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0:01 Well, hello coaches. Welcome back. Coach KW here again for another exciting video. Uh, I really appreciate everyone's shares, likes, and subscribes, and the comments that were off the charts on the last one. Keep
0:12 them going. I love the content. I love the interaction, and again, it's finding it's helping find new coaches to find this information. If it was valuable enough for you, again, we do this I do
0:24 this for the kids. I want to make coaches better so that kids have a better experience here. And so if more coaches can find this content valuable,
0:32 all the better. Today we're going to do something a little different. Um I'm just finishing up my DLC course for United States Soccer Federation. It's been a long time coming. Uh mainly just
0:42 because the last job I was in always conflicted with the dates that they ran the courses in my neck of the woods and so I ended up I actually took a new job
0:51 a couple years ago and maybe the second or third thing I thought was uh finally I can get myself into one of the courses. So I'm just about at the end.
0:58 We're not quite finished, but I thought it'd be valuable to take a look. I'm sure one of the things that us grassroots volunteer coaches struggle the most with is session planning. We
1:08 don't do it every day. It's not our full-time job. We don't have perhaps a library in the back of our heads to be able to be like, "Hey, these next three
1:15 weeks I want to work on playing from the wide areas. I know exactly what to do."
1:19 We probably scour the internet. So maybe you watch a channel like mine um trying to find that stuff. But a part of the D course is starting to get coaches to
1:27 learn how to do it in a structured manner. So I thought today I'd share with you my quoteunquote final exam that we had to do where we have to create a
1:35 full session plan from start to beginning uh warm-up and uh multiple activities and then as part of your D license you have to video yourself doing one of the activities in that plan with
1:46 your team or a team to submit for your final summit of exam. So, I thought I would share the plan with you, then I'll share the video and then we'll kind of
1:56 tear it apart warts and all because it's obviously never perfect. It's a learning process. The C license apparently you do this session plan basically every week for about six months. So, it's a big
2:08 step up, right? This is just starting to get you into the habit of learning how to do these things with some very intentional languages and the choices
2:15 and things like that. So, let's take a look at those plans and then we can watch the video and you can see how I do. All right. I don't know the final
2:21 answer right now. So, you know, maybe you could all judge me thumbs up or thumbs down on it. All right, so let's take a look at the plan
2:27 first. Okay, so here's the basic setup uh that US Soccer gives you for session planning. And again, Dourse is really focused on your final exam is one full
2:37 session plan. The Course, it's many, many of them over a six-month period.
2:42 So, we're just starting to learn how to do it. Uh some basic headers on the document. Um, for U 10 through 12 or U8 through 12, there's only attacking and
2:54 defending game moments. They don't talk about transitional stuff just a little bit when you get into U12. Um, in areas of the field, they usually just keep it
3:01 into halves. They don't do it into thirds. So, attacking half, how long it is, what our objective is here. And we're trying to develop our team to play
3:09 from the w score from wide areas. for the behaviors, the principles in the US soccer criteria, you basically for each age group get a certain amount of
3:19 attacking and defending ones and there's no variation. It's like pick from a list. So if you pick your principal is finish the attack. Then your subprinciples have multiple options as
3:29 well and you only get to pick from that limited option. So, it kind of focuses your attention and what you do down a little bit, which can feel a little
3:37 constraining, but the whole idea is as the age groups go up, you expand more and more, and they're trying to keep you focused on what's the most important.
3:45 That's their opinions, but again, that's what we're looking at here. So, finish the attack is the principle. So, therefore, when you look through their list of subprinciples, fill zones in
3:53 front of goal, cross the player in front of goal, finish cross, and then your player actions. Again, there's another almost like a menu. You go across from,
4:01 you know, only five principles to maybe 8 to 12 subprinciples. And then each one you have player actions. So we're looking at passing, shooting, adapting body shape, and
4:12 supporting. Your coaching points are where you start to really think about how to be specific. What are the key things that you want to work your players on? And so when you set up these
4:23 plans, you'll have three to five coaching points, but you have to understand that when you're doing your session, you may only get to one of those coaching points. And that's okay.
