Effective Soccer Practices

Hello my name is Keith Tabatznik and I had spent 22 years as the head coach at George Town University. Until last year and last year I have spent most the year going around watching professional teams practice. And one of the things that I have noticed with the professional team is something that I think is very important for all the youth teams is that every professional team starts their practice off with the ball and with the lot of technique work. And I actually say to you that as a coach there is nothing more important that you can do for your practices then the following three things. Technique, technique, technique, and the more that you can use the ball, the better.

Some of the most common things that I see in practices with youth kids that I think are probably the things that make them not enjoy this much. We see long lines and sometimes I sit there and I watch a youth team training session and a kid gets turn to shoot a ball every three minutes. So we have to find ways where we can get them repetition. The best way to improve technique is by repeating it. Obviously repeating good technique it brings along good technique. And so if we see some of these things on Kudda.com you see plenty of examples and techniques and then in every one of them you are going to see loads of repetition.

The other thing that I think often a problem is we are always seeing emphasis on winning and loosing. And let's face it when the kids finish the game when there were a loss they are not thinking about that they are thinking about where are we going to go to eat. You know we are going to McDonald's or go to Burger King. And so lets make sure even in our practices, well we want to have competition in them is that let's get the winning out of it in the young ages. And the most important thing for all the kids and for ourselves too as coaches is that we have fun.

And so making practices you know little competitions and little drills that bring on. In fact I have used the word drill and I would probably change that to games. These are the little games that we do so that's its fun for the kids. And I would also say that consider the length of the practices as well. I think one of the things a lot of times as we get older the practices get longer. I could tell you that as a young coach I probably went from three hour practices. My first was at the George Town to an hour and a half practices my last year and I can guarantee you that the last year was much more effective.

So that's my biggest thing that I would tell you, alright. Make the practices fun technique, technique, technique. And a good practice will always start with the ball it will have the ball going through it .And I would also say one or two themes only in the practices as well. But you have a little technical work with the ball. You have some competition games and always finish it with the scrimmage where we are not coaching them we just let them have some fun. You do that you going to have a lot of fun coaching and your kids are going to have a lot of fun playing this great game.


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