What to Look for in Your Child’s Soccer Club’s Training Approach
Soccer
12/10/2021 - admin
By Antony Wilshaw, Soccer Coach
There are a million and one youth soccer clubs and organizations around the USA. All selling their “eliteness” for anyone who has money to spend. These clubs will have pretty websites, filled with flashy pictures and buzzwords like “development” or “world class” and promoting the latest tournament they are attending. They will even have a short blurb about their advanced training curriculum, but, looking a little deeper, there isn’t much to learn from all this, as a parent. So, what do you do? How do you choose a safe and educational place for your child to learn and enjoy their soccer?
One thing to be weary of is the training philosophy of any club. How a club trains their players can and will have a big impact on the improvement and enjoyment your child will have. There are two types of training ideas that a club will pick from. There is the “drill” approach or a games-based approach. What’s the drill approach? This can be a form of training that teaches skills in isolation, which have very little context to the actual game. Drills can be very repetitive, teach skills without a decision behind them and can cause overuse injuries.
Games-based training is what it sounds like. Its teaching skills and decisions from within a game setting. The game setting can take on many forms, from possession games, small-sided games and full format games. Games-based training also allows the coach to modify situations to help bring out common situations, decisions and skills in a way that paints a clear picture of how they apply to a competitive game. Teaching the game from this idea, allows players to gain experience for how to apply their skills, against opponents, how to position, how to defend and the plethora of other situations that can and will happen in a game of soccer.
Although this article is critical of using drills as a form of training idea, there is always a time and a place for it. Drills can be a very good supplement to team trainings. This is ideally done in a player’s own time, where they can get extra touches of the ball, or extra strikes of a ball to sharpen up their skills. Coaches can and should encourage play at home and this is the ideal time to “drill” for players. Coaches can give players “drills” to use at home, set competition targets for the players and develop a healthy self-training approach away from the team to help their players to improve individually. Combining the two training philosophies can have a better chance of helping a player enjoy the game overall, due to the likely improvements they will make at playing the game.
As a parent, you should do your due diligence, ask a club coaching director or coach what the training approach is, why they train the way they do and understand the difference between a drill and games-based training.
In later articles, I will go into more depth between the difference between a drill and games-based training session.
Thanks for reading!
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