Love all your vids! You have truly been a huge help for myself and my team. One suggestion, it would be nice to get another 10-20 seconds of showing your teams practicing the drill or an example of when they did it in a game. Having those visuals are motivating to see how it was implemented and used.
Great info. This is how a lot of basketball drills are run to develop plays. It really makes things faster and more predictable options. Great video topic!!!!
I seem to recall that Doug Lemov in his book The Coach's Guide to Teaching advocates for pattern recognition training as a good way to train youth soccer players. Loved your work with 3Four3 and Gary Kleiban.
What you call Pattern Choreography is an essential type of exercise for young players. It is possible to do Pattern Choreographies for technical movements in a particular situation. For example, a player receives the ball with his back to goal with a defender on him who prevents him from running to go towards the goal. The exercise can consist of protecting the ball from the defender few seconds then kicking it back to the right, to the center or to the left.
👌 Love pattern play, like you said make it fun, build the blocks unopposed first, then add defenders who can score if they win it till you have the whole game playing and add double goals if you score from a pattern,❤
Great stuff coach. I implemented some choreography to my spring team. They were the 3rd team and therefore the weakest of the 3 spring teams. However now that they are playing amongst the all the fall rec players and other spring players , they are standing out on the out the pitch using some the patterns. Having them doing it with enough field space is critical to me because it gives them a better sense of where to go on the field in game like situations
Independiente del Valle is implementing the strategy you’re going over as early as 7 years old so you’re on the right track. They are Ecuador’s best club for youth development
Thank you for this video,@@CoachRorySoccer. I have been using your 7v7 videos extensively to help our new U10 team in CA this year. I understand your frustrations with US Youth Soccer, but I feel that individuals like you are single handedly improving our youth development at these critical early stages. Thank you for all that you do, and for sharing your knowledge with us!
@@CoachRorySoccer We just need someone to invest millions on a proper academy looking to develop players for sale overseas. If that person succeeds other will one day follow
Love your choreography posts and I build it into my practices when I can. I struggle sometimes with this 9U-10U age where they're supposed to be gaining experience in all of the 7v7 positions... if they're supposed to be rotating around, that's seven potential "roles" in just a build-out choreography (now multiply for corners, throw ins, etc.). That's a lot for a young (distracted!) brain to track. Sometimes it's a struggle to get them to memorize even one role. Maybe rec teams might be a bit different than competitive teams, but I suspect you see mental overload at some point in this?
Thank you, I’ve been working to implement this over the last year. I have 17 players on 9v9, and I struggle with them maintaining engagement when we do it. I’m hopeful if we stay the course, they will begin to see the benefit. Limited field space also makes it difficult. But I strongly support the coaching strategy and plan to keep working on it with my team. I’m wondering if you have smaller passing patterns you do, that practice some pieces of the same choreography, but where you would use a smaller number of players and a smaller space?
Yes when I have smaller spaces there are some passing patterns you can do but for me it’s tough for players to conceptually turn those into game realistic situations. I’d probably do more 9v3-4 positional rondos. 17 players is a lot to roster on a 9v9 team. When I have larger numbers I would take maybe 9 of them and do pattern choreography and the other play 4v4 or 2v2 and switch
Yes, too many, it will be better when we move to 11v11 next year. I’ve started adding the positional rondos in place of choreography right now. Or I try to run the choreography as a circuit, with a few players staying in their positions, and other players cycling from the left to the right. That worked pretty well, but not as well for switching choreo. My players’ main struggle is staying wide and coming as low as the pressure to support the ball. Hoping they continue to improve on that, doing battle boxes, and 4v1 rondos. Anyway, love your stuff.
When the players are working on learning these patterns, how much do you focus on making sure they are weighting their passes correctly, moving back toward the ball instead of waiting, taking their first touch in a good direction, etc? Those are the technical skills that would distrupt the pattern if they arent executed well, so do you recommend calling that out during these practices?
I layer these coaching in as players become not comfortable with the patterns. You are correct that these elements need to be present in the patterns for them to be effective. But depending on the age they can only process so much.
what age group do you suggest they start doing this? I get super frustrated seeing 8 year old son's team with boys running all over the field and bunching up so much and it seems like coaches are NOT doing this in training yet..
I like the idea of pattern choreography but stopped doing this because I really struggled with keeping U8-U9 players engaged while training these. Any tips for doing this with younger age groups?
