Developing Athletic Players
Combating overuse injuries and raising the ceiling on player development
It’s no secret that the younger generations spend less time in unstructured play. At the same time, club sports are offering sport specific programming at younger ages. The combination of these two factors leads to many players never developing a well rounded athletic base on which the sport specific skills will be scaffolded.
There are major problems with this current reality. Players are performing sport specific, or specialized, training at younger ages which is leading to overuse injuries. And despite the effort to produce better players, we’re actually producing lesser athletes, because their formative movement experiences are being too narrowly directed.
However, by looking at player development through the lens of long term athletic development (LTAD), we can get some ideas on how to work on general athletic skills within a normal team training session. By improving the way in which players move, they’ll be more resistant to injuries and will demonstrate increased skill. That increased skill means that the player will be capable of making a wider range of decisions, so it has technical and tactical benefits.
The best part is that this can be a ton of fun as well!
TAKEAWAYS
After reading today’s article you will:
Understand the value of general athletic skills
Understand the danger of early specialization
Understand how general athleticism and soccer skills work together
Have ready made games to incorporate into your next training session
BACKGROUND
*I will use movement and athleticism fairly interchangeably throughout this article because athleticism is moving the body well. Good movers are good athletes and good athletes are good movers.
As a coach I’ve worked with a wide range of player populations: from youth players playing on a competitive team for the first time ever to former D1 college and pro athletes who are playing at the highest level they can while working a ‘normal’ career.
One of the greatest benefits to the variety of my coaching experiences is having seen average and sub-elite performers both up and down the entire age range. I’ve seen players learning to control a ball for the first time. I’ve seen guys who were in La Liga academies at U17. In addition, I’ve seen youth players who were very good at soccer and held back by their lack of athleticism as well as those who were incredible athletes but lacked the soccer specific qualities to succeed at the college or semi pro level.
Being involved with my son’s U7 team has made me realize just how important this general athletic background is and this week I’ve spent a lot of time researching and thinking about application of LTAD in the very youngest players.
I’m always asking myself a few questions:
-what is the best content to teach today, given the players’ age and experience, to yield the greatest long term outcomes?
-how do I make training enjoyable for a group of 7 and 8 year old players?
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE SPECIALIZE TOO EARLY?
A common issue that has started to come into focus for me is just how much we focus exclusively on sport specific skills at increasingly younger ages. Having spent years coaching players at club level (mostly U12 or older), I never really spent much time thinking about their development as athletes in general.
At that age, most of the kids have chosen soccer to be their primary sport and it made sense to me to train the players specifically for soccer. However, the average player is often lacking in both general athletic skills which I believe slows down the rate at which they can pickup the soccer specific skills. Anecdotally, I’ve seen that the higher a player’s general athleticism, the faster they become a skilled soccer player.
I’ve never viewed it as my concern - for players who really want to go to an MLS NEXT level or with high level college aspirations I’ve felt they should address the non-soccer deficiencies on their own time - but now that I’m working with the youngest age kids I realize that it’s absolutely something we need to teach because players don’t get this foundation elsewhere.
As I’ve learned from research, players are really athletes first, sport specific players second. And what often happens is that players come to the club without a well developed general athletic background. Running, dodging/juking, changing direction, accelerating/decelerating…all of these are general athletic skills that later will be applied specifically to the chosen sport.
The problem is that kids aren’t getting these skills from anywhere. With the decline of unstructured play, kids aren’t getting a broad base of movement skills like they did in decades past. Gone are the days of running around outside with friends, playing tag, climbing trees, etc. And the result is that kids either have less movement experiences or are already ‘specializing’ in a particular sport because that is the main (or only!) organized athletic experience they have.
*This issue is actually becoming worse as more clubs are taking charge of providing the initial, recreational experience that used to be serviced by a community/rec club. I see players at 3-4 years old being coached in soccer specific skills and games with zero exposure to general athletic skills.
If this change was for the better, we’d see the average competitive youth athletes becoming healthier and more skilled. Instead we see signs that the opposite is happening - https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/injuries-among-youth-athletes-are-on-the-rise-but-why . The current environment sees players specializing by playing one sport at the expense of all others.
While we can bemoan the fact that kids don’t have the same skills as decades past, we can also view this as an opportunity to do better for the athletes and generate better long term outcomes. This change then needs to occur in our team training sessions. We need to take time from working specifically on soccer to working on the general skills that serve as a precursor. Through developing a broader athletic base we can help reduce the risk of serious injuries to our young players.
