Soccer Lesson Plans, Soccer Articles

Pre-Season Trials - Squad Selection Session

This week we're bringing you the Sportplan Pre-Season Trials. Whatever level of football you're involved in, from Serie A to Serie Z, now is the time to assess your players' skill levels and decide who's going to make the final cut for this season.

But how do you choose which players should make up your starting XI, which players should sit on the bench and which should be left back... in the changing rooms? To help you make this difficult decision we've created a session to help you quickly and easily set up a series of simple exercises to assess your players' dribbling, close ball control and finally a bit of passing and moving.

Once you've set up the drills you can take a step back and watch your players in action - keeping track of the player's who demonstrate a good touch and control.

If you want to increase the pressure for more experienced players you can time your players with a stopwatch as they perform the slalom dribble or the under the bridge run. The pressure of performing these exercises under timed conditions will give you some interesting results to help you pick your final team.

This session has gone back to the grass roots of training, using traditional core skill drills to enable your players to show what they can do - dribbling under, over and through cones. After this we work on close control, feeding the ball into players for them to control with their feet, thighs and chest before concluding the trials with some passing.

See how you player's perform the basics in this week's squad selection session! - full members can download it now, or you can upgrade today.

Coaching Good Support Play

Coaching players to support the player on the ball is not easy, so to help you get your players working all for one and one for all this week's Sportplan session looks at movement off the ball, creating options and picking out the right pass.

Gone are the days of 'letting the ball do the work', in today's football it is all about putting in the leg work. Over the course of the 2005/06 season Steven Gerrard covered roughly 380 miles, this is equivalent to about 15 marathons, a tenth of which was run at sprint pace. Nowadays your average Premiership footballer will run 12 km per match!

Of course, lower league football will not require the same levels of fitness as the top flight but it is important to get across the importance of running off the ball to your players and making sure they understand that creating options by moving will help them to receive the ball more often and ultimately support their whole team.

To ensure the player on the ball always has an outlet we begin with a passing and moving drill before adding a defender into the mix with a 3 vs 1 possession game. Players will need to move around the grid to avoid losing possession though, running the cone and calling to receive a crisp pass from the ball carrying player. Your players will then progress into larger possession games, they'll have to think quickly if they want to avoid losing possession for their side!

Use this session today so that your players understand that if the player in possession can't find a pass it's their responsibility to move and offer an option, not just wait for the ball to come.

All for one and one for all! - full members can download it now, or you can upgrade today.