Name: Two 15‑Minute Sessions: The Cheapest ‘Club Upgrade’ You Can Give Your Players and Kids!
Uploaded: 2026-01-20
Duration: 12 min 6 s
Channel: Coach KW
Description: Help parents and volunteer coaches see the math behind player development, not just the myths. In this video, I break down how much actual practice time…

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Part of the series: The Big Picture

About this video

Help parents and volunteer coaches see the math behind player development, not just the myths. In this video, I break down how much actual practice time most kids get in town travel or rec programs, and then shows what happens when you add just 15–30 extra minutes a week with the ball. Using simple “compound interest” style math, you’ll see how: • Two 90‑minute practices per week over fall and spring only give many players about 60 total hours a year. • Dropping to one 60‑minute practice per week can mean just 20–30 hours a year – less than a three‑day camp. • Adding two 15‑minute solo sessions a week gives a player 10 extra hours per season, or 40 hours over four years – enough to completely close the gap between teams that train once vs. twice a week. The video also walks through the youth soccer “pyramid” from in‑town rec all the way up to MLS Next and ECNL, highlighting how training hours stack up at each level and why consistent extra touches at home can help a motivated player move up without needing to chase a badge right away. This episode is perfect to share with: • Parents wondering if their player “needs” club soccer yet. • Players who say they want to improve but don’t realize what a small daily habit can do. • Volunteer coaches trying to explain why at‑home ball work matters more than one more fancy team session. 0:00 Why extra ball time is like compound interest 2:00 How many hours your team really trains in a year 5:00 The 15‑minute rule: adding “free” practices 9:00 Four‑year U10–U12 example: closing the gap 13:00 The youth pyramid: Rec to MLS Next 18:00 What to tell your players and parents next season Full Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHQkkm5iE_Xld9p49k7dlog?sub_confirmation=1 Buy an AI camera that doesn’t break the bank! https://partner.reeplayer.com/soccercoachkw Amazon Coaching Items: Insta360 Ace Pro https://amzn.to/3Uj0diZ GoPro Tripod Mount - https://amzn.to/3JCtcJO 20’ Tripod - https://amzn.to/4bdSWI1 16’ tripod - https://amzn.to/4aTOi23 Tripod Weights - https://amzn.to/48z81WI GoPro Hero 12 - https://amzn.to/4aJfGzT GoPro Volta External Battery Handle - https://amzn.to/4aJfGzT 256Gb Micro Memory card - https://amzn.to/44gCNPY Insta360 X4 - https://amzn.to/4df7MQs 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 Books: https://amzn.to/4jNrsOC - How to Coach Girls - 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. Coaching younger players? Give this a look for some innovative ideas: https://amzn.to/40RI9j7 Scoreboard Soccer: Creating the Environment to Develop Young Players https://amzn.to/40MuPNb - Soccer Starts at Home General Coaching or Soccer/Football Books: https://amzn.to/4hGf1BP The Coach’s Guide to Teaching: 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. https://amzn.to/4odNpIo - Two Versus One - I like how this book really takes a look at how you can break down attacking moves into focusing on creating and winning 2v1 situations - a great way to break down the concept for both novice and experienced players, with lots of drill set ups to consider. Most Dan Blank's Books are worth it for at least ideas to incorporate: https://amzn.to/3CwNKUd - Soccer iQ Presents... POSSESSION: Teaching Your Team to Keep the Darn Ball https://amzn.to/4hSlpGV - Soccer IQ: Things That Smart Players Do, Vol. 1 https://amzn.to/4gxhOwE - Everything Your Coach Never Told You Because You're a Girl: and other truths about winning Lastly - really interesting concept - having 10 or so standard layouts for a practice sessions, and then dozens of different drills that use the same setups (Amazon UK only): https://amzn.to/4hKGxyy Essential Practices for Player Development: The Ultimate Program for an Entire Season of Training soccer strategies and tactics, coaching soccer formations and tactics, best soccer formations, how to teach offside in soccer, best 7v7 soccer formations, best 9v9 soccer formations, football tactics for beginners As a memeber of the Amazon Affiliate program, I earn a small commission off items you may buy off these links. Thank you!

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Transcript

Auto-generated captions — may contain the odd mishearing. Click a time to jump there.