BETTER ATHLETES ARE BETTER SOCCER PLAYERS
There is always a lot of debate among soccer coaches as to how important athleticism is in our sport. While I agree that the sport is essentially a game of decisions, with the athletic and technical components being subservient to the tactical, the reality is that better athletes become more skilled players. That greater range of technical solutions then makes the player more tactically flexible.
*the argument is basically that players need to improve on their decision making and soccer technique; that this is a greater bottleneck to our country producing world class talents than athleticism is. And while I agree with that, the average youth player is severely lacking in all of these aspects. Spending time developing general athleticism with young players will allow us to reach the middle and high school ages with players who have a sufficient athletic and soccer technical base to potentially reach higher levels of performance than what we currently see.
Look at the below video of Endrick. The 17 year old is one of my favorite players already and reminds me a lot of Ronaldo Nazario. Would he be successful making the same decisions without his athleticism? Or do his general athletic skills (balance, strength, agility, speed, etc) enable him to have success across a wider range of solutions? Without strength would he strike the ball as powerfully? Without dynamic balance would he be able to ride tackles without losing the ball?
While the soccer specific skills (applying the athleticism while manipulating the ball) are vital, the general athletic skills provide the underlying foundation. Players are coming to clubs at increasingly younger ages - I’ve seen programming for 3-4 year olds - where they are given a lot of soccer specific training. While it may seem that this is normal and what you may expect a sport specific club to do, it’s a problem when the players aren’t given opportunities to develop other skills that aren’t directly related to the sport in question.
*I can think of multiple players I’ve coached over the years who were good players but obviously limited by their lack of athleticism. They may have had the soccer ability to play an MLS NEXT or ECNL (some even did play at this level), but it was clear that they were already operating at their maximum athletic level. They weren’t going anywhere else as a player. Maybe they would become smarter players through experience and make less suboptimal decisions. That would raise the floor of their performances. But their ceiling? That was limited by a lack of athleticism. Unable to change that, there wasn’t much room to continue improving by focusing on soccer specific skills.
Think about running. Can you run faster with the ball or without it? Obviously very few people can run at their maximum sprint speed while dribbling a soccer ball. So even if we try to provide technique focused games (such as knockout) where all players have a ball, the ball actually prevents the athlete from pushing their athletic limits.
Given this current reality and the lack of unstructured play where many of these skills would have been developed in the past, I believe we have a responsibility as soccer coaches to spend time in team training to develop these skills.
While in the past I would have felt like this was ‘taking time away’ from teaching soccer, I now see it as time invested in the athletes’ future. By developing general athletic skills alongside soccer specific skills we can address athletic shortcomings while continuing to teach our sport. It may not be the perfect solution, but given the short amount of time we have with our players during the week, I think it’s far better than the alternative of completely ignoring this skillset.
*Somewhat ironically, I think this athletic development is better accomplished by coaches using a traditional method versus those with a more global method, provided that second group isn’t taking steps to consciously train general athleticism. I’ve seen many coaches out here doing circuits with players hopping over cones or hurdles combined with soccer technique. While I don’t find that to be a great way to develop soccer skill, I do think the hopping, running, etc without the ball are useful for promoting athleticism. I think it can be done even better, but this is a positive I see in traditional methods.
With that being said, here are some games I’ve used (or am planning to use) in recent training sessions with my son’s U7 team.
EXAMPLE GAMES
The last two weeks I’ve worked on using some different games. A lot of this has been based on Jeremy Frisch’s course along with stealing or tweaking ideas from PE games found on YouTube. You can find a great article he’s written here: https://iyca.org/10-ways-to-improve-athleticism-in-young-athletes-jeremy-frisch/
As I said in the beginning, developing these skills can be a lot of fun for the kids. Traditional drilling methods aren’t very enjoyable and remove a lot of the decision making that is vital for developing skill. In contrast these are competitive games with plenty of decision making. It’s vital to have all of this environmental context to ensure the skill transfers to game situations. This decision making potential is also what makes the game more enjoyable than repeating a technical action with minimal decision making or variation.
NOODLE TAG
Jeremy Frisch calls tag ‘the athlete maker.’ Can’t argue with that! This was a lot of fun for the kids. You could do this any number of ways, but I simply made a large square (about 20x20 for 12 kids) and made one person the tagger. To get someone out, they had to hit the runner below the waist.
