OK, so if you have read Tip #1 regarding equipment and Tip #2 regarding the Warm Up, your players should be organized, in the right gear and warmed up ready to go.
Now if you are coaching club players, high school, college etc, you will then go into the “meat” of the practice and work on [...]

OK, I have written 5 Tips for a new coach about to carry out the first soccer practice. I know that it is a daunting task running a soccer practice for the first time, I ran my first practice 26 years ago!
Tip #1 concerned equipment and also covered a couple of ways of taking control [...]

OK, so you volunteered to be the soccer coach of your kid’s team, only problem is, you’ve never coached a soccer team before…YIKES!
Not to worry, we are here to help.
I will be posting 5 Tips to help you get through your first practice…
Here is the first one:
TIP #1 Equipment
Cleats must be soccer cleats, no baseball [...]

So here we are waiting with bated breath for the FIFA World Cup Final to begin tomorrow.
Can you imagine how the players are feeling right now? I wonder what they are thinking and how they are preparing both physically and mentally. Can you imagine being in their shoes right now?
So, if you are preparing your [...]

Last night’s practice was a little disappointing. It is amazing to me how much I must be aware of the level of motivation and effort both at each practice and throughout the practice.
The players seemed to be going through the motions a little too much and it started to have an atmosphere as just a [...]

Last night at practice I put together a drill that worked on 10 different topics:
1. Side foot driven pass
2. Sprint
3. Body shape
4. First time lay off
5. Movement after the lay off to follow up
6. First touch
7. Driven shot
8. Rebounds and first time finishing
9. Communication
10. Runs into the box.
We worked the players really hard with this [...]

Saturday saw my college players win 7-0 against conference rivals. We made the decision over a week ago to devote at least half of each practice to finishing and set plays. As a result we have scored 12 goals and conceded 4 in our last three games.
I have a number of effective and demanding [...]

After losing on Wednesday 1-0 away from home, we decided to dedicate Thursday and Friday’s practices to shooting and finishing…boy did that idea pay off!!!
We played away against a school who had a record of 19 wins and 1 loss against us over the last 10 years. In that time we only scored a total [...]

OK, so we are now on our official 48hour countdown to our first game on Thursday. Today we had a decent practice, working on our midfielders and finishing.
We had to cancel tonight’s practice due to the fires here in L.A. so we had a chalk and talk session regarding attacking set plays.
Here are some [...]

OK, we just completed our second day of pre season soccer training.
Here is the format:
8.15am-10.30 Practice #3 Topic, Running with the Ball and Beating Players
1.00pm-2.00pm Team Meeting #3
2.30pm-4.30pm Practice #4 Topic, Crossing and Finishing
7.00pm-8.00pm Team Meeting #4
The format for the team meetings were as follows:
Housekeeping
Review of the previous practice including Key Points
Briefing on the [...]