Transcript by Coach KW. Click a time to jump there.
0:00 Well, well, coaches, welcome back. Coach KW here.
0:03 Hope you're all well, as I promised in the last video.
0:06 So we're going to take a look at building up your session plans and why it's so easy to make it so difficult.
0:13 I've seen it all the time.
0:14 You see a coach on the field.
0:16 They've got a binder. They've got that phone open.
0:18 They're looking very intently down, looking to figure out, you know, they've got cones on the field and their diagram has more arrows and air traffic control.
0:28 And in the end, the kids are standing around.
0:31 It doesn't need to be that complicated.
0:33 We can make this much simpler for you.
0:35 It's better for the kids. It's better for you as well because it's easier for you, but that's what we're going to look at today is how we can build our sessions
0:43 to keep the ball in motion as much as possible.
0:47 Not overcomplicated for you, and really don't overcomplicate it for the kids, because that's the most important.
0:52 So let's get in here and take a look.
0:54 While I've got you hooked in real quick.
0:56 Go visit soccercoachkw.com. I have a website where you can free text search every one of my videos to find any piece of content you might have missed or you're looking for.
1:06 There's some other goodies in there too.
1:07 We won't talk much about that.
1:09 Again, like, share, subscribe! Now let's get into the video.
1:13 So it's your 1st few practices of the coach, or maybe you've been doing this for a while...
1:17 You feel like you're struggling. I'm going to give you a framework you can use over and over again.
1:21 I'm 5 years into the current team that I have now, and I can promise you that for the majority of my practices over the time.
1:28 I've pretty much stuck to some version of this format because it just works.
1:32 It makes it easy. I'm busy.
1:34 I'm a director level for my real job.
1:37 I don't have the free time I wish I did.
1:39 I just need to get to the field sometimes after a quick meal, shoving some food in my mouth and then getting right to practice.
1:46 This is what you can do to make your life easier and make it easier for the kids, and I can tell you that it works because I've got kids that are
1:53 moving on to NAL and MLS 2 teams from me already this year, and that's really my biggest satisfaction is I know that my kids are getting better, even if I'm not
2:02 coaching to win my games as much.
2:04 My kids are getting what they want and they're excited.
2:06 So let's take a look at this right now.
2:08 Really, what you need to do when you go to do this, you really have 4 decisions and take a look at this graphic I put up on the screen.
2:15 You're picking from your menu, and when I say that, what I mean is, in each of your format, from 7v7, really, from 4v4 all the way to 11v11 and the age and stage that
2:24 your kids are at, you've kind of got a general sense of what it is you need to do.
2:29 If you're earlier on and 4v4, you know, they had to have fun to make sure the kids come back and they learn to love the ball, almost everything you do should be a player with the ball because that's what they want to do.
2:39 They want to play with the ball, if somebody else has the ball, they want to go take it away from them because that's the toy.
2:45 They want to play with. 7v7, you start to be able to expand into more of, hey, here's 2 or 3 players that can share this ball, and oh, we're also on a team.
2:54 What can we do with this?
2:56 And we'll look at some of that in more detail as some of my other videos.
2:59 9v9, 11v11. It's the same sort of thing.
3:01 You have something that you need to do with these kids.
3:04 So once you've done that, you now have to decide, am I attacking or defending?
3:08 Because you only want to coach one subject at a time.
3:11 It is so easy to set something up where it's 2v2, and you're coaching attacking and you're working on that, and then you're not happy with the defenders, so you then start
3:21 coaching the defenders. You start mixing your messages.
3:24 Every kid in that field is going to be an attacker at some point during the drill, so you should do nothing but coach the attacking points.
3:33 Because guess what you can do next week.
3:35 You could do exactly the same drill, but now coach the defensive points.
3:40 Coach one side of the ball.
3:41 So decide, attack or defend, because right now that's pretty much all you need to worry about.
3:46 There's 2 other moments, transition to attack or transition to defend.
3:50 You'll get that later on. So then, pick just a couple of principles.
