Introducing Dribbling

A lot of the coaching I do is "Mini Kickers" - thats teaching pre-school children the very basics. Teaching dribbling with the ball to them can be very difficult but can be done with a lot of patience. Main issue I find is that if you place a ball in front of a 3 year old their first instinct is to kick it away. Heres some of the things I do:

- Firstly try and keep them static. Tell them you can use different parts of your foot. Get the group to try and do this on the spot. Slowly progress it into walking pace kicking the ball between their feet. I find telling them to do "baby kicks" works best in getting them to keep it close to their feet. Gradually pick up the pace.

- Start/Stop. To keep their attention, demonstrate the "Captains Pose." I've seen this done 2 ways - one is standing tall with hands on hips like a football captain supposedly should, the other is giving a hand to head salute like a ship captain supposedly should - ultimately in both they have one foot on top of the ball. This is what they should be doing when the coach shouts the stop command. Another benefit is that they are encouraged to keep the ball close to their feet and under control as they dont want to be last to do their captains pose. The kids all compete to see who's captains pose is the best.

- Traffic lights game. Basically same as before. When coach shows the red light (usually a red marker) they have to stop dribbling and put their foot on the ball, green marker means go and yellow means tapping the ball between feet on the spot.

- Follow the Leader. Everyone has a ball and stand in straight line. They all dribble, following same direction as leader. Change leader every 20-30 seconds.

Just a few ideas, hopefully their useful.

Warmups/Games with markers

Just a few ideas that I use in my sessions. Can be used as part of warm-ups and involves a bit of SAQ (Speed, Agility, Quickness) or for younger kids it could easily just be a game for them to play

- Firstly place 20+ markers/cones randomly spread around in a confined area...penalty box, centre circle or around a sports hall. From this point, theres plenty of different ways you could go with your session:

Jumping
- Get the participants to jump over the markers, then move onto another one and repeat this process. This could be varied with jumping with their feet together or hopping. Another one could be jumping over the marker, then jumping backwards back over it.
- A challenge could be added for participants to jump over as many markers in they can in a set time period. At the end, ask them how many jumps they made. Always find it funny how the younger ones lie about their scores.

Flipping over the Markers
- With all the markers on floor, set the group a challenge to flip them all over so they are upside down. Repeat this a few times. Young ones like it because to them its a fun game. Older ones seem to like the challenge too.

Colours Game
- As part of the warm up, get the group to move around the confined area. When coach shouts out a colour, they have to find that colour of marker and stand there. Its quite funny with the younger ones if you shout out a colour that doesnt match any of the markers.
- As a variation of this, get the group to move around. Once they approach a certain colour of marker they have to do a certain action
eg. red marker = hamstring stretch, green marker = calf stretch

Follow the Colours
- To start with, tell the group to go and find a marker each to start at. When you tell them to, they have to move around running to markers of the same colour as they started at. eg. If they start at a red marker, they'll move to another red marker, then another...and so on.

Coaching

This is my first attempt at blogging.

I've studied and taken part in football/soccer coaching with different age groups for around 5 years. This is just my attempt to pass on some of the things I've found to work well and others that are less successful.

Here's a drill I've found that work well with any age group above that of about 6 years old. It's based on the concept of passing.

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- Create a square by placing 4 markers on pitch. Lets say about 20 metres apart, a good distance anyway

- Get the participants to form a circle inside the square. Something like this(red circles are markers, x's are participants):

- Simple pass of the ball clockwise around the circle. Very simple and you should emphasise that. Its purely for explanation purposes.

- This is where the markers come in. After making your pass, participants must run to the nearest marker and then back to their position in the circle. This brings in the concept of passing and moving and increases the intensity a little.

- Assuming participants have the hang of what their doing, introduce a second football to the mix. This puts the particpants under a bit of pressure and they now need to pass and move a lot quicker to get back to their position in the circle in time for the next football arriving.

- Further progressions can include adding more footballs (this obviously depends on how many participants you have), changing it from clockwise to anti-clockwise (I'd recommend this as it promotes use of both feet) and adding in a rule of only being able to take one touch of the football. Balls will probably go flying everywhere but its a challenge for them.