I found the two tape series on "Youth Soccer Practices The FUNdamental Way" by Karl Dewazien to be very informative and presented in a fashion which makes the concepts easy to remember. It is refreshing to hear the goal is to teach youth 'to love the game' instead of trying to convince them that they can become the next Pele.
The buzzwords contribute to improved learning and recall in subsequent practices and games. Particularly noteworthy are the "Push-Peak-Place" and the 'Ball in flight, look left and right" to teach getting one's head up, vision and tactical awareness.
The guidance to keep the players active was well presented and convincing. The tapes persuasively demonstrated that for young children, learning stops when movement stops, and players have less FUN. The video's clearly demonstrate that forming lines leads to standing around, confusion and disciplinary problems of the coach's own creation. I also found focusing on what players actually learned to be good advice.
A performance gain of 20% by players verbalizing their understanding over performance based only on a coach's explanation and visual demonstration is very significant. As a coach I find it amazing that the addition of keeping the players moving and doing the techniques improve technical recall to as high as 90%.
The rationale for determining practice duration is very logical. Teach the players to work hard for the length of their games and sandwich warm-up, coo-down and stretching around it. Sandwich a fun game and a fun scrimmage around skill work should improve one's love of the game. Which should lead to improved motivation to do skill work. Which in turn will lead to even further enjoyment of the game and the cycle would continue. More FUN leads to more motivation to work on skills, which lead to more FUN.
The demonstration that kids don't mind repetition as long as they are challenged was very enlightening to me. It was very informative to realize that adding variation and restriction to similar practice activities provides the challenge and interest thereby eliminating the need for all the new drills, which takes away practice time as the coach introduces a new activity.
The video convincingly demonstrates that coaches should be patient with young players and take as long as is needed for players to master skills. This tape will help coaches keep an open mind about the potential abilities of your players without prematurely giving up on them.
Many other useful tips were all well presented such as using the checkerboard field arrangement to increase the coach's span of view. Using wide fields to teach attack and narrow fields to teach defense. Use of uneven numbers or fewer touch games to work on passing and always to positive even when correcting mistakes.
This review could continue for about another forty pages if I were to attempt to give all the 'new' information presented in these tapes. Therefore, it should suffice that the reader be told, 'these are the best youth training tapes on the market -bar none!!!"
