A Soccer Player Is Developed

The homemade position idiot

A soccer player is a whole person and a child who plays soccer is also a whole person, admittedly a little one. This truth is certainly not surprising.

People pursue a certain process of development. For some, this process is very rapid, and then there are the "late bloomers" and those who even leapfrog over the stages of development.

Everyone knows about these groups, and yet they are always forgotten again in soccer.

What happens when development phases are leapfrogged in soccer?

For example, whoever does not learn the feeling and techniques with the ball in the young years, leapfrogs over these steps of learning. This can then be made up for later, but the observer will always recognize it since something is missing in the basic motor skills.

We now come to position play, since I as a trainer can make the same mistake here as can be noted with deficient technical training, only not as quickly.

Whoever as a soccer player becomes specialized in certain abilities at an early stage will miss out on important development phases, since each position in soccer needs different abilities. The best example is always the goalie, who from childhood on has always stood at the goal, who can have gone through no good soccer training at all, since important development phases were not sufficiently encouraged. A foray out of the goal is then the same as an adventure trip; from where is the experience to come for playing soccer outside of the penalty box?

Unhappily this fixed position playing functions in the early years, since it is more successful. For some years this is all right, but at the latest in the older junior years these players will founder, and no great success will be achieved. Even great talents are lost because they belong to players who are completely trained in soccer. However, they have learned over the years to adjust to changing game situations and have far more playing readiness at their disposal.

Don't take away this development phase from your soccer kids, and even with position play, rotate them so that the children can accumulate their important experience. "Rotation" is not just the magic word for the pros. In fact it means something different for children and adolescents, but is much more important.