Not only is this fun, but it creates so many opportunities to work on agility, acceleration/deceleration, spatial awareness, etc. The smaller the space the more the players will work on quick changes of direction (agility) while with a larger space there will be more opportunities to accelerate.
WARRIOR RUN
The boys loved playing this game. The idea was to get opportunities for the runners to work on agility, acceleration/deceleration, and to do this in a way that would be really enjoyable for them. For the taggers it was about anticipation and reaction - trying to figure out what the runner would do and then going for the tag at a good moment.
*One of the things I also liked is that I was able to challenge the players to try and get through it, with the accomplishment being its own reward. I find that sometimes making things competitive can be a little hard on this age group and I strive to find a balance between using competition to make the games more exciting versus it having a potentially negative impact for kids who aren’t finding success.
To play this game I made a 21x10 area divided into 3 zones. A defender had to stay on each line (except the starting line, where the runners started) and could not move off the line to tag the runner. They could move laterally but not forward or backward. To add some extra intrigue, I put 2-3 agility poles in each zone so the runner had some other decision making options. I tried to stagger these in a way so it wouldn’t be possible to make a straight run through all zones, but would require some changes to their running path. Each runner wore a flag football belt with a flag on each hip.
*At first we did it with just one flag but it was too easy for the runner. Two flags was a good challenge.
The agility poles worked well and plenty of times a player would use it as an obstacle, juking left and right before they would sense an opportunity to accelerate past the defender. One of my toughest players to engage walked off saying, “that was fun!” So it passed the test.
1v1 CHASE TAG
With all the fun I’ve been having learning about LTAD and cooking up ways to add it into my sessions, I watched some highlights of World Chase Tag on YouTube. It’s a really fun mix of athletic skills and the athletes are seriously impressive movers. While it may be hard to really recreate at training, here’s what I’ll try:
Two teams playing 1v1 in a 12x12 square. Rounds last up to 20 seconds. The round is over when time expires or when the runner is tagged. If the runner is tagged, the tagging team gets a point for that round. If the runner evades a tag for the entire 20 seconds, the runner’s team gets a point for that round. The same player will play as the tagger and then stay on as the runner for the next round. After playing as the runner, they will go to the back of their team’s line.
I expect this to be an exciting and fun team game with all the typical tag benefits. There are also plenty of ways to make this more interesting, such as using flags or adding obstacles. I’ve done something very similar before with a U17 girls team where I added pop up goals and some cones to the area so there were obstacles to hide behind or jump over.
2v1 POSSESSION
I haven’t used this yet, but it’s an idea I want to try. I’ve played this 2v1 possession game twice with the kids and both times it wasn’t very good. Kids seemed confused as to what they were supposed to do and to be fair it’s probably too complex for their age and ability. HOWEVER, I do think they would have a better understanding if they weren’t asked to manipulate the soccer ball. In fact, I think it would seem relatively simple for them at that point.
So instead of having them play 2v1 and try to keep the ball away from the third player to make 5 consecutive passes, I’m going to have them play 2v1 handball keep away. My thought is that all of the general athletic skills will transfer - dodging, changing directions, acceleration/deceleration, spatial awareness - but it will be easier for them to do this if they don’t need to think about manipulating the soccer ball at the same time.
Once they demonstrate they can successfully play this game, then I can add the soccer ball in and it should be a nice progression. I would expect to play this game with the hands probably 2-3 times before adding the ball and asking them to play it as a ‘soccer game’.
The way I’ll play it is three players in a 10x10 square. One player is the neutral who always helps whichever of the other two have the ball. The two players in possession have to complete 5 passes for a point. Ball is carried in the hands and the ball carrier can run with it as much as they like. If the ball carrier is tagged by the opponent, it’s a turnover and the opponent gets the ball to either run or make a free pass to get the play started (this won’t count toward the 5 passes). Only passes that are completed without dropping will count toward the five required for a point. If the ball is dropped and recovered by the possession team, they maintain the number of passes they had already completed (ex. Made 3 passes, dropped the ball, picked it back up, their next completed pass is 4). Play for 2 minutes.
CONCLUSION
With the decline of unstructured play and the rise of sport specific training at increasingly younger ages, athletes are missing the general athletic background that will give them the best opportunity to thrive in the sport of their choice.
To help prevent burnout, overuse injuries, and the other ills associated with early specialization, athletes need a more general program at the youngest ages.
Instead of focusing solely on soccer, let’s look at ways to take at least a portion of the training session and help fill in the gaps that players have. And let’s do it in an enjoyable and age appropriate way so we can keep players in our sport!