4:32 The point is is you've intentionally put into your head, here are the things I'm going to focus on if and when they come up. And if I don't have an opportunity
4:41 because I have to focus on one thing, don't feel like you have to force yourself into all the other pieces. So that's what we're looking for. We're
4:47 looking, we're going to try our coaching points to get our players to scan from the wide areas looking for players in front of the goal. We're going to talk
4:54 about, hey, how can we move ourselves when we don't have the ball in front of the goal? Uh, if we need technical things about crossing, if our crosses
5:02 are off, we're going to talk about that plant foot turning and pointing towards the goal. And body shape, again, another technical component. If we have to get
5:09 to it or if we see it, how can we get ourselves to face up to let that ball come to us in best popular angle. So, here's my warm-up activity and sort of a
5:19 rival game for me. So, once two players are here, they can start playing and then you just add players as they go to it. And what I chose here is again, I
5:27 love my welcome games. You can see my video 13 welcome games where you manipulate the shape of the fields and how you put the nets. And this is one of
5:35 those cases. I thought in this case, I'm going to turn the nets around because the point being here is you can't play straight direct because you'd hit the
5:43 back of the net. So players have to naturally start to go out wider to play that ball into that end zone, if you will. Kind of like hockey, playing
5:51 behind the net to then be able to score into the net that's facing backwards.
5:55 And that's the point of a warm-up game is you're not really giving a lot of direction, but the natural flow of the game starts to encourage the things that
6:02 you hope to see throughout your session.
6:04 So that's where this came from. So here is my activity number one, and this is the one I actually do the video on. So, we'll spend a little bit more time on
6:11 here, but the idea here is that we have a box made up of cones in the middle of each of these fields. It's the same field, so you're able to reuse the field
6:22 size over and over and over again so that you can move from session to session within your day. The idea here is you can only score with the ball
6:30 coming through the side of that square, if you can see it there. We're using the scoring to try and encourage a certain behavior from our players. We're trying
6:39 to get them to do things that then as we move to a real game and a real field and a real net that they can then be
6:45 incentivized to try that same process.
6:48 Now, we could have switched the rules and say, "Hey, if you can receive it in the box that's more like a cross into the front of the net, but what I thought
6:56 we'd do in this particular one is being able to play that ball all the way across would encourage more of that ball coming across in front of the goal
7:03 line." It's up to you how you make that scoring to see how you incentivize your players. An important part of any of these plans, which I didn't talk about,
7:11 is that bottom yellow box, the coaching interactions. What they really want you to do in US soccer, and it is a great idea, is that to be intentional about
7:19 how and when and where you step in to give your coaching points. What are you going to ask? What are your coaching points? When are you going to enter the
7:31 activity and have it planned out? And then how are you going to deliver it?
7:35 And they give you some things. They call it the coach's toolbox. and they give you about there's five different things to to to think about that. But in this
7:42 case, here's some of my guided questions. What's the easiest way to score to set up? How can you maxim max maximize your score per shot, if you
7:50 will? When am I going to enter the activity? I'm going to do it in between reps because usually you want to run these things for a certain amount of
7:56 time and give them a short moment of rest so that the activity is high intensity. And during those breaks, you can give instruction points or I have
8:06 here in a freeze moment where you freeze the action because the players are either succeeding or not succeeding and you can stop them in their place, show
8:14 them what's going on, have them rehearse the moment that you want them to do a couple of times and then restart play.
8:20 And then we talk about how. So here we do guided questions like we looked at before. We could do demonstrations where it's like, hey, this is what it would
8:27 look like. Let's practice it. And then again using those player actions. So, in my plan, this would be the next activity where we get rid of the extra cones and
8:34 now we basically have nets with those two cones in the top and the bottom.
8:37 Again, be great if I had two full-size nets. Then maybe I add a goalkeeper.
8:41 Maybe if I had enough players, you could do the same thing. But the idea here is again, we're looking to then incentivize by the scoring mechanism. Ball coming
8:49 across where a player plays a a one-time pass into the goal is worth more than just a shot at net. And then lastly, US Soccer likes to have your last activity
8:58 to be half of the field in your position with a big goal to a target with a keeper and counter goals or some optional thing here. Be great again if
9:08 we all had access to a half a field with rolling net so we could push that net to the halfway line and have equal numbers.