3:55 And based on the age, you need to maybe parse this down to just one or 2 versus 3 or 4 in a session.
4:03 The more effective way is to just focus on those one or 2 things, and then the next section build upon those.
4:09 So, if you're working from attacking from the wide areas, then maybe all you're focusing on is getting the ball out wide, and then the technique of the wide
4:19 player to plant the foot, to whip the cross in, and get it in front of the net, there's lots more to get done there, because now you can also coach which run should the player in the middle of the fields make?
4:29 How should they strike the ball as it comes into the box?
4:32 You'll get there, but 1st focus on is Can I get the ball out wide?
4:35 Can my wide player stay wide and then get the plant foot turned to point where they want that cross to go and can they get an effective
4:42 cross across the field for my other players to latch onto?
4:46 Then the next week, work on the end product of now that ball is coming in consistently, you can practice with the other players, now receiving that ball, positioning themselves.
4:56 But if you do that all at once, while the wide player is still learning to consistently get a ball to the box, half of your practice will just be, that ball didn't go where you wanted it to go.
5:06 And so the strikers didn't have anything to practice, okay?
5:10 Focus on one or 2 principles and keep it simple.
5:13 And then pick how you teach it.
5:15 If it's something brand new to your kids, then you're going to have to be a little bit more step by step, showing them the process, walking through with them so they get the big picture,
5:25 and then ramping it up, versus something that maybe is related to something you did prior, which you can then take that, ask them some guided questions, and let them figure out a bit of it.
5:36 It goes with age and experience.
5:38 The more experience and older the players are, the easier it is to do the guided process and let the quote unquote game be the teacher.
5:46 But with most of our young players without a soccer background, you really do have to walk through some of the basic steps 1st because they have to be able to crawl before they can walk before they can run.
5:56 And that's part of the coach's journey is to make sure that you're giving them the framework from which to work under and then get through that.
6:04 So you've got yourself a session, you've got the idea of what you're going to work on, attack or defend, you've got a sense of what you might want to do.
6:12 Maybe your session is more tactical where you're kind of working in your shape, especially if you get older.
6:17 Or maybe it's more technical. You really just want to work on the kids' technical abilities, passing, receiving, shooting, whatever it is.
6:23 That's fine. You've picked that subject.
6:26 Here's a universal session shape that you can use where you can pull out different pieces of this because at younger ages.
6:33 It might be a lot of short moments, with older ages, it might be fewer longer moments, but here it is.
6:38 Let's take a look at this, right?
6:39 Always an arrival game. As I like to say, I want my kids as soon as there's 2 of them there doing something with the ball, whether that's
6:47 playing 1v1, whether that's passing and taking some juggles with each other, playing 2 touch, something like that.
6:53 And as players come in, I want to be able to greet them, then get them into something while the rest of the team is showing up because
6:59 as much as we'd love to hope everybody shows up on time.
7:03 We know that's never reality. The 2nd block you can always add at almost end of the age is some sort of movement block.
7:09 Now, this isn't physical fitness. It's physical literacy.
7:13 Go back to my last video, if you want to see a little bit more about that, and I will go into more detail.
7:18 But this is where we're doing things that challenge the players to do things with and without the ball, physically, hopping, skipping, jumping, shuffling, running forward, running backwards, running sideways, with the ball, without the ball, balance
7:31 coordination. You can always do those things.
7:34 I have a U14 team and you'd be shocked how these are pretty decent players, and yet they can struggle to hop on one foot and then switch to the other foot for 3 yards at a time.
7:44 It's actually kind of shocking. But it's something that can be worked on versus just running laps and sprints, which under age 15 or 16 is going to do nothing, but waste your time.
7:56 I'm telling you that, again, go back and watch my physical video that we just finished.
8:00 Now, after that, or mixed in with that, we have that ball work.
8:04 Whether in that relay sort of physical literacy piece, we also have a ball piece where they do some things - hopping and skipping and then they get to a ball and they have to manipulate a ball and play some passes
8:14 or make some dribbles. You can integrate all this in.
