Saturday, January 1, 2011

Coaching your Soccer Kids to have Split-Vision

I was recently reading an article on coaching your players to have better vision on the field. "First touch" skills are, of course, a prerequisite to good vision and that's still an area where we need to work. Still if I can improve my players' vision with some occasional drills at the same time, I think it is time well spent. Some points in the article reminded me of a drill we ran recently that the girls really seemed to like. It was very challenging and there was lots of giggling to boot. (Our friend Sarah taught this drill to us.)

Here's the key steps of the drill:
  1. Pair up the girls with each pair having one ball.
    • One player is the dribbler.
    • The other player is the leader.
  2. The leader, while facing the dribbler, starts running backwards.
  3. The dribbler must keep the ball as close to the leader as possible while maintaining eye contact with the leader. The challenge is to keep the distance between the dribbler and the leader to a minimum.
  4. The leader varies her speed and changes her direction constantly.
The dribbler learns to keep the ball close (if she dribbles it too far ahead, it will contact the leader) while keeping her head up because she has to maintain good eye contact. If she looks down, the leader reminds her to look up.

Hopefully, this drill will build more self-confidence in the girls so they will take a look around and know they won't lose control of the ball.



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