Run the best youth soccer sessions ever!!!

Summary

In this video, Coach Rory Soccer provides an updated walkthrough for running effective youth soccer sessions, particularly for U12 and under teams. He outlines his session planning process, emphasizing a structure that includes battle boxes, rondos, positional games, and finish with striking and finishing drills. Rory advises against long scrimmage sessions during practice since they do not allow for repetition of key movements. Instead, he focuses on building team shape and executing planned patterns. Additionally, he discusses integrating set pieces, throw-ins, and defending into sessions and explains why he prefers players to work on technical skills independently.

Highlights

• The session plan covers battle boxes to rondos, breakdown games, pattern choreography, to positional games. 🎯
• Training should focus on formation and team shape with engaging activities instead of lengthy scrimmages. ⏳
• Players should practice technical skills independently to maximize team training time. 📚
• The video compares build-out and attacking session structures with similar components. 🔄
• Rory advocates for the exclusion of simple isolated drills and scrimmages in favor of more structured training. 🎓
• Important elements include teaching formalities like set pieces and defending every few weeks. 🛡️

Key Takeaways

• Rory's updated approach focuses on battle boxes, rondos, positional games, and finishing. ⚽
• Training should focus on team structure, not just scrimmaging. 🏗️
• Technical skills are to be practiced individually, outside of team sessions. 🏠
• Include corner, set piece, and defending drills periodically in sessions. 🚧
• Limit scrimmaging to ensure essential patterns and situations are practiced, not just played. 🚫
• Session structures should adapt based on available resources and players' familiarity with exercises. ⚖️

Overview

Coach Rory Soccer provides an insightful update on how to conduct effective youth soccer sessions for U12 and under. He highlights the importance of structured training with a heavy emphasis on formation and teamwork over basic skills training or lengthy scrimmages.

The video guides you through a detailed session plan starting with battle boxes—small-sided games that help build match-relevant skills. Progressing through rondos to breakdown games, pattern choreography, and ending with positional games and finishing practices, each section is designed to maximize team cohesion and understanding of game dynamics.

