Develop aggression in youth soccer players, splash boarding exercise

Splash boarding exercises

We are huge fans of splatter tackling drills and splatter tackles when coaching youth soccer. These exercises are great ways to facilitate full contact with your children. We believe that it is imperative to perfect the blocking and tackling technique at the youth level. Too many youth soccer coaches just don’t put in enough time or demand the perfection of details that make kids great blockers and tacklers.

Ruining the potential of good children

Despite what many youth coaches think, most kids aren’t born to be great blockers and tacklers, they are made. Unfortunately, there are a lot of kids who have the potential to be very good soccer players who go broke with their youth soccer coach. These coaches rush children into contact before they have perfected perfect blocking and tackling technique with their NON-contact players. Too many kids rush to block and dash into space long before they’re ready for it. That is a training problem, not a children’s problem. The coach is too busy trying to quickly see who the studs are, before giving his average and weaker kids a chance to develop the skills and confidence to survive and compete in a full-throttle tackling or blocking drill on the space.

Splash drills

In our book “Winning Youth Soccer: A Step-by-Step Plan,” we detail exactly how you can do it. One of the key steps is the use of “splash” exercises. The splash drill allows the player to learn to accelerate through contact without experiencing the consequences of a reciprocal hit. This drill also allows the player to bring another player to the ground without impacting the hard ground. This exercise can also help you drill the correct landmarks for foot placement, head placement, and hip twist.

For the player who plays the role of the “scapegoat,” the player who offers no resistance to blocking or tackle and is hit against a soft landing mat on each rep, the job doesn’t seem like much fun. But what I hear from coaches across the country is that their kids love being the ones holding the shield and getting slammed against the landing pad with every play. I thought our kids were weird, they all want to play cake, but I guess all kids are just as weird as mine.

Splash hole problems

One of the things that always bothered me about this exercise was the fact that you need to have 4 long mannequins to use as landing pads. Well, at around $ 100 each, that’s $ 400, out of the reach of many youth programs. Carrying these mannequins is also a huge hassle. Then once on the field, you only have a landing pad for 25 children. As most of you