60-Minute Youth Soccer Practice Plan

Who this is for: a U9 to U12 rec or travel team that trains once a week for an hour, usually on a shared field, usually with a coach who has a job.

The maths that should decide everything you do. One hour a week, maybe thirty weeks, is thirty hours of coaching a year. If a quarter of that is spent standing in lines waiting for a turn, you've thrown away seven and a half hours. Nothing else you get right will make up for that. So: every player has a ball wherever possible, no queues, no line of eight waiting to shoot.

One topic. Not two. An hour is not enough for two topics and trying is how you end up teaching neither.

The session

0:00–0:10 — Warm-up: traffic-lights-dribble

Ball each, immediately, before everyone's arrived. Ten minutes and every child has had more touches than in an entire game on Saturday.

0:10–0:22 — Technical: turning-through-gates

Twelve minutes, ball each, no waiting. Turning is the most useful thing a ten-year-old can learn, because it's what she has to do the moment she receives with someone behind her, which is every single time.

Say: "Look before you get it. Then turn away from the noise."

0:22–0:38 — Main topic: dribbling-gates-1v1

Sixteen minutes of 1v1. Everyone plays, everyone attacks, everyone defends. This is the block that makes footballers.

Say, when someone gets beaten: "Good. Again." Say, when someone tries something and loses it: nothing at all.

0:38–0:56 — Game: 3v3-mini-goal-festival

Three-minute games, small teams, tiny goals, no keepers. Rotate constantly so nobody spends the evening losing. This is the part they came for, it's a third of the session, and it should be.

0:56–1:00 — Finish

Three names, three specific things you saw. "Maya, you turned away from pressure twice in that last game. That's exactly what we practised." Then let them go home.

If it's going badly

Change the game, not the volume of your voice. A group of ten-year-olds who have stopped concentrating are telling you the activity is wrong, not that they're bad children.

Once a month, or after a bad Saturday

Bin the plan and play mini-world-cup for the last twenty minutes. Let them pick their countries. Don't organise it too much. If they're not smiling by the third drill, the drill's wrong or you are.