Rory takes a strong stance against isolating technical skills in team practice, instead promoting individualized training for these areas. He also prioritizes the inclusion of game situations like set pieces and defense to build a well-rounded skill set in his youth players.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction The chapter introduces the topic of running better sessions for youth soccer teams, specifically focusing on U12 and under. The speaker mentions a previous video on the same topic for 7v7 sessions and acknowledges some updates based on questions received and changes made over the past year. The aim is to provide an updated and improved version for effectively conducting these sessions.
• 00:30 - 02:00: Session Assumptions This chapter discusses planning a training session with a focus on the themes and assumptions made for a particular team demographic, specifically a U12 or under team. It highlights the necessity of basic building block activities and notes that for older teams, more comprehensive warm-up activities are needed to prevent injuries. The complexity of sessions increases with the age of the team.
• 02:00 - 03:30: Session Structure Overview The chapter discusses the typical structure and frequency of training sessions in a club setting. It assumes a scenario where players train twice a week for a total of three hours, with each session lasting an hour and a half. This setup is contrasted with other possibilities, such as more intensive training at an academy or minimal training of just one hour per week. The chapter also notes that this structure is common among clubs and assumes a group of approximately 12 players, though it acknowledges the flexibility to modify the setup.
• 03:30 - 05:30: Field Setup and Battle Boxes The chapter 'Field Setup and Battle Boxes' discusses planning and execution during games, particularly regarding the number of players involved in activities and the sequence of events. The speaker emphasizes that while they organize activities for 12 players, teams can adapt based on their own numbers (10, 14, etc.). An important note is made that familiarity with the activities affects how smoothly they can transition between different tasks. For teams that are experienced with these tasks, transitions can be seamless, but new teams may struggle with the sequence and need additional time and practice. Specific activities like battle boxes might require more familiarity to execute properly.
• 05:30 - 07:30: Rondos Transition The chapter titled 'Rondos Transition' discusses the challenges and training methods in implementing rondos and breakdown games for a specific age group in soccer coaching. The text notes that while implementing these exercises can be challenging, especially without prior experience, they are crucial for skill development in 'build out' or 'attacking third' strategies. The speaker mentions that 95% of their sessions for this age group focus on these categories. The discussion includes an initial field setup but lacks additional detail in the provided excerpt.
• 07:30 - 09:00: Positional Rondo and Team Organization The chapter titled 'Positional Rondo and Team Organization' discusses the setup and execution of a training session on a soccer field, specifically using a positional rondo exercise. The session involves using a full or half field setup, with different progressions to facilitate learning. The beginning of the session includes 'battle boxes,' a tactic explained in another video, replacing the former method of starting with small-sided games like 2v2 or 3v3.
• 09:00 - 10:30: Build Out Breakdown Games The chapter titled 'Build Out Breakdown Games' focuses on techniques and drills designed to improve how players handle build-out situations in soccer. The session starts with the use of 'battle boxes', a particular setup used to simulate game-like conditions where players practice supporting the ball carrier. The coach prefers starting these sessions with 2V1 (two-versus-one) standard drills to instill the concept of supporting the ball carrier. The session's physical setup involves arranging the battle boxes to the right side of the field with a directional flow from one side (red) to the other (blue). Additionally, there's a mention of a '1V E1 pass and receive' session within battle boxes, aimed at enhancing individual skills in passing and receiving under pressure. The emphasis is on creating conditions that mimic real game scenarios to better prepare players for actual matches.
• 10:30 - 12:00: Pattern Choreography In this chapter, the author discusses a football (soccer) training drill called "Pattern Choreography." Initially, players at the blue cones pass the ball to those at the red cones, who then attempt to dribble between two opposing cones. The drill then evolves from 'Battle boxes' into 'Rondos' by simply removing the cones, demonstrating a seamless transition in training exercises. The setup includes two 4v1 rondos with additional players serving balls from the center, providing a clear structure for running these exercises in a training session.
• 12:00 - 14:30: Positional Game and Shooting Practice The chapter explains a soccer training drill called 'Rondo', which is adaptable based on the number of players and their skill levels. Various configurations such as 4v1 or 4v2 are discussed, and the use of different pressure styles like 'passive pressure' is mentioned. The emphasis is on maintaining speed and intensity.
• 14:30 - 18:00: Attacking Third Session Structure The chapter focuses on structuring an "Attacking Third" training session. It begins with intense training where a player is in the middle for no more than 30 seconds to ensure high activity and pressure on the ball. The session transitions into a positional Rondo or team organizational activity, achieved by expanding two smaller rondos into one larger grid using four cones. This method facilitates smooth progression from individual focus to team coordination.
• 18:00 - 21:00: Additional Considerations The chapter 'Additional Considerations' discusses strategies for positioning players and playing tactical games in soccer, particularly in a 9v9 setup. Emphasis is placed on organizing players into specific formations such as a 2-3-1 alignment with a goalkeeper, two center backs, a center midfielder, two wings/full backs, and a striker. The chapter suggests incorporating exercises like positional Rondo or positional possession games, beginning with movement of the ball to establish patterns, followed by introducing defenders.
• 21:00 - 25:00: Exclusions and Conclusion Depending on the level of your group, start with fewer defenders and add more as needed, adjusting over time.

