The internet can provide a wealth of information and resources for youth soccer coaches. There are thousands of drills posted online as diagrams and videos. SoccerDrive.com alone has over 400 (and growing) animated soccer drills and tactics. Not only is our goal to provide great content that is useful to youth soccer coaches, but to give them tools that will help them:
- be more organized
- be more prepared
- be more efficient with their time
- communicate with their assistant coaches and players
This article will review four tools we offer that help youth soccer coaches accomplish these goals.
Organization of Content Using Drill Lists
We just mentioned that we have over 200 animated soccer drills and tactics on this website alone and thousands of drills can be found by doing simple searches online. The key is to find drills that work well for you and your team. What works well for one team may not work well for another. As a coach you are responsible for finding drills that are good for your players.
With this is mind we have developed functionality that allows members to save any drill into numerous lists. This allows users to organize the content in their own way and make sure that drills they would like to access can easily be found without having to search the site every time they want to view it. Drills that have been saved into a list can be accessed anytime on their drill lists page. The video below gives a demonstration of how this works.
Creating Practice Sessions
Developing high quality practice sessions is a vital habit for successful youth soccer coaches. Showing up for practice without a plan and just “winging it” can lead to a waste of time for everyone. Good coaches will show up with specific objectives and a plan on how they will achieve those objectives. Can you imagine a school teacher showing up for class without a lesson plan? Therefore, another tool available for our members is the ability to develop practice sessions and save them into their account. Once they are saved they can be used modified and used again later. Coaches who use this tool can save time developing practice plans and make sure they are providing high quality sessions. Please watch the video below that demonstrates how to create a practice session.
Sharing Practice Plans and Drills with Coaches and Players
One of the most frequent requests we have had as coaches is an easy way to allow players a way to view practices on their own before coming to practice. The benefit of this should be obvious. If coaches and players can take time to understand the objectives and drills before practice then less time can be used on introducing new drills and concepts. Many players will perform much better if the drills can be re-enforced at practice so players are thinking less and reacting/playing more.
Athletes are no different than students in that they all learn in different ways, however, most athletes are extremely visual. In addition to listening to the coach describe a drill and see it drawn up on a drill board it benefits many players to be able to view an animated version of the drill so they can understand the timing and flow of how the drill works.
With this in mind soccerdrive.com as developed a method for coaches to create a team access account where members of their team can login to view practices and drills that coaches want to share. Team access accounts are available to all soccerdrive.com members and a demonstration can be viewed in the video below.
Coach’s Notebook
The online tools we offer are great but at the field it is always great to have a notebook you can reference and share with other coaches. While we love what our online tools have to offer we also know that a physical notebook is hard to replace. There is just something about writing out a drill description or drawing a diagram that will never be replaced. Therefore we have a handful of downloadable files that can work great to use as a template for writing or drawing up your own drills and practice sessions.
Download Blank Soccer Practice Sheets
In Conclusion...
Here at SocerDrive.com we have developed online tools to help youth soccer coaches…
- Find high quality drills and tactics
- Organize content in their own way
- Create practice sessions that can be modified and used again
- Communicate with their coaches and players by using the Team Access feature to share practice sessions and drills.