“Kids need to learn the fundamentals of how to dribble, pass, shoot, and control the ball before they can play the real game of soccer. Coaches should pull these skills out of the game and practice them in isolated unrepresentative game conditions because we can’t teach these things in the real game environment because the game is far too complex. How can you expect a player to learn to dribble when you have to worry about passing, shooting, controlling the ball, or looking for teammates to pass the ball to?”
Fact: Adults often revert back to the way they were taught as a kid. This pretty much means Drill. Drill. Drill. However, the data and theory tell a very different story about skill acquisition. The new information Challenges the assumption you must learn isolated skills because you will not learn them in the real game.
Study:
The control group in a U10 soccer study showed that kids who performed isolated technical skills did not show any improvement over the group that played in small-sided games. The study concluded that the small-sided game group developed skills at the same rate as the isolated drill group. However, the small-sided game group experienced an environment that offered meaningful decisions on and off the ball in a game-representative setting. The benefits of this environment are far superior to any isolated skill drill environment. The small-sided games are real soccer, they teach how to exploit time and space and close down time and space. That’s the fundamentals of all invasion sports. The game is not about dribbling around cones.
Study Data: Return of investment: isolated skills 770 passes vs 354 passes in a small-sided game. But improvement is worth 2-1 in a small-sided game. The quality of practice matters. One repetition in a small-sided game is more valuable than in a decomposed task (isolated skill drill).
The key is to use variability with the small-sided games.
Isolated training is repetition after repetition which misses the idea of true development. It should be viewed as repetition without repetition. Meaning playing in game-representative environments that require adapting solutions, intentions, and techniques is better for overall development and skill acquisition.