Using Small Sided Soccer Games in Practice

As newer coaches begin learning how to coach soccer, most of their efforts go toward running drills to try to teach their players specific skills. That is to be expected. Often times you are given a team with very little understanding of how to play, so the coach has to start from scratch with teaching skills. The problem is, spending too much time concentrating on specific skills will not necessarily prepare your players for game situations.

As you learn more about how to coach soccer, you should work on coming up with ways to work the skills you are trying to teach your team into game situations. A great way to do this is to use small sided games as a part of your regular practices.

A lot of soccer coaches will use scrimmages, but small sided soccer games are a little different. Small sided games are small, controlled games that allow players to concentrate on certain aspects of the game. Rather than just blowing the whistle and letting your kids start playing a game, small sided games typically will set different goals or put different rules on the game. For instance, if you want your team to work on passing skills, you might set a rule that requires a team to make 3 successful passes before they are allowed to take a shot on goal. Or you could change the scoring to say that for every 3 successful passes a team makes, they get 1 point. This makes the team think more about passing than in shooting.

There are many different variations you could put together that make your team focus on one particular part of the game. If you want your team to get used to defensive pressure, you could set up a situation where you have 2 players on the field that always play defense. That way the attacking team is always outnumbered. You could require players to only shoot with their non-dominate foot. There are countless different situations you could set up for your players.

Teaching your players to play soccer is just that; you are teaching them to play. While skills are important, if they can't perform those skills during a game then knowing the skill is of very limited value. Knowing how to coach soccer means knowing how to get your players ready to use what you have taught them during a game. If they can do that, you have done your job as a youth soccer coach.