Written by Andy Driska with contributions from Karl Erickson
In our part 1 of our discussion, we took sides. Karl defended prioritizing fun in soccer practices for 7-10 year-olds, and I defended the idea of incorporating challenges to build skills. What we’re trying to explore in Part 2 is how we could meet both aims. Hope you enjoy!
Karl Erickson: So, if you want to try this game-like practice, what’s that actually going to look like? How many players on a side, what are the rules, size-and-shape of the field… all those things? Do you have a goal for what you are trying to teach in this game?
Or do we set-up a game where the kids have the most possibility for the fun parts of soccer – touching the ball, scoring – and do I trust my judgment to see when good (skill) things are happening and just reward that… draw kids’ attention to it. Let it happen, then reward it, instead of specifying the goal of what you’re trying to do.
But that’s a difficult thing to do. Maybe it’s too idealistic, maybe it’s not even possible. Especially if I’m a new coach and I need to manage 15 nine-year-olds, when I’ve got 90 minutes a week and maybe the 20 minutes before practice to plan a session. Is that reasonable?
Andy Driska: Seems like you need a bunch of games, like a cheat-sheet, that you can walk into practice with. Games that are easy to set-up, that have fun names, and that kids will learn something from playing, but they probably won’t know what it is that they learn. And the coach can see some improvements that they might attribute to that game.
4-on-4 soccer is pretty common these days, which I think is good. I think sometimes adults don’t pay attention to it because they don’t understand the strategy of it, or they don’t think it’s worthwhile to coach, so they leave the kids alone… which is great. A games approach – maybe Teaching Games for Understanding (detailed article on TGfU), or Constraints-Led Approaches (more info from Rob Gray on YouTube) – but think more about how you can change situations.
Can you create 5-on-4 situations, or changes in rules? Exclusion games, where you create a sudden advantage for one team for 25 seconds, those can be good learning experiences… but maybe don’t frame it as a learning experience.
Karl Erickson: Those approaches, like constraints-led approaches or teaching games for understanding, can be intimidating, especially to a new coach. It’s going to be easier if you just diagram a practice, have the kids run from here to here to here, and then I know exactly what’s happening.
But what if we take the pressure off a little bit? Don’t perfectly diagram the practice. Get a rough frame that’s going to be fun and have a lot of situations with kids doing stuff that matters in soccer, and then just make a random change. You become the “shark” and you exclude a player for 20 seconds, or “squish time” where the sidelines are suddenly much closer, or something like that.
Then, pay attention. What kind of scenarios do these changes create? What might the players be inadvertently working on? It’s not a complicated idea. Start with the basic frame (of soccer), poke at one part of the game at a time (like rules, or boundaries). See what happens.
Might we be able to hit two birds with one stone with this, to develop skill and keep it fun, and maximize the planning time you have as a coach?
Andy Driska: So, if we have 45 minutes in a session, and we assume the first 5 and last 5 minutes are for warming up and winding down, and five minutes for moving around and instructions, we might have 3 blocks that last about 8-10 minutes each. It’s not much time when you look at it that way.
Many years ago, I was coaching water polo, and a mentor coach (Charlie Brown at Penn Charter HS) told me that USA water polo recommended to keep their practice activities to no more than 7 minutes each, even at the highest levels. I remember that was a useful way to set-up a practice. My goal was to build games in 7 minute blocks. Instead of saying, “how will I fill 45-minutes of practice?” I said I have a warm-up, 4 blocks of 7 minute games, and a cool down… I just gotta pick 4 games.”
That got so much easier to plan. And if I have a book of meaningful games for players to play, I can just drop those games into a common practice structure… I can match the games to what I think the players need more of.
The hardest part about coaching, for me, was “what the hell are we gonna do for tonight’s practice?” Because you’re working a day-job, you’re so busy, and you don’t give practice much thought. I think it’s an easier way, to identify some games ahead of time, and try to place them strategically throughout the week’s practices. Give them names. All you gotta say is the name of the game, and everyone knows the rules… everyone knows what they have to do.
Karl Erickson: I think that’s actually a big point… easily recognizable games that the kids know and connect with… almost like a neighborhood game. But a game that you poke and modify and adjust on the fly. That can be fun and engaging.
You know what’s not fun or engaging? Learning the rules to a cone-relay. If a drill is super complicated, that’s time when kids aren’t touching the ball.
Andy Driska: Yeah, and you know, it’s not that kids don’t like rules. Ask any kid what the rules are to freeze-tag versus California freeze-tag, and they’ll be able to explain the difference. Games like hide-and-go-seek, red rover, all the neighborhood games we used to play… any kid could explain the rules. The rules are the common framework that allow us to play the game. If we agree on the rules, then we can play the game. And kids understand this from a very early age, they don’t need adults to do that, they seem to figure out… it’s like an agreement.
Karl Erickson: And they’ll police it themselves!
Andy Driska: Yes they will! And they’ll modify them, too.
