In discussions with our Teachers In Sport Soccer Trainers, we hear about how fundamental skills of sports have often been overlooked during a child’s formative playing years. This can invariably lead to technical flaws in otherwise very accomplished junior players. There is no better example of this when looking at the head position in dribbling and ball control.
Here is a drill that children find fun, can run on a repeated basis as a warmup and that will, when done weekly, absolutely, 100% guarantee an improvement in you little charger’s ball control in fairly quick time.
Heads Up Compass Drill
1) Form groups of 5 (more or less can be used but it won’t quite be a ‘compass’)
2) 1 player is assigned the task of ‘dribbler’.
3) The remaining 4 players are asked to stand at the North, East, South or West points, creating a diamond with each player approximately 5-10 metres apart.
4) The player with the ball must dribble with his / her head up all the time (by keeping their eyes on one of the compass points).
5) The players forming the compass must now take turns raising their hands in the air. When the ‘dribbler’ sees a hand in the air he / she must dribble towards them until their hand goes down.
6) The dribbler must then turn whilst dribbling and find the next person they need to dribble towards.
7) If two players put their hand up at the same time, the one who is being run towards keeps their hand in the air, the other puts their hand down. Alternatively a teachers could be calling out ‘North!’, ‘East!’ randomly with the child at that compass point putting their hand up in response.
Great for all standards, all ages and good to use with points scoring, timing or in a totally non-competitive context.
Enjoy!
[...] of this is ‘Heads Up Dribbling’ – you can see a blog we wrote on this topic here. So often in this case, a child may have been able to run circles around oppositions as an 8 year [...]