Fun Soccer Drills For Kids

I know a lot of people think that working with grown-ups is a lot harder than working with children, because grown-ups already have a formed personality, they have their own experience with the game of soccer and each of them needs to be treated as an individual at all times. For me, soccer drills for young players are a lot harder to apply, because you don’t have a lot of options to take in your relationship with them.

With grown-ups, you can base your coaching on a close relationship with them, on severity, professionalism, honor and several other concepts that might or might not work well with a group (still, all these options might be viable). With kids on the other hand, you’re basically stuck with providing them with a fun environment to play in. You can’t be “hard” on a bunch of kids. Yell at them and they’ll leave crying and not come back to training again. It’s as simple as that, they’re sneaky :)

So if you’re stuck with fun soccer drills, let’s make sure you make them really fun, so that your team of youngsters can both enjoy them and learn from them at the same time. Before presenting a few fun soccer drills you could try working with, let me just say that you can’t really train “passing”, or “shooting” or a single concept with kids. It’s not fun to shoot for 30 straight minutes, or practice throw-ins or whatnot.

You need to find soccer drills for your young players that combine these raw concepts, so that they practice them, even if unknowingly.

-Soccer Drills for Young Players - One Versus One Dribbles

The kids will love this one, it’s truly a fun soccer drill! Even as small children, when it comes to sports, we’re extremely competitive and with a one versus one dribbling drill, you get to put them head to head, competing.

What they compete for is up to you. For example, you could count a score like this: every time the attacking player manages to dribble the defender, he gets a point, but so does the defender if he manages to stop the dribble. Or, you could simply form two goals out of cones, one for each player and the score would be based on whoever crosses the opposing goal line with the ball at his feet.