9:14 But in this case, I'm this is what my team does a lot. And so this is my finish activity. Again, there are no rules here. The idea here is you're just
9:22 looking for your team to see if they can put into action the things you've just worked on in the activity. Now, I might have replaced the activity number two
9:30 with this next thing. And I've done this next thing many times. It's very effective, but in this case, I just didn't choose to do that. Let's just
9:37 take a quick peek. So, I've done these sort of constrain games a ton with my teams and they're super effective. So instead of that second activity in the
9:45 small field, perhaps I could have or should have done this, which is basically I extend the lines of the 18 to the center and I lock the players
9:53 into their zones. Again, forcing those outside players to stay wide, making them a target um and using this to kind of replicate the feeling on the big
10:03 field. And then instead of again that second game where we're playing to just the two big goals on the smaller field, I do this. So options to go either way.
10:14 I I have mixed feelings because again I love these constraint games. I think they're super effective for attack or defense. So this is one of the options I
10:22 could have done before I went to the full size. We'll go back to that right there where you just take the lines out and say, "Hey, play." So you've seen the
10:30 overview of all the session plans. Let's take a look at the video. I submitted that's just that activity with the boxes and see how it goes. I'll skip ahead a
10:39 little bit to get through some of the descriptive stuff that's going on on the field. Basically just getting the kids onto the field. And now we're going to
10:46 just talk to them how they do the game.
10:48 So listen, you need to be able to be able to score. Coach, can you just go down so you can stop the ball from rolling? Just go down to like where you
10:57 see the penalty mark. Yeah. To score, you need to play the ball through the side of the box. Okay? Through the side of the box. So, you cannot score through
11:08 the middle. You have to score through the side. That gets you one point. One point. So, what happens if you just pass the ball through? Listen. What happens if the
11:19 ball goes through? How many points? One point. Great. If a teammate to receive the ball in here, two points. So comes through the side and a teammate receives the ball.
11:31 Play this ball to Cody. Receives it.
11:33 Great. Go back out. Ah, sorry. Codes.
11:37 Thanks, codes. Go on that side of the cones. Codes. If you can play a ball all the way through.
11:46 Play. And he receives it. Three points.
11:50 Make sense? So you just kick the ball through. No one touches it. One point.
11:55 that comes in here and you receive it here. How many points? And what happens if you can make a pass through the zone to a teammate? Three. Does that make
12:03 sense? Great. Red, go down there.
12:05 Somebody fix that cone. So, here is what you might call in US soccer they talk about for check for understanding. Gave them the rules and then stopped and
12:14 said, "Okay, what happens if A B C?" And you want them to tell you back what the rules are because you want to make sure they understand it. So, that's what
12:22 happened here. So now we'll skip ahead to stop playing play. You're going that way. So the name of this game is if you can play the ball through the side of
12:36 the box, it's one point. If you can receive the pass inside the box, it's two points. And if you can receive a pass all the way through the box to a
12:44 teammate, three points. Let's go take a look.
12:54 One sec. Keep playing. Keep playing.
12:56 Keep playing. Keep playing. Oh, good save. Can you break? Can you break? Can you break?
13:07 Okay. I'll give you a sec.
13:11 Keep playing. Keep playing. Keep Explain it again. Sure. So, see the box?
13:20 Mhm. I got to watch to see if their goal gets scored.
13:25 Two two points. Two points. Great. Back up. Non red. Back up. Red play. If the ball goes through the box and nobody touches it from the side, either side,
13:36 one point. If you play the ball through the side of the box and a teammate receives it inside the box, two points.
13:43 And if you can receive a pass clear through the box from one side of the other, three points.
13:49 Does that make sense now? Yeah. I don't get how you One point. You made it through. Made it through. One point.
13:55 Give it. All right. Freeze. One sec.
13:57 Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Come here.
13:59 Come here. Come here. That's all right. So, boys, we're playing this game. Where do you need to move the ball? What? What' you say?
14:09 Outide. Out wide. Move the ball out wide to get the barrel back in the middle.
14:13 Right. When we're playing, you all tend to be kind of clumped up and you're all trying to defending the middle is great, but when you have the ball, the players
14:22 with the ball are also sticking on the middle. I'll freeze once or twice when you're in that formation and you can see it. Okay, Red, back up over here.
14:30 Carter, come here for a sec. Here we go.
14:36 Play. So, there was a example of that was a natural stoppage. I let them play the round once or twice. They each had scored some points and then we give a
14:45 little bit of instruction to say, "Hey, this is what we're looking to do." As they get along here, they start to really warm up. These are fifth grade
14:51 boys and here is a freeze moment.
