YOUTH FOOTBALL SERIES #5 - EVERYTHING DOESN'T NEED TO GO ONLY FORWARDS ALL THE TIME

 

In the hastiness of coaches and parents yelling "go, go, go!" from the sidelines on each and every possession, youth footballers will feel that they are in extremely time sensitive situations and thus their vision will be tunneled and often the ball simply goes down the field in a straight line, whether there is a decent option there or not.

To go deeper on this, players off the ball but surrounding the play also here the outside commentary of "go!" and follow a similar pattern, running straight down the ground towards goal with everyone else, going against everything we should be teaching them without the ball, namely being to create space.

Instead everyone invades the same space and your team's forward thrust is halted before it even starts.

Here's a quick video on what I saw a heap of during our game day a couple of weekends ago and how some subtle alterations can improve this greatly...

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YOUTH FOOTBALL SERIES #4 - SLOW DOWN WHEN NEEDED

                                           

A pretty big focus I bring to my coaching is to slow down either through the ball carrier purposefully taking time to dispose the ball from a mark, or as a team to possess the ball using 100% options for as long as they can.

All I say during these activities is basically " find the easiest kick you can do", a skill in compartmentalisation (a future post in this series).

Watching through a bunch of our senior games over the break I found 19 instances of kicking to an outnumber and 17 instances of going fast when we should have gone slow.

Reasons I put these down to included your structure of player movement (which determines your ball movement) and basic player awareness which can be a multitude of things I won't go into now.

Ultimately though Ia think this all starts at junior level with coaches and parents pleading with their team to "go, go, go" once they have the ball, creating a sense of chaos that might not need to be there while making every touch of the football time sensitive when not every possession is, or needs to be.

In the moment his can cause a lot of potential forward thrusts an scoring opportunities to go missing but can also instill itself in player's mindset when they move to senior level football, as shown above.

Here's a quick video from my own coaching showing a prime example of a play which needed slowing down to score, but wasn't and how slowing down would have worked better...

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YOUTH FOOTBALL SERIES #3 - NO VOICE, NO FOOTBALL

                                     

I'm sure this is an "issue", if you can call it that, in all youth and junior football clubs everywhere and I saw it both young and older groups that we ran.

It's not that they don't ever talk as we had some presentations and some them talked to all players, parents and coaches like they'd had media training beforehand and we were like "why don't call for the ball like that?"

In the 1 session a couple of weeks ago there were 2 examples of how talk/calling for the ball didn't get the ball to the best position/player on the ground and when it did and I'll add some some cues/tips to use to help this along under the videos.

NO VOICE, NO FOOTBALL...

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YOUTH FOOTBALL SERIES #2 - FIND THE SPACE TRAINING DRILL

                                                     

#1 of the Youth Football Series looked at finding where you can get the next possession and an example that occurred in one of my football programs last week and this continues on a bit from that.

Once you've anticipated where you think the ball movement pattern will go to, you then need to work into whatever space is there to receive the ball with time and space.

This sounds simple enough but younger players can't always take their focus off of the ball regardless of where each of them are are on the ground and unconsciously get drawn towards into the play and to the ball.

Here's what I saw a bit of yesterday in the 3 games I umpired...

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SLOW PLAY TRAINING DRILL - PATIENCE 2

                                                 

Back in October I posted my first crack at developing a slow play training drill called Patience but I ran this version with youth footballers this week and I think it works better because of the slight alteration.

Most players of all ages are far too eager to simply play on without knowing who and what's ahead of them, especially if they're back is turned to their goal when they mark the ball, which is 90% of the time.

Drills like these can show the ball carrier that it's perfectly fine to be standing still so long as you have the ball and the best option isn't always the first option, it's the BEST option which may very well be the first option but might also be an option that won't happen until 5 seconds from now so providing them opportunities to experience this is critical for developing tactical prowess in young footballers, which relies on being able to play fast and slow or  contested and uncontested with all 4 styles of play having completely different tactical, psychological, technical an physical skill sets, but are often coupled as well making cognitive demand extremely high at various times of the game...

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YOUTH FOOTBALL SERIES #1 - WHERE CAN YOU FIND THE NEXT POSSESSION?

With everything finally back open in Melbourne, my youth football coaching work has opened back up so for the last 4 weeks I've been literally all over Melbourne doing that from Ascot Vale to South Morang to Sandringham to Box Hill to Bulleen to Mulgrave an finally finishing off all the way out at Doreen this weekend.

We've been coaching up kids from ages 10 - 15 by exposing them to various tactical and technical aspects of football which finishes with a huge game day for all players from all locations, and from the 17 sessions I've been a apart of I've compiled of list things that we did focus on and somethings I'll focus on in the future, currently sitting at 12 or so posts unless I see some more things worth mentioning on game day.

WHERE CAN YOU FIND THE NEXT POSSESSION OR THE ONE AFTER THAT?

If you've watched junior football of any age you'll often find a huge scrum around the ball with little positional play, as far too many players all vie for the 1 ball so after we focus on contested/congested play we will move out to something more spacious which allow the players to see the game through slow thought actions (refer to the "Decision Making During Games" series).

Below are a couple of videos looking at successful implementation of positional play and players using their knowledge of and in the game, to locate and get into dangerous space.

VIDEO 1...

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NEXT LEVEL COACHING – DECISION MAKING DURING GAMES: DO THIS!

                                          

This is the final post to wrap up this study so hopefully over the last 14 posts you've learned a little bit about how to gain game information off of your players, who don't see what you see and don't feel what you feel in that given moment.

This can help coaches better understand their players on an individual basis that can then allow the coach to get a leg up on what players need what training, getting as close to even keel as possible with players of various technical, tactical and physical capabilities.

NEW TERMS

Divergent Questions - refers questions without specific answers but requiring the ability to think broadly about a certain topic

Slow Thought - refers to decisions and game actions made based on of-the-game information

• Coaches should adopt 2 types of decision making training environments
• The 1st is the use of intentional decision making training (explicit learning) to develop cognitive decisions where players know what information to search for and also what action is appropriate to satisfy game information
• This may include explicit slow deliberate sense making activities such as video analysis, previews, team debriefs, coach led rules plus individual and collective roles and responsibilities through tactical rules
• The 2nd is to encourage players to explicitly connect their perception of information to their declarative knowledge of the game through slow and deliberate environments to make better informed decisions in rapid competition environments
• The game presents player’s with incidents where tactical information can no longer be referenced from limited time and game information which demands a change of expectations, so to support this coaches should utilise incidental decision making training which conforms to variable design principles such as non-linear pedagogy, in that practice provides exposure to the perception of information in order to identify invariances between the information being perceived and the action planned
• In such uncertain environments, coaches should consider guiding players to adopt the “take the 1^st” heuristics through exploratory coach behaviors (divergent questions etc) and practice manipulation (rule modifications etc)
• Coaches also need to consistently reinforce in training shared common language, a clear common frame of reference (game model etc) and to consistently seek, develop and refine technical and physical capabilities of their players, as they afford a wider scope of game information to select from
• Don’t shy away from decoupled, mass and block instruction but ensure technique is refined and re-coupled to game information
• Coaches should also study how to support players development of decision making and how it must progress further than coaches perceptions via self confrontation elicitation interviews (no, fast and slow thought grading etc) to explore how the demands of the game are perceived and captured by the coach, and impressed onto players within effective learning environments