8:17 You can make it a relay race, so it's fun because competition is always a great thing.
8:21 It always gets them to work a little bit harder.
8:23 But adding ball work in at this stage or with the physical literacy is a great way to, again, get those technical skills up to speed and add that component to
8:32 almost every practice that you do.
8:35 Then a lot of times, either related to the welcome game, if you've done one of the welcome games, perhaps that I've shown you or my older videos,
8:41 I've got links here for them, 13 welcome games or possession games, you might go back to that game when now you explain the reason why there were 4 nets placed
8:50 in 4 different corners and what you want them to do, et cetera, et cetera.
8:53 This is where you then focus on that big idea, whether it's attack versus defend, if you're working on your shape, or whether this is playing from the wide areas, and you're going to use wide
9:03 bumpers or 4 goals put wide on a field, whatever it is, this is where you can put that game into action, and then coach those coaching points towards
9:13 the piece that you decided you wanted to do on early on.
9:17 Lastly, if you have time, you should always just end with a scrimmage.
9:21 So you remove all the restrictions.
9:23 You let them play to 2 goals and you just encourage them to do the things you were just practicing.
9:29 You will see some of it.
9:30 It can be frustrating sometimes when you go, I just spent an hour on this and I didn't see any of it in the scrimmage.
9:35 It's okay. Practicing something once is not going to get it into their brains.
9:40 We talked about that already 2 videos ago.
9:42 You've got to practice it, then you've got to let it decay a little bit, and then you're going to bring it back and help them remember what it was you did.
9:49 That's what cements it in their brain.
9:52 And make sure that when you're doing all this.
9:55 When your time is up and you're done, they want to keep playing because if they do want to keep playing, you know you've been successful at your session because they're excited to keep going.
10:05 When we're looking at these universal sessions, We, of course, have to focus in on our players' development, right?
10:11 We talked about mental and physical the last 2 videos.
10:14 Here, this graphic here. It kind of gives you a few dials to turn in your session to figure out how you can make something work harder or easier depending
10:21 on the group, the age, the day, the time of week, whether they had state testing in in school that day or any other combination where you need to make
10:31 the practice harder or softer. And you can take a look here, whether that's the block length or the type of the ideas and how many players are involved in that idea.
10:40 You could see it gets more complicated, obviously, as we get older and bigger.
10:44 Same with game size or your voice, how you're going to do this.
10:48 Are you just demonstrating before you do things?
10:50 Are you demonstrating an ask? Do they have the experience where you can guide them through questions and see what goes on with it?
10:57 All these things, all these ways, you can use to make a practice easier or harder based on all the factors, whether that's age, development, whether or anything else in your timeline.
11:08 You can use any of these pieces to manipulate your practice.
11:12 So I always want to throw in the 5 things you really shouldn't do.
11:15 Most of these are obvious, but we're gonna hit them anyways because it bears repeating, no laps.
11:21 You cannot coach fitness in 2 practices a week.
11:24 It's just not possible, and you don't have the specialized skills for pre-pubescent kids because they take fitness a different way because they haven't developed any of the pieces of the physiology to burn and
11:37 develop the way you and I might.
11:39 So don't. It doesn't matter. Everything you need to do with these kids with the ball because you want them playing.
11:46 That's the deficit right now. Obviously, no lines, but there is an exception.
11:50 If you're doing like a relay race or something else where you're getting maximal effort out of your players, then a line can be the recovery mechanism before they go again.
12:00 So lines aren't always taboo, you just have to make sure you're using them for the right purpose.
12:06 This goes without saying, I think I said this earlier.
12:08 If your drill has more lines than an air traffic control at your local airport, it's not doing much.
12:15 Those drills photograph fantastically, they look great on Instagram or social media.
12:19 They tend not to work well at all in practice because you've got to spend 10 minutes explaining it to the kids.
12:26 If you can't do it in a sentence or 2 and walk it through.
12:29 It's probably not a drill worth doing.