14:53 Where's everybody now? In the middle in the same quadrant, literally in the same quarter of the field. Okay. What if Who's in possession of the ball? Red. Avery. What if you
15:04 went over there? What's your name again? Nolan.
15:08 What if you went over there? All right.
15:10 Now, what does this do to the defenders?
15:12 What do they have to do? Spread out.
15:15 Cover more area. Ready? Play. Keep playing. Keep playing.
15:35 One point. So, oh, so if you see the across and Yep. That's one point. Yep.
15:47 Oh, I'll give that one point because you made a touch. Nice job.
15:57 Uh, no. Which Ryan? Keep playing. Can you find it?
16:06 Hurry, hurry, hurry. Two points. Freeze. Freeze.
16:11 Freeze. One Elijah, can you put the ball back to um right, Elijah? He was there. Reds, you weren't in here quite yet. Where could you have gone to maximize your
16:27 points? Listen to Cody. Right. Great that you got in here, but if you want to maximize the points, there's nobody here in that section, right?
16:38 Great. Oh, this is the size.
16:49 good. Ah, good idea. Now you can see there just at that moment this player here his first movement this time was outside the box. So he had taken what he
17:03 had heard a few minutes before when he actually received the ball inside the box and this time made his run to the outside so that he could try and
17:13 maximize his point value there. ball never got to him, but there's a great opportunity seeing that the player took on that information and was trying to do
17:22 the next best thing. Use the whole field, boys. Use the whole field. Oh, good defense. I'll count that as one point, but all right, Tara, get it back.
17:44 Good. Good. Good instructions. Support him. Support him.
17:56 Good. Oh, he was inside. I'll give you a two, but that was close. Boys, come in here. So, here's another plan. Stoppage.
18:09 So, what are you finding easy about anything I mean I'm seeing the ball in the middle is easy one point to touch it. Yeah. So in the easy
18:25 because everybody's kind of pulling out wide and kind of taking away those spaces. What do you find hard? Excuse me about this.
18:33 Switching the roll. Switching the ball is hard. Distances accuracy. This turf doesn't help either, right? And the ball like when it rolls it just takes off.
18:42 It's not the best surface to play on, right? I'd rather grass all day long. So instead of making that long switch, what might we be able to do to switch the
18:50 ball that might be more accurate?
18:56 Wide. Play out wide. But how? If you wanted to switch, you said it was difficult to switch from one side of field to the other. What might you be
19:03 able to do as a team? Like play it like like if you're out wide, you can play in the middle, play out. So, how many passes that do? Two. Two passes. Play
19:12 two passes to get out wide. Have that player in the middle be that relay, right? We do that a lot in games. Cool.
19:18 All right, Red. Take the ball out from over there. We'll do it one more time.
19:22 Here we go. So, one of the things here I maybe should have done is I had that extra player. I had swapped him out because he wasn't really that all that engaged in
19:34 order to give the team with the ball more opportunities to work and perhaps give them the advantage. Perhaps I should have put a neutral in. I should
19:41 have had that extra player come in and say he plays where has the ball. They would have had numbers up which means there would have been more offensive
19:48 actions. There would have had more passes available to them. But I didn't.
19:53 And again, that's part of the learning process is just figuring out what I should have done better.
20:04 But there's that two short passes instead of one long pass that we just talked about. Go back. Go back. Oh, nothing there. You have to go through
20:25 the side. Ah, good instinct. Good instinct. Good instinct. Three points. Well done. Well done. We'll give that one more try.
20:36 Boys, can we try and reduce our number of touches? We need to move the ball a little bit quicker. You're getting this ball in the middle. And then you're
20:43 taking a lot of time to move it. So maybe reduce yourself. Think to your head two, three touches, two or three seconds. Try and move that ball quicker.
20:52 Here we go. Play. And you see here, I didn't actually impose a touch restriction. I just said to them, can we move it quicker? And here are some suggestions.
21:02 Either do a touch restriction or think about how much time you have on the ball, a couple of seconds. This player that's on the ball, he has fantastic
21:10 foot skills, but sometimes he dwells on the ball. Uh he's just coming out of foot season where that was a lot needed from him. And so it's going to be a
21:19 little bit of work as the spring season goes along to break him a little bit of that holding on to the ball just because he can. That make some sense to you. You
21:29 started to have more success. You started to spread out a little bit more, right? So the keys here is using the whole field, using that width, but also
21:38 not being so slow to make that switch when it's on.