Well, hello coaches. Welcome back and happy new year. Coach KW here. Hope you're all well. First video of the year. Took a little time off obviously from my live stream at MLS Nextfest in

the beginning of December uh for family and holidays and all that such and honestly not a lot of soccer going on out there as I speak. It's uh snowing

sideways where I live. So, frozen tundra. But today, what I want to do is a video that uh really for coaches to also uh maybe share with families uh and

players. And really part of this video was inspired by a topic that came up in the live stream when I was at MLS Nextfest. And that is the idea of uh

compound interesting of time uh spent with the ball and how we get players to spend a little bit extra time with the ball outside of practice and what that

can mean for their development. And that's what we're going to talk a little bit about today. But before we get there, uh, if you haven't seen my videos

before, I'm Coach KW. I am a volunteer coach in a town program. I do town travel. I'm the player development director here. And my goal here in this

video series, my YouTube channel, is to help other volunteer coaches who maybe have come to the game as you know, we need a coach for your team or your kid

isn't going to play to try and get a leg up on what it is that you know, how how to coach soccer. some of the parts of

soccer that maybe if you weren't playing or didn't play or don't have access to uh great examples of great coaching that my channel can help you kind of shortcut

the process and understand the game a little bit better and understand what's important and not important in coaching uh across a whole bunch of different fields. So, if you follow me and you

find any of this video uh useful, any of the rest that's on my channel, I'd love a uh new subscriber for the new year, that'd be fantastic. uh coaches seem to

share and like this with other coaches all the time and I really appreciate So in this topic what we're talking about is I like to call that compound

interest. Kind of like investing. The more you put in over time it grows more and more. Uh that's what happens with practice time as well. And part of this

video was inspired by a conversation I had with my counterpart here in town. I have the sixth grade boys team. I've had them since third grade. Uh he has the

sixth grade girls team and he's had them from third grade. Really great coach.

another dlicensed coach here in our town, which is fantastic to have. And the conversation we had was just basically like, you know, the difference between the boys and the girls now is

the boys when they went home, they took the ball out of the bag and they played with it. And then when they went over each other's houses, they had the ball

out and they were playing against each other. And then a bunch of them decided to play club soccer. And so now they got another three hours a week or more with

the ball playing. Whereas his lament was, "My girls, they love playing soccer. They're a great group of kids.

However, I'm not sure the ball ever comes out of the bag in between practices and what that looks like in differences now. When when they were in

third and fourth grade, they were very similar in what they could do and when they, you know, teams would some, you know, want to challenge each other and

play against each other is a much more even game. Now, my boys, it's a whole different ball game because they're much faster on the ball. Their first touch is

much better. The decision-m is much better. They're able to play possession in tinier and tinier spaces where he's introducing a lot of these possession drills and the girls struggle with it in

bigger spaces even because they just don't have the faculty with the ball because they don't spend that much time with it. It's what they do in practice

and then they go home and forget about it. So, I'm going to hopefully put some numbers behind what these practice times look like, and then what happens when

you add some extra time on the outside, what it can do for a player, and how it can kind of level the playing field and or elevate them if they want to go

further. So, let's take a look at that now. So, first, let's take a look at some common practice time examples that I know about across the country for

teams. As I said before, perhaps I'm really lucky. I think in our town program for town travel, our players get two 90minute practices. Now, we have a

fall season and a spring season. As I mentioned earlier before, we have winter here and it's snowing. Uh, and I'm going to round those seasons to 10 weeks.

They're really probably between eight and nine, but 10's a round number for the math. So, let's do that, right? So, 20 weeks in a year out of a 52- week

year that we have soccer organized around here outside of any extras that go on. So with two 90minute practices a ye a a season I mean a week we get about

60 hours in an entire year or 30 hours fall 30 hours spring with our players practice time during our program. If you have two 60-minute practices a week now

we're looking at 40 hours in that year or 20 hours between the two weeks uh two um sessions fall and spring. And you can already see where this is starting to

separate. If you're unfortunate enough to only have one practice a week, now divide those numbers in half. You're getting 30 hours over a full year with a

90 or you're only getting 20 hours of a full year with a 60. And that means really each season you're getting 10 hours of practice time, which is

basically a three-day half-day camp you can do on a vacation time. You're getting the same amount of time with your team as you might get in a 3-day

window at a half day camp for soccer during a vacation, which is not a lot of time. So, how can players elevate themselves either to get themselves

maybe their team practices only once or twice a week, 60 minutes, but they want to get on the team that practices two times a week at 90. How can they make up

that gap? Because that gap becomes real over time, which is what we're going to look at two slides from now. So, it's that extra time in the ball. So, let's

keep it real simple. Once a week, 15 minutes for those 20 weeks of the season, excluding the rest of the weeks of the year that they could take a ball

out of their bag and play with it. That means juggling, kicking against a wall, playing with a family member, playing with friends, whatever it might be.

