Top tips: grassroots coaching practices

With grassroots teams returning to training ahead of the new season, Les Howie, FA head of grassroots coaching, looks at five key issues for coaches to consider when delivering practices.

1. How do I ensure the players leave my coaching session with a smile on their face?

Creating a positive learning environment with specific goals for the players to achieve is crucial. If your team are clear on what ‘success’ looks like for the session, they will have an aim to work towards and will feel motivated to achieve it. Think of it as fun with a purpose.

Reviewing the players’ performance at the end of the session is a key part of this process. The review is a chance to focus on ‘what went well’ and a great opportunity to highlight good play and behaviour.

As well as setting team challenges, you could also set individual challenges within the session. This allows you to recognise differentiation and stretch players who may benefit from an extra challenge, but remember it should always be realistic.

If your group feel like they have learned, developed and achieved the session aim (or aspects of it), there is a good chance they will leave the session with a smile on their face.

Finally, providing positive feedback and, of course, having a smile on your face also goes a long way.

2. When and how do I work on heading with my team?

In reality you’ll see very few headers in a game of Mini-Soccer - the next time you play, count them.

Mostly when I watch Mini-Soccer games, I’ll see around two headers; therefore heading the ball isn’t a priority at the beginning of the player journey and can be worked on as they get older.

As there is no need to introduce the skill of heading too early, it’s important to avoid unnecessary heading and focus the majority of your time on supporting players to develop other key skills.

When you do introduce heading though, build up the exercises slowly to encourage the players and increase their confidence.

Introducing heading:

• Using a balloon, beach ball or a sponge ball is a fun way for young players to be introduced to heading.
• You can progress by getting the child to head the ball in their hands.
• As confidence grows the player can throw the ball up gently then head it.
• As the child becomes more confident, ask them to throw the ball a bit higher.
• When the child is older and more confident, you can progress to serving the ball from a short distance.
• As strength and confidence develops you can increase the distance between the server and player.

Finally, I would encourage all coaches to follow the best practice advice set out below when coaching heading in your practice sessions:

• Only practise heading with age appropriate footballs (for U7 & U8 that’s a size 3, for U9-U14 that’s a size 4 football).
• Consider eliminating practises which do not directly contribute to improving heading technique for the game. For example: juggling the ball with the head.
• Question whether repeated heading in a training session is necessary for the aims of the session and how frequent sessions involving repeated heading are required.
• Stop heading practices immediately if a player begins to feel dizzy, has altered vision, is unwell, has a headache or experiences other unusual symptoms.
• If a player has been concussed, they should follow the guidance in the graduated return to play section of The FA's concussion guidelines with regard to when heading can be resumed.