Run the best youth soccer sessions ever!!! Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hey guys you want to run better sessions for your youth soccer teams well today we're going to do our session planning for u12 and under so let's go so I did a video about a year ago called run better sessions where I outlined how I typically go through a session in 7v7 well I've changed some things and I got a lot of questions on specific parts of that so this is really going to be an updated version of running better sessions but I wanted to make it more of
• 00:30 - 01:00 a session planning video and talk about kind of the themes that I typically run and how overall I plan it out so a couple of assumptions that I'm making number one I'm assuming that you have a u12 or under team with older teams there are some other things to consider specifically warming up activities to prevent injury and then several of the things that I'm doing here are really basic building block stuff and in an older team this would get a lot more complex in terms of the individual
• 01:00 - 01:30 aspects of the training I'm also assuming that you train twice a week for an hour and a half at a time so three hours per week you're not in an academy where you are training four days a week and you're also not necessarily in a situation where you're only training an hour a week potentially this is something that I think most clubs are doing twice a week one and a half hours per week also assuming that you have about 12 players now you can modify it
• 01:30 - 02:00 based on your numbers whether you have 10 whether you have 14 but each individual portion is going to be planned to have 12 players last thing guys a little disclaimer if this is the first time your teams are going through some of these activities you're not going to be able to go in sequence the way that I'm describing my teams are very comfortable with all of these things we've done them many times and so I can go from one to the other very seamlessly so for example if your team has not done the battle boxes or the
• 02:00 - 02:30 breakdown games or the rondos you might have to do just one or two of those for a couple of sessions until they really get into it but trying to go the way that I'm describing uh with having no experience in any of these can be challenging 95 of the sessions that I run at this age group fall under two categories build out or attacking third this is the initial field setup and this
• 02:30 - 03:00 is going to make a lot more sense when we get into the individual components of the session but it is a full field so if you don't have a full field what you'll do is you'll set up the half field on the right go through the progressions there then when it's time take those cones away and do the setup on the left so the way that I start all my sessions now are with what we call battle boxes and I have a separate video explaining these in detail but I used to do just 2v2 3v3 small-sided games to start the
• 03:00 - 03:30 first 10 15 minutes and I just wasn't happy with that so to start our build out session we start with battle boxes there are several types of battle boxes you can do but especially for the build out sessions I do like to do the 2V1 standard to start getting the idea of how we support the ball carrier getting back to the field setup here the battle boxes are set up on the right and you're going to want the direction of action going from red to blue here's a 1V E1 pass and receive battle box where the
• 03:30 - 04:00 players with the ball on the blue cone pass a ball over to the players who receive it with the red cone and then try to dribble across the two cones opposite from them the next step in the build out session is to go from Battle boxes to Rondo's now this is easily done all we're going to do is remove the red and blue cones the setup you can see I have here is for two 4v1 rondos with the two extra players serving balls in from the middle area how you set up your
• 04:00 - 04:30 Rondo is really going to be dependent on the players that you have and the skill level that they're at so you could do two 4v2 rondos you could just do a 4v1 Rondo the way I have it shown with the extra players playing it in and maybe have them do what we call passive pressure which means you know you don't try to tackle them you just just try to put a little bit of pressure on them if you had 10 players you could do two 4v1 rondos with coaches serving the balls in you really just have to adapt it to the group that you have no matter how you do it you want it to be fast furious and
• 04:30 - 05:00 intense so that player in the middle I don't keep them there maybe more than 30 seconds at a time then we switch that person because you want a lot of activity a lot of pressure on the ball from here I like to take it to a positional Rondo or a team organizational activity and that's easily done by just expanding out the two rondos and essentially putting them together so what you'll do is take the four cones here and just expand it to make a wider grid so this is what this
• 05:00 - 05:30 essentially could look like where you get them into a shape here we have a two three one with a goalkeeper two center backs a center midfielder two wings or full backs and a striker if you were playing 9v9 you could certainly set them up in a 99 shape whatever that you're playing with we then play a positional Rondo or just a positional possession game and we start by just moving the ball around kind of getting some pattern and then we start sending Defenders and
• 05:30 - 06:00 you can see here I've sent two Defenders but it depends on the level of your group maybe you send two maybe you send three really just depends I would say start with a smaller number and then you can always just add more as you go moving on from the rondos we go into our build out breakdown games and this is now where if you just had a half a field you would take down whatever you were using which was the right sided setup which was now Rondo's and you would move to the build out breakdown setup which is now on the left I have an entire
• 06:00 - 06:30 video on build out breakdown games so I'm not going to get too into the Weeds on those but we're going to do them for about 15 or 20 minutes and when you start introducing the build out breakdown games you might have to do it for longer and I tend to do one or two of them so I might do 2V1 I might do 3v2 and then I'll move on because there's a lot of the build out breakdown games if you do all of them in sequential order it usually takes a little bit longer than 15 to 20 minutes and we're really focused on a build out session here not
• 06:30 - 07:00 individual aspects so we then move on to pattern choreography now pattern choreography is a bit controversial in certain coaching circles I personally find it invaluable especially at the Young ages now pattern choreography I have a whole video on this both at the 7v7 and the 99 level but what it is in a nutshell is basically unopposed pattern play Within A framework so here we're doing build out so I have specific pattern number one pattern number two pattern number three pattern number four
• 07:00 - 07:30 you can keep going with these but you get your team in a mindset of what patterns might develop in the course of a game from pattern choreography this easily transitions into our positional game so a build out positional game typically a 7v3 74 75 again depending on the skill of your team it starts from the goalkeeper who plays it out to the center back and they build to two Puck goals or what I also like to do is say you know you don't have to score in the
