Formula for Success | Practice Organization
Individual Skills | Teamwork Skills

How can you best help your players improve? How can you best help your team compete against the other teams? Those are important questions, whether you’re a new coach with new players or an experienced college coach.

Perhaps your coaching credentials determine how much your players can improve. The stronger your playing background, and the higher your license, the better off your team will be.

A strong playing background is a plus, and you should learn as much as you can about coaching soccer. But those, fortunately, are not the decisive variables. If they were, new coaches couldn’t hope to accomplish much before attending a coaching course. Their players, in the meantime, could fall hopelessly behind in the soccer world. And players wouldn’t bother to practice on their own, without a coach.

Thoughtful Soccer is based on this success formula: I = W x F. IMPROVEMENT is determined by WHAT players practice and how FREQUENTLY they practice it. If your players practice the right things frequently enough, they’ll improve . . . even if you’ve never played soccer yourself. If your players don’t practice the right things frequently enough, they’ll fall behind players who do.

The What

Let’s take a closer look at the formula for success. WHAT must your players practice? You’ll have to break soccer into different topics or themes.

There’s no single correct way to do this. The coaching courses I’ve taken broke soccer into skills and tactics. Skills are physical abilities, like dribbling and shooting. Tactics are decision-making processes that players can be taught.

Here’s why I’m not crazy about those distinctions. In other endeavors, mental abilities as well as physical abilities are termed skills. And the term tactic implies that if a decision-making process is taught to players, they’ll have it for all time.

I prefer the distinction between individual skills and teamwork skills. Skills clearly allow continual improvement. Teamwork skills clearly involve the group.

WHAT individual skills must be practiced? Passing, dribbling, and shooting are obvious answers. Not unusual, though, is the youth player who has never practiced shooting with the weaker foot, heading, or chipping.

Not only must each skill be practiced. Some skills break down into important subcategories. Dribbling comes in three different varieties; success with one doesn’t guarantee success with the others. Shooting also comes in three different varieties, and there are at least fourteen different shots to practice.

WHAT teamwork skills must be practiced? Break soccer into phases or parts, and there’s your answer. As a group, your players must keep possession of the ball, break through the defense, and finish. Defensively, they must contain the ball and pressure the ball to win it back. Each of these parts has different keys to success. Players who can handle each part effectively have effective teamwork skills.

Your practice activities are another important part of the WHAT. Time spent on non-competitive, non-interactive drills isn’t that much help. The Thoughtful Soccer way is to practice the individual skills using High Impact Skill Activities, and to practice the teamwork skills using Thoughtful Scrimmages.

The Frequency

What about the FREQUENCY variable? The more often your players practice the individual skills and teamwork skills, the more often they compete at the High Impact Skill Activities and Thoughtful Scrimmages, the more they’ll improve.

FREQUENCY has several dimensions. Total hours practicing is obviously important, but so is your time management skill. The more time your players are competing, and the less time they’re listening to you talk the better.

Practice organization is a critical dimension of FREQUENCY. The traditional approach is to have one main theme, a skill or tactic, for each practice. That theme is then taught using a logical progression of activities. To understand the weaknesses in this approach, see The Case for Multiple-Theme Practices.

The Thoughtful Soccer approach is to strengthen multiple themes in each practice. Activities for receiving, heading, chipping, shooting, and dribbling are always included, as are activities for one or more of soccer’s parts. This allows each theme to be practiced more frequently in the course of a season, as the above article explains.