21:44 Um, a lot of times I think it's still early in the season. We're still taking more touches than perhaps we would as we went along, right? But the key of making
21:53 that switch to make that other team move is to move the ball quicker, right?
21:58 Because if we take our time in the middle, what does the other team have to do? What do they have time to do? They defend, right? They watch. They look at
22:07 you. They see what's going on. They can reset. So, if the team is all the way over to one side and you play it back to the middle, what's the defending team
22:14 gonna do? If the defending team's way over in the middle and the other attacking team passes it back to the center and perhaps a back pass, what's the defending team
22:27 going to do to react? They're going to reset. They're going to reset. They're going to reshift back into the middle. But if you can get that ball back and over fast enough, what
22:36 does that do? What does that do to the defense? When you're defending and you see that ball go over to the open side, what are you thinking?
22:47 Press. What's What's really What's going off in your head? Is it back to block?
22:53 Yeah. Right. Try to block it. Try to get over there. Allow them bells, right?
22:56 You're like, "Oh crap, we're all over here and now we got to get all the way over here. We got a little bit of panic." All right. All right. Great job.
23:03 We'll move on to the next bit, but let's um put the pennies and stuff back there.
23:08 We'll keep going. So, when I watch that back, uh there's certain things that worked and certain things that didn't.
23:13 Uh my coaching interactions were pretty decent uh in terms of when I stepped in.
23:18 Now, the kid it's, if you couldn't tell from the shaking of the pole, it was incredibly windy, incredibly cold. Uh so, it was difficult to hear. It was
23:26 difficult like it was difficult to get into it. That surface was kind of like a rug. there was no friction. So, I don't love playing on turf and I really don't
23:36 like playing on bad turf. Uh it just happens to be the only place we had available to us. Uh we do play all of our games and practices on grass at
23:43 least in our town. We go away and we see turf every once in a while, but it was another factor in the process with them.
23:51 They were a little tentative to move the ball because they knew all it took was the wrong touch with the breeze that the ball was going everywhere. So, again,
23:58 early days, this is pre-season. They're not really in the flow. A bunch of our kids haven't played all winter long and you could see it. And then there's some
24:05 that have played all winter long playing foot with me. So again, my coaching interactions, I only get to a couple of them on the sheet. We talked about
24:15 playing it wide, getting, you know, getting open, playing that ball across.
24:18 We didn't get into any of the real technical components of how to receive that cross or how to make that cross because they did a pretty decent job
24:24 when they went and did it. Is the session design great? I don't know. Oh, I think if I ran this a couple more times, I think maybe we'd get more out
24:32 of it. I think I'd be more focused. I think if the kids were a little bit more into it, they were hyperfocused for whatever reason. They wanted to
24:39 scrimmage the girls down the other end, and I was like, "No, they don't want to scrimmage you." Some of it is that player action that goes on there. I
24:46 could have brought in that extra neutral player to have more offensive action. I could have put in some touch restrictions to keep that player from dwelling on the ball a little bit
24:54 longer. My questions at the end could have been a little bit better. they were just kind of out of it. It was a Sunday morning 10 o'clock. Not the best time
25:01 for my fifth grade boys to say the least, but it is what it is. So, coaches, I hope you found that useful or at least enlightening. Uh, you know,
25:10 what's all I'm happy to put out there what I do and you know, it's not perfect. I'm learning just like everybody else. I'm a volunteer coach who just happens to have a little bit
25:21 maybe a little bit more background in the game than, you know, the next volunteer coach. So, I hope you found this useful. Again, I'll put links to my
25:29 session and some of the other things I did that if you want to download and take a look. Um, let me know in the comments like, you know, what do you
25:36 think of that process? You know, I have you taken some of those license courses.
25:40 I do plan to make a video once my D license is over to kind of just give an overview of the process so people can, you know, hopefully not be afraid to
25:47 step into that process. I want to take away the uncertainty and fear of it because, you know, it can be scary to put yourself out there and try something
25:55 new where perhaps you don't feel as accomplished or ready for it. Um, and maybe I can help you get over that hump.
26:03 But I'll do that after my D license is done and hopefully I have that piece of paper in my hand. So, until next time, thank you so much. Share, like,
26:10 subscribe, thumbs up, get in the comments, tell me uh, you know, how I did on that or not. And until the next time, I'll see you out in the fields.
