, and then I realize that was on me, not on them.

So I hope you found this helpful.

Please like, share, subscribe, ring the bell.

We're going to look at it in the next video.

I'm going to try and look at what you should be doing in your 1st few practices, how you set up your session plans to keep it simple, stupid,

as they say, because people overthink this way too much.

I see it all the time with some of my coaches in my town and it's like, you're working too hard.

I used to do it too, watch some of the best coaches at some of the youth levels, and you realize, It's really not as difficult as it seems, if you just keep it to the basics.

So that's the next video. Hopefully we'll get through, we'll look at a bunch of different age groups, but it's really kind of universal.

So, till next time, thanks so much for watching.

We'll see you out in the field.

Bye bye.