• 07:30 - 08:00 Pug goals you can just dribble across the line where the Pug goes stand as you would in the game this builds your team's structure on what you do in build out how you move the ball up the field from the defensive third into the attacking third and this is how you develop your team's shape cohesiveness and how you move the ball the last thing I like to do at the end of training is some shooting and finish and if I have five or ten minutes at the end that's typically what I like to do first of all the kids love scoring goals but you do want to have some practice in
• 08:00 - 08:30 Striking the ball and crossing and finishing so you can score goals and I have one finishing video on the channel I have some other videos planned that talk about some of the Striking games that I do they're pretty simple and straightforward but they get the kids in front of goal scoring squirrels so just a quick recap of the build out session we start with battle boxes transition to Rondo's move over to our build out breakdown games some quick pattern choreography into the positional game and then we finish off with some
• 08:30 - 09:00 striking and finishing so the beauty of the attacking third session construction as the field setup is exactly the same as our build out where you have these right with the battle boxes and the rondos the left with pattern choreography and positional games and then you finish with a striking or crossing component to goal you will
• 09:00 - 09:30 notice that attacking third session structure is actually very similar to the build out where we start with battle boxes and transition to Rondo's now the one thing I will say is if I wanted to work on something specifically in the attack for example 2V1 I would really focus on a 2V1 battle box now the Rondo's we keep pretty much the same as the build out session structure with 4v1 4v2 transitioning into a 7v3 team organizational structure as the kids get older you certainly can add a lot more
• 09:30 - 10:00 complicated factors into the Rondo but for me repetition and Mastery are the most important things here in terms of the attacking third breakdown games I do have a separate video on those but it's it's very similar to the build out breakdown games where you're breaking down individual components this year this time of the attack and working on the individual relationships between those attacking players and it's very similar we have 2b1 we have 3v2 we have 4v3 and you can expand this out to make
• 10:00 - 10:30 it applicable for 9v9 as well we then move on to pattern choreography which again is now just our attacking pattern so this is unopposed pattern play in our attack so what are the patterns we're going to use to open up space and create opportunities to score goals again I have a whole video on attacking patterns guys so feel free to check that out really I'm just trying to give you an idea of how I construct a session the attacking pattern choreography leads us directly into our attacking positional
• 10:30 - 11:00 game here's an example of 6v3 plus the goalkeeper you could certainly go 6v4 plus the goalkeeper 65 plus the goalkeeper again depending on where your team is at it's positional so the ball starts with one of the two center backs here in the back you've got your Center mid and your wings out wide Striker up top now again if you had 9v9 you would set this up as a 9v9 pattern and essentially go to goal if the Defenders
• 11:00 - 11:30 win they can come back on the Pug goal and typically I play for a lot of amount of time or to a certain number and really it's a positional game so you're trying to focus on each individual position and where they're supposed to be in our attack how they're supposed to support the attack and then what runs are they making into goal on crosses to score our attacking session then ends the same way the build out session did with some striking and finishing so just to put these two side by side and do a little
• 11:30 - 12:00 recap this is what I'm doing 90 of my sessions where we start with battle boxes we go into Rondo's we then go to a breakdown game whether that be build out or attack then move that into pattern choreography again build out or attack that gets transitioned into a positional game again build out our attack and we finish with striking and finishing so while this is what I do for the majority of my sessions there are variations within each section so you might do different battle boxes you might do some variation on rondos maybe
• 12:00 - 12:30 you'll be working on a particular pattern choreography or a specific type of breakdown game but in general this is how I construct my sessions So within the structure of your sessions and working with your team you're going to have to mix in three other things the first is corners and set pieces and I try to do this once every two to three weeks for 20 minutes or so I think at
• 12:30 - 13:00 the younger ages that Corners are really less of a thing you should be focusing on throw-ins are another thing that you're going to sprinkle in every couple weeks for 20 30 minutes and I have a video on throw-ins I have some more planned on throw-ins that talk about pattern choreography in throw in so I also do that and then lastly I like to run a pure defending session every six to eight weeks so this is a dedicated session purely on defending so we do some battle boxes but then we get into
• 13:00 - 13:30 some 2v2 defending 3v3 defending defending as a unit and I think that that's really important especially at the Youth Level and I have a video planned on that as well so a couple things that you guys might be wondering why I don't have included in my typical session construction the first is dedicated technical work and I've spoken on this many times I I don't line up cones and have kids you know do skills through the cones in isolated
• 13:30 - 14:00 technical drills I I there's only so much time I have during the week and I feel that it's most important to focus on formational shape stuff the battle boxes the Rondo's the stuff that that I just talked about if someone wants to do technical work that's something they do individually at home and and I do send home homework we actually use an app called technique there's some resources that you can give your player but to dedicate team training to that I think is a waste of time the other thing that you might have noticed is I don't really
• 14:00 - 14:30 scrimmage at all I find that many coaches spend the last half hour sometimes of their sessions just scrimmaging and again I think that's a complete waste of time um you know what you're trying to do is build your team's shape you're trying to work on certain aspects of what you're trying to do with the ball things you're trying to do without the ball and you know to me just playing 30 minutes of a scrimmage where you're not going to be able to repeat those patterns you're not going to be able to repeat the
• 14:30 - 15:00 situations over and over again that you're trying to enforce that's why I don't recommend doing that so guys if you have any questions please go ahead and comment in the comment section or reach out to me directly through the email happy to help you guys out I hope you really enjoyed this video