I am coaching 12U girls soccer. We are not very good, even by the standards of our basically low level, everyone plays league. So I am struggling with the amount of time I should devote to scrimmaging in practice.
I'm of at least two minds: on the one hand, we are so weak at just about everything that I can easily use all of our time together to usefully work on basic stuff like trapping, basic passing and ball movement.
On the other hand, because this group of kids generally plays so little soccer outside of our time together, it seems that the move between a drill and the impact it would have on being a soccer player in a game is pretty mysterious to the kids. They don't play enough soccer outside of our team to translate. Sometimes they do the drills so slowly that it is next to worthless to have done it and they get bogged down in a wrong headed approach to the drill. (For example, two girls doing a trapping drill will, instead of continuing to put the ball to each other hard to work on their traps, will essentially tap it back in forth so the 'traps' are easier and thus they can show that they 'did it' well.)
Also, in in-game situations they are, as a group, not super experienced and so the game often seems to move too fast for them, both as a team and kid to kid. So as a result, I am increasingly leaning on practices just being broken into three or four long periods of modified scrimmages for the whole practice:
scrimmage 1: 'handball/ultimate frisbee' style where the ball handler can't move or be defended, but has to pass.
scrimmage 2: 2 two/three touches then pass. (no dribbling, keep your head up)
scrimmage 3: three passes before shooting.
scrimmage 4: finish with a regular scrimmage.
Along the way I try to keep a sub or two so I can rotate kids in and out to do some individual coaching/ talking about their decisions.
But IDK, there are some really basic issues that don't get resolved with all of this scrimmaging. I've got kids who still toe the ball and who can't execute the most basic give-and-go/passing triangle around a defender, even when it is spoon fed to them.
Any ideas?
I'm of at least two minds: on the one hand, we are so weak at just about everything that I can easily use all of our time together to usefully work on basic stuff like trapping, basic passing and ball movement.
On the other hand, because this group of kids generally plays so little soccer outside of our time together, it seems that the move between a drill and the impact it would have on being a soccer player in a game is pretty mysterious to the kids. They don't play enough soccer outside of our team to translate. Sometimes they do the drills so slowly that it is next to worthless to have done it and they get bogged down in a wrong headed approach to the drill. (For example, two girls doing a trapping drill will, instead of continuing to put the ball to each other hard to work on their traps, will essentially tap it back in forth so the 'traps' are easier and thus they can show that they 'did it' well.)
Also, in in-game situations they are, as a group, not super experienced and so the game often seems to move too fast for them, both as a team and kid to kid. So as a result, I am increasingly leaning on practices just being broken into three or four long periods of modified scrimmages for the whole practice:
scrimmage 1: 'handball/ultimate frisbee' style where the ball handler can't move or be defended, but has to pass.
scrimmage 2: 2 two/three touches then pass. (no dribbling, keep your head up)
scrimmage 3: three passes before shooting.
scrimmage 4: finish with a regular scrimmage.
Along the way I try to keep a sub or two so I can rotate kids in and out to do some individual coaching/ talking about their decisions.
But IDK, there are some really basic issues that don't get resolved with all of this scrimmaging. I've got kids who still toe the ball and who can't execute the most basic give-and-go/passing triangle around a defender, even when it is spoon fed to them.
Any ideas?