Keeping your players happy about doing training is one of the key ingredients in maintaining enthusiasm. Establishing a set of fun soccer drills for kids is a challenge for many coaches and one of the key ingredients is coming up with drills which keep them interested.
Just doing goal shooting drills will soon become boring and won’t be effective in nurturing a young players overall skills. Competitive drills pitting players against each other are great for refining skills such as dribbling, receiving and passing.
One on one or two on four drills don’t become boring and in fact, take the boredom out of their training. It also encourages both competitive and team spirit and is very effective in keeping a player focused on developing individual skills.
In this article, we highlight a couple of soccer drills which incorporate what we’ve mentioned above.
- Drills where you pit one player against two or more are a great way to develop both the balance of a young player and their competitive nature. Ideally, for inexperienced players, putting two players are against four is preferred.
- Simply place the larger number of players around a made up perimeter of about 30 feet and then put the two other players in the middle.
- The larger group will then pass the ball to each other while the other two will be attempting to “rob” them of the ball. When one of the outside players surrenders the ball to one of the inside players they then swap positions.
The biggest benefits with this soccer drill is it teaches the kids to work in a tight space and not overwork the ball as well work as a team.
One On One Drill
This is another fun soccer drills for kids as it really gets the competitive juices going. No kid likes to look second best and when they are up against just one other opponent they generally want to win to not only impress the coach but also mom or dad who might be looking on not to mention gaining bragging rights.
- One player is the attacker and the other the defender
- Designate a space for them to work in but not too large
- The attacking player must try and pass a point(a line in the sand) using dribbling techniques
- If he succeeds he is award a number of points but if he doesn’t then the defender gets the points
- Set up best out of five drills and to take it a step further, you could introduce a round robin where the last two standing get to square off in a final
