What if I told you that young players enjoy the soccer practice games the most when they are scoring goals. It is therefore necessary for you to find out and add as many opportunities as you can for their practice. In order to create such occasions for them, many options are available that can be performed. A few examples are shooting drills, full-field scrimmages, and small sided games.
During small sided games and full field scrimmages, it’s your responsibility to keep altering the various ways to encourage extra goal scoring. Slot in those games that can be played without a goalkeeper or you can confine their movement inside the defined boundary. The current goalpost can be extended or extra goals can be integrated for enhancing the chances of enhancing goal scoring.
During soccer training, players can improve goal creation by becoming a skilled shooter and developing their judgment skills. Similar to passing skills, it works well to initiate shooting methods pretty early in the development of kids but lay more emphasis at the later stages.
Carrying out soccer drills is one of the means to equip the players with requisite shooting skills. Players become skilled at shooting the ball accurately and score many more goals by way of these shooting drills. It is therefore important that you encourage your kids to become skilled at shooting the ball precisely.
In your soccer exercises, coach the players how to strike the ball appropriately while shooting it. Players are allowed to take shots from a close range repeatedly with the inside of the foot. In using the inside of the feet, you bring more precision into the shots. When circumstances demand more power, instruct the players to strike the ball using the instep of the foot, with toes pointed downwards and ankle locked.
How you position the non-kicking foot impacts the height of the shot. Hence, tell the players to keep their non kicking foot further to the ball so that the shot is low. You should eliminate all distractions for example moving balls, moving shooters, or defenders so that the player’s concentration is only on shooting the ball.
You can start the drill progression in soccer practice games with a stationery ball and a stationery shooter. As the shooting techniques progress, increase the challenge by putting the shooter in action before he/she hits the ball. This shift will alienate from the accuracy of the striking efforts at first, because the player's visualization must serve a double purpose.
One, it allows the shooting players to find some space in the direction of the ball and then it also helps them put the foot at the very spot where the ball is.
As players become confident, enhance the level of difficulty by placing both shooter and the ball in motion, and create a more game like state. Once they show improvement in shooting the ball, introduce varying speeds for the ball.
Here you go! By introducing many opportunities for scoring goals in soccer practice games, you can make the players benefit a lot out of their sessions. For even more tips and tricks on youth soccer, subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community.
Andre Botelho is a recognized authority in youth soccer coaching and has already helped thousands of youth coaches to dramatically improve their coaching skills. Learn how to explode your players' skills and make training fun by downloading your free ebook at: Fun Soccer Drills.