12:31 There's a piece too where they say, well, just let them play.
12:33 One long scrimmage. Unfortunately, for most of the ages that most of us coach is not productive in any way, shape, or form because they stop taking it seriously.
12:43 And they kind of get bored with it because there's no real jeopardy.
12:46 There's a difference between showing up to a game day against an opponent knowing that you could win or lose.
12:51 You will keep your focus for that entire time because there's that jeopardy.
12:55 But in the scrimmage against your own teammates or even another team next door.
12:59 It doesn't have the same meaning.
13:00 And so their focus falls apart on it.
13:03 I see it all the time.
13:04 So, find something else to do so that scrimmage becomes almost the reward of the session of, hey, you've done all the other things I've asked you.
13:12 Now you get to play the game because that's what you really want to do.
13:15 There's the scrimmage, but don't do it the whole time.
13:17 It just doesn't work. It always devolves into something you don't want it to be.
13:21 And last, we said this earlier, don't coach both sides of the ball.
13:24 It's so tempting to fall into that.
13:26 Just let the other side do what they do.
13:29 Remember, you can take the same session, flip your focus, and now just coach the other half.
13:34 You're going to have an even better challenge here.
13:37 Let's say you coached attacking the week before, and your defenders weren't doing so well.
13:41 Well, now the 2nd week when you coach the defenders, the attackers already know what to do.
13:46 They're going to be better at it, which will better challenge the defenders.
13:48 You get a better session in both directions.
13:52 So, simple always beats any... Massive combination of diagrams and cones and everything else.
13:59 So many of my sessions are one field set up with just a few tweaks here and there.
14:05 And I can take away a couple cones, add a couple of cones, and I'm ready for the next thing while the kids are getting water.
14:11 So, as this graphic here says, simple beats complicated.
14:15 If you've got a binder and 8 drills planned and arrows and dotted lines and all that time to explain and set up, you're wasting everybody's time and it's just not working for you or the kids.
14:25 Keep it simple. Try and get yourself to where you get one or 2 field setups.
14:29 You can repeat over and over again so that when the kids land in it.
14:32 They already kind of know what's going to happen, and now you're just changing the rules or changing your focus of your coaching, and they are right into it without wondering,
14:42 what do I do when I come to the blue cone versus the orange cone versus the yellow cone.
14:46 Was I supposed to pass to Johnny or Mary over here?
14:50 Keep it simple, right? It will work better for them.
14:53 it will work better for you.
14:54 So that's it. It really is as simple as that.
14:58 You can really structure almost all of your sessions around those basic principles, those basic building blocks by just making a few decisions and then getting your kids right into it.
15:08 No complicated diagrams, not minutes and minutes of trying to get the choreography, right?
15:13 That's not really what soccer is about.
15:15 And so while they look great on social media, they don't really work on the field, the faster and quicker you can get your kids playing, the more effective your practice is going
15:25 to be, the less downtime there is, the less fooling around that's going on on the edges.
15:29 Get them in because once they understand, hey, this is a basic setup.
15:33 I kind of know what to do, what's coach going to give me is a new challenge today.
15:37 Where am I not going to be able to go?
15:39 Why is the field extra wide?
15:40 Why is the field extra skinny?
15:42 Why are the nets where they are?
15:44 Those are the sort of things you want to get your players to start that come to practice to be like, hmm, what's going to show up this week?
15:49 That's where you want to get your players and it's all with this simple platform and simple setup that you can do over and over again.
15:56 So if you have any specific questions, as always, get down in the comments.
15:59 The next video, what we're going to talk about is what it sounds like for a really good coach when they're talking to their players.
16:06 And that's something that's not talked about enough, because I think we know all the stereotypes are out there, but I think you'd be really surprised as what works the
16:15 best and what works and what is done at the highest levels of the game.
16:19 I get some examples I'll show you then.
16:20 So, till next video. Hope you're well.
16:22 We'll see you out in the fields real soon.
16:23 Bye bye.
