ONLINE KICKING COACHES

 ***NOTE*** - To start with I’ve written about kicking technique in the past here and here and today will go over some of this in a far more condensed fashion.

Yesterday I came across 1 neutral football coach comparing the methods of 2 other football coaches that both focus on kicking technique with 1 of them using the other as an example of what they don't teach which is a weird move for mine and as I constantly tell my players, concentrate on you.

Going back to the link the post/s todays they don't seem to be there so maybe it was taken down or I just can't find it again!

I’ve seen and watched clips from both of these coaches over the years and know that they indirectly reference each other in some of their clips which I’ve no problem with.

Tim opts for the out and in cue for ball drop and likes to keep it at that where Ben likes to roll with the lift up cue and also get ultra internal and give further cues on fingers, arms, ball position and the like.

What do I prefer? I’m glad nobody asked…

It doesn’t really matter because both coachers get results with their clients, just maybe not for the reasons they think though.

If I had to choose, I’d go with Tim as the lesser cues based on his cue simplicity and the 80/20 rule.

I’ll personally grade myself as a very good to excellent kick + I’ve played so much footy that my decision making is better than most in the few times that I can actually get the ball these days.

Now that my credentials are more than verified with 2 kicks from 6 years ago, a trip down memory lane.

When I was a youngster in the 80’s I used to hold the ball in 2 hands and slam the ball down on my foot.

I don’t why I did it, but knowing what I do about constraints and self-organisation, I suspect it was my own technical concoction of working around the constraints I had the time of being a tiny kid with tiny hands and not being able to hold a full sized footy properly – no one else was doing it so it wasn’t a learnt action and I came up with all on my lonesome.

I started playing u14’s at aged 8 and at some stage between 5 – say 10 years old, I grew out of the foot-slam technique for something more traditional – but how?

I cannot tell you what I did exactly to change technique, but I can tell you what I didn’t do and that’s 1v1 coaching on every finite detail of kicking.

I did a lot of kick to kick with mates at and after school, I played footy with older neighbourhood kids and my older brothers as well as games on the weekend, but I was never taught explicitly how to kick, or to how to correct my kicking style as a kid.

Getting back to Tim and Ben, the differences between them are minute to me. What possibly gets lost in it all of it is that the type of kick you’re doing will dictate what technique you use.

A kick off a step or 2 will not require a higher ball lift like Ben, but it will use a more compact out and in style like Tim subscribes to.

Kicking on the run and/or a highish kick has you perform a longer penultimate step, where the body self-organises itself around that longer step which needs different timing between the upper and lower body to perform the kick.

Lifting the ball up higher occurs at the same time as this longer step because as the legs go, the arms go and vice versa.

The level of ball lift will also dictate what the arm and wrist will do.

In the end I don’t think any of those particulars really need to be taught unless they’re absolute performance limiters – which they usually aren’t.

The top kinogram is a long/high kick on the run and the bottom kinogram is a short/low kick off a few steps – notice the ball/hand/arm position from the 1^st image of both kicks that also backs up what I talk about in each of the videos above:

Deconstruction isn’t the best option for skill acquisition and overly internal cures aren’t either, and in a game, under pressure and thinking totally unconsciously when kicking the football, those cues will never enter your mind even once and if they do, then while they’re popping up in the old brain box, you’re being tackled from having to process too much information in not enough time.

My last point is that every kick is context dependent (opposition, pressure, time, space and consequence) making every kick you have in a game a 1 time only affair so do all those unpressured kicking drills carryover to real games?

In the end you I don’t think you can replace the hours and hours of unstructured play and practice that worked for me but on the other hand, that’s not really a thing now and is probably the biggest reason my teenager, and plenty of others, doesn’t play anymore, but that’s a topic for another day.