My son starts a new season of soccer this fall. He’s playing on an U6 team in the Gilbert Youth Soccer Assocation (GYSA). The team was without a coach so I decided to take the plunge into the world of coaching youth soccer. If I’m ever going to manage a Premiership team, I might as well start here.

For interested coaches, the league paid for us to receive a Y-Level Certification through the Arizona Youth Soccer Association this past Saturday. Though I’ve played soccer for most of my life and have a pretty good understanding of the tactics involved, taking this course dissolved some of my misconceptions about how kids learn and how they ought to be trained and developed, especially at the U6 level.

At the age of 5, kids are constantly in motion and they have a very short attention span. Because they have no sense of pace (they will run until they drop), practices and teaching sessions should be done with short games that will keep them from running themselves down too fast. They are individually oriented. They bring their own balls and they want as much time with “my ball” as they can. They are not team-oriented at all and, therefore, the concept of passing the ball will not be grasped by most of them.

So if passing and team-formations are out, what’s a coach supposed to do? Well, the most a coach can do at this level is to teach them how much fun they can have with a soccer ball. They want to have fun and so the best a coach can do is to plan games that help them to keep “my ball”. Of course, sharing is the foundation of passing the ball and building that foundation is a healthy goal for the entire season. But, at their level, especially since they are easily psychologically bruised, activities that emphasis ball control and primitive eye-foot coordination should be the only things going on in a U6 practice.

The implications of this are profound. I remember last season taking the kids and having them line up in front of the goal. They would then take turns kicking the ball into the net. This was standard fair at practice. Yet, when you think about it, none of the kids are actually getting enough time on the ball to be beneficial during game time. Sure, they learn to kick the ball, but they spend most of their time in line.

Running drills like this are spill-overs from what we’ve learned from other sports. In baseball, basketball, and football, we run laps, we line up to hit the ball, we run plays. All of those things help the player to learn the mechanical play of those sports. Soccer is a different sport. It is spontaneous and requires a player to make critical split-second decisions during the run of play. So, at the U6 practice, we want to describe each game we are going to play, but we want to leave some leeway for learning what is required up to the kids. Tell them to use their hands, their feet, or their heads and leave the interpretation of the rules up to them. We want to start getting them to think about what they’re doing instead of just doing what’s being asked of them.

I’m looking forward to our first practice next week. I’m planning all sorts of games and, hopefully, fun activities so that I’ll be able to share at least a little bit of the love I have for the game of soccer. I’ll be blogging about the season and how the kids progress.