Karl Erickson: So maybe that’s the key, especially with younger kids, if games are their frame of reference, what if we just build on that? With limited time for the practice and for planning, can we build on what already works for them?
Andy Driska: I like games that teach skill, but I also like games that engage kids, and usually the best games do both. So the problem was, there weren’t enough of those games that did both. And you can’t do the same game every day, then it loses its effect, right? You need to have a good cheat-sheet in front of you, showing the ten games you could play almost all the time and we’d be happy.
Karl Erickson: And maybe, as volunteer coaches without much free time, to help each other out, maybe we need to start chatting on the sideline with parents. Ask, “what games do your kids already play?” Then you can make a tiny tweak, and then all of a sudden, it’s a soccer game.
Going back to my experience coaching rugby for 7-year-olds, when we figured out all the kids knew Octopus, the game where people are trying to get from one side to the other with other people trying to stop them, and if you’re caught you become a tentacle. We thought that everyone seems to know this game, we’re going to play that as a warm-up.
Then we realized, “hey, wait a second, what if we give them a ball?” What if we say, “you’re on teams and you have to get the ball past the tentacles?” That was the best thing ever! But it took us months to do that. We probably could have asked one of the kids or parents, and they’d say they do this all the time. So, if every coach knows one kid’s game that you can tinker with, then you don’t have to reinvent everything from scratch. You just have to find one other parent who knows one other game.
Andy Driska: So what did we learn?
Karl Erickson: At the biggest, broadest level? Skill development and fun/engagement both seem to be critically important. Neither of us could argue for one side without acknowledging the importance of the other. And maybe they aren’t competing aims. Maybe there are ways of coaching that don’t put them in opposition.
Andy Driska: Another point is to look for activities that have the potential to develop and teach component parts of the sport… games where the learning is disguised. But the games that are the most engaging probably have the most ability to also teach skill. These aren’t competing aims, so you need to find those games that do both. Those games ideally could be 85 percent of your practices.
Karl Erickson: That approach takes the pressure off coaches and simplifies a practice. We’ve got a few 8-minute blocks, we can build a few games that we share, and we don’t have to design an elaborate game plan to coach a team of 7-10 year-olds for 45-minutes. We can get a lot out of some basic games.
Andy Driska: One take-home for me was simple rules that everyone can understand. Hide-and-go-seek has a very simple object of the game, so if you can design a game that’s as simple as hide-and-go-seek, so that a 7-year-old can explain it to another 7-year-old who just showed-up late for the first practice today, they can explain the rules.
I might be crazy, but when you boil-down soccer to its essential rules, the object of the game is use anything but your arms in a predefined space to put the ball in the back of a net. That’s 90 percent of the game. Of course, there are rules that govern specialty situations, but the object of the game is so damn simple, and that’s why it is so popular. It’s a really simple idea that you can do with 4 people, or with 11 people. Maybe with 20, who knows?
Karl Erickson: If we can do that, and the kids can teach and police the rules, maybe that frees up time and energy for you, as the coach, to watch what’s going on. You can see if they are having fun, or trying some new skill-stuff, rather than just making sure the drill runs okay.
Andy Driska: When I would coach practice games like that, I just retrieved the balls that went out of bounds, and I watched each player. I was a lot more observant of what players were doing in games like that, compared to when I was trying to teach and ensure they were doing the drill correctly. It gets you out of that corrective mindset, and puts you in a mindset where you’re observing and learning as a coach.
And honestly, as a coach, that’s when you make your gains, when you shut up, step back, take a deep breath, and just enjoy what you’re seeing. That’s when your whole field of vision opens up, and you start seeing how everything comes together. If you’re so laser-focused on Karl, who can’t dribble the ball correctly, then you’re not having fun, you’re correcting, and it makes the job kinda miserable.
Karl Erickson: Yeah, that allows us to hold both fun and skill development in focus. We can bounce around, instead of having to be in control and only focus on what’s directly in front of us.
Andy Driska: I was never the best athlete, but I used to do well in those chaos games. Some of my best moments were winning one of those chaos games, because I was never going to be a starter, but that was like my shining moment. It does sometimes allow those kids who are in the middle of the pack, in terms of their skill, to emerge and find something new about themselves.
Karl Erickson: That probably helps the other end of the spectrum too. Look at (Lionel) Messi, one of the most skilled players in the game… maybe ever? He talks all the time about how much he enjoys just playing, just going for it, innovating in the moment. Even at the highest level, where there are all sorts of skill demands and highly-structured scenarios, the best player in the world benefited from taking an approach that could be described as a playful approach… or embracing chaos, as you were saying. He found a way to engage with chaos.
Andy Driska is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Kinesiology. He coordinates the graduate programs in sport coaching and leadership and teaches courses in sport psychology, skill acquisition, and coaching science. He conducts research on coach education and athlete development.
Karl Erickson was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Kinesiology from 2014-2021. He taught courses in sport psychology and sport sociology, and conducted research that focuses on understanding youth sport as a context for personal development.