Here is a snippet from Liam Hyslop’s article on Todd Beane’s visit to New Zealand.
To read the full article click here!
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“Beane said the course, entitled “rethinking and redesigning youth football development”, would challenge a lot of what coaches currently believe about player development best practise.
“We just want to wrestle with some of the assumptions and maybe twist them about a bit and come up with something productive and useful and very practical.
“We want to leave people with a very dynamic, very innovative, very practical programme that they can take back to their training grounds.”
A lot of coaching and training sessions leave players bored and disengaged, Beane said. He pointed to a recent study in the United States which found 75 per cent of players were dropping out of football by the age of 13, with the blame placed squarely at the feet of coaches.
“The No 1 reason by far was because it stops being fun. That’s on us as coaches. How do we take a game and not make it fun?
His best piece of advice for young coaches was to keep things simple. Throw out the 1000 drills they have downloaded from the internet and stick to a portfolio of 30 that are focused on real football scenarios.
“I would stay away from drills as a young volunteer coach and I would focus on small-sided games, small training games, mini matches and variables of that sort. Why? 1. You have a higher intensity for training naturally through competition. 2. You have the players engaged because it’s fun. 3. They’re going to learn through that process, and if you can add a few pointers through that I think you’ve done better than probably 75 per cent of the coaches worldwide who are using inane drills to emphasise something that they may or may not know, and the kids are bored silly in doing so.”
Such examples were merely a taster of what would be to come from Beane in January.”
