The importance of a small set of drills

First, this post is all entirely useless if you haven’t clearly defined your philosophy: How do you want to create your chances? How do you want to penetrate opponents’ lines? Where do you want to win the ball? Where is your initial line of confrontation? What visual cues tell your players what action they’re supposed to take now? What are the responsibilities of each position in each phase of the game?

If you haven’t detailed out exactly what you want your team to be doing in the various phases of the game, do that NOW. Otherwise, you’re just teaching the kids random pieces of soccer without teaching them how they fit together. That results in sloppy play, poor decisions, and a slow speed of play - jungleball, kick and run, pickup soccer.

Once you have your philosophy and style of play detailed, you have an actual end-point for where you want your team to end up. That makes it infinitely easier to identify and utilize drills that are relevant to accomplish your goals. I’ve seen coaches (the select few who have a detailed philosophy) waste an incredible amount of time explaining rules of the drill. As the imparter of knowledge, we are collectively throwing away so much opportunity for our players to get in repetitions and also to layer on additional coaching points (which are usually the higher-level and most important ones for player development!).

The simplest way to eliminate your wasted time is simply to identify drills that you can use to teach multiple components of your style of play. After once or twice through the drills early in the season, the kids understand exactly what’s going on which allows the coach to just say “go to Drill X” and the kids start immediately playing. That’s about 2 minutes saved each drill, 6 minutes each practice, 18 minutes each week, 72 minutes each month, or about 3 hours each season. You just bought yourself two entire training sessions worth of time. That doesn’t even touch the even greater benefit of time saved from the players trying to figure out the process and how to actually succeed within the drill.

I have narrowed my set list down to 8 drills for U12-14 for the entire season. It takes the kids two weeks to learn them all and then we can really get started on learning the soccer part – layering on crucially important pieces that will make them better soccer players. Verbal communication, visual communication, checking shoulders, creating space for themselves, creating space for their teammates, finding space created by teammates, recognizing when to get forward with or without the ball, and a million other bits of information top-level players need to have imparted to them.

Each drill allows me to teach at least two aspects of our style of play on each side of the ball. I’ll use the simple 4v1 rondo with a rule of no passing across the square as an example. Many coaches simply use it as a generic passing drill to warm up, but it has the potential to be so much more:

Offensively, the two key points for my style of play are receiving across your body (and passing across a teammates body) and quickly getting into angles of support. These are key to moving the ball quickly and keeping it on the ground, the absolute core of my entire philosophical framework. On top of that, I layer on moments of communication like asking for the ball, telling them not to play to you, and telling them to play a specific teammate. All of those hinge on players learning to read the defender’s positioning relative to the ball and the available passing options.

Defensively, the two key points are channeling play to the desired direction and recognizing the visual cues of when to press the ball to win it or force an error. On top of that, I layer on selecting what type of tackle (block tackle or poke tackle) to use in specific situations and the importance of intensity for being decisive to take advantage of opponents’ errors.

The small drill set is about more than just being able to layer on more complex ideas. It is also about allowing your players the time to absorb what you’re trying to get them to learn via the drill. Repetition creates calm players. Repetition creates consistency. Repetition creates recognition of situations and increased speed of play.