Kicking against a set of stairs. 15 minutes a week. That can add five hours to a a season, fall and spring, of extra practice time. with 15 minutes a day, 15

minutes a week extra. That's almost three and a third 90-minute practice sessions or five 60-minute um practices in a year. And if they took the ball out

of the bag twice, two times a week for 15 minutes, that's 10 hours. That's three to five weeks extra in a season.

If you think of it like that, in a year, six to 10 practices, and that's just dedicated time for one individual. So, it's that compound interest of a little

bit of time applied over and over and over again can make a huge difference in the amount of time that a player spends with the ball. And because they're doing

it probably solo or with a partner, they're actually getting far more touches. I actually have a video on the channel that's like a 15minute workout that gets a player close to 2,000

touches in 15 minutes, depending on the speed that they go at the at the video at the practice one-on-one session. 15 minutes is a lot of time to get those

those protectors in and can make a huge difference in your players development.

Now, I think the U10 to U12 period, those four years are a huge formative area of development for our kids. So, let's multiply this over that four-year

period. And you can see over those four years years with 290s a week over those four years, that's 240 hours of practice all the way down to where you have 160

minute practice a week, you're now only having 80 hours over four years. But if you go back to our previous slide and we look at what happens when we add those

two 15minute sessions, that's 10 hours per season, that's 40 extra hours over four years, which now takes that 160 a week to equal that 190 a week. And it

takes that 190 a week close to the two.

So you can see how those 40 extra hours can really start to bridge the gap between those teams. So, if your player is on a team that only practices one of

those smaller amounts and they really want to get to a team that h that practices more, they need to do that more consistently because over time, those extra minutes that they're

spending practicing with their team starts to make those teams spread and separate in terms of ability very much so, and it becomes harder and harder to make the leap from one level to the

other. I'm going to look at the whole youth pyramid here and we'll talk about the extremes that we can see in this next. So here is basically the entire

youth soccer pyramid if you will from bottom layer and in town and recreational all the way to MLSmies and MLS next home grown and the difference between these teams a lot of times is

how much they practice and how many times they practice a week and for how many months. So let's take a look.

So for that top tier MLS next homegrown andmies they're practicing four days a week sometimes doubles for two of those days. So you know 6 to9 hours per week

and over that 10-month season that they tend to do you're going between 240 and 360 hours a year of practice time at a high level. even the next level down,

whether that's ECNL or MLS 2 or some of the other levels where maybe they're practicing three times a week for 90 minutes. And you think, well, that's a

lot of time. Again, when you compare it to what the top level players are doing, those numbers start to pale between 162 and 180 hours versus 240 to 360. Now

multiply that by two, three, four, five, six years of practice time in those things. And you can see how it could be really difficult for a player if they

don't put in extra time somewhere else to make up the gap between that as the gaps widen between the levels of the teams, no matter what level you're

trying to get to. Even if it's a regular regional club team who is practicing 290s a week, but they're going for 24 to 36 weeks out of the season and you're

playing for your town program with one or two 60 or 90 minute practices a week.

Even that number can really be difficult to make up the longer you wait if you're not putting that extra time in. So, I hope you could see how this idea of

compound interest from the banking world and investment world can really apply to your players putting in that extra time and over the years being able to multiply their efforts at practice to

make the gains that they hopefully want to make on their own. As as always, a player's intrinsic motivation is going to be the best indicator whether or not

a player is going to succeed over the long run at the highest level they want to try. Uh us as parents and coaches can only poke and prod so much. If the kid

doesn't want it, it's not going to happen. And that's okay. But if your player does want to make strides and want to make those gains to get to

higher levels, then it's really important to look beyond the times you're with your team at practice and what you can do individually. So coaches and players and families, I'd love to

hear from you in the comments of how you might inspire your players to get that ball out of the bag. How do you gamify it? how you get those challenges in. Uh

there are these apps that are out there like Dribble Up. There's these F-pro mats that have some patterns. There's tons of videos on YouTube. As I said, my

son recorded one when he was 10 or 11 for players that will get you somewhere between 1500 touches in a 15minute period. Whatever it might be, I'd love

to hear what you're doing. I've linked that video down below if you're interested to take a look. But until next time, I hope you're all well. Happy

New Year again. More videos coming out as the uh season goes on. I'm doing a large uh foot program with my town for the first year. Getting a lot more kids

involved with that. I've got a whole playlist on that if you want to take a look at it. We'll have some more content coming from that as we come along until

we get to the spring. So, until next time, I hope you're all well. See you out in the fields real soon. Bye-bye.