Stop Thinking About Soccer!

That may sound like a bad thing but it's really true!
It definately is a good thing when youth soccer players can actually stop thinking about what they are doing and what they want to do with the ball and just do it... "without thinking."

The “perfect touch” and all the technical skills that you see great players possess don’t just come naturally and they didn’t come from just playing “pick up games”. The majority of these top level players had these skills engrained into their souls by repeating them 100’s if not 1000’s of times on the practice field, day after day, year after year. They performed them until they could do them without “thinking.”  Their moves became “instinctive.”

An instinctive move or behavior is one that is performed by reactions below the conscious level. In other words, when we perform these skills and reactions over and over it eventually comes without having to “think” about them. It's when you can perform the most complex soccer skills this way that you become "Good!"

How do we teach soccer skills make something instinctive?
Just think about taking a fork and balancing a fork full of peas on it. Well, it might be better to say, think about the fact that you don't have to think about it. It can take months for a child to learn it and even longer for it to become a “thoughtless act”. The exact same thiing applies to skills in soccer. 

Learning soccer skills is actually no different than learning to feed yourself.  It simply takes perfect practice over and over and over again.

Why should these skills be repeated often? The more we repeat an action the better defined and more “natural” (instinctive) that skill becomes. To put it another way, we can "engineer" a set of muscle memories to become hardwired into our brain. Now even if we don’t use the skill for a while, such as riding a bike, our brain has the ability for spontaneous recovery of the skill.

 At home and away from “practice”.

Look at the amount of time your child spends in "official" practice with their team. For rec soccer players it might be about 2 hours a week and that is only during a short 12 week season.  A large number of players leave rec and move on to the academy and select soccer levels.  There, they might get 8-9 hours a week at practice, but even that hardly qualifies them to develop the muscle memory of the "star" soccer players.

This is where soccer and parenting and family comes into the picture.  I can't tell you how many hours I have spent throwing a soccer ball at my kids for them to practice trapping or heading.  It's great!  But this is the part of soccer that I personally like the best.  If your kids like soccer, then you have a great "excuse" to be involved in their lives DAILY... Even while they are in their teen years!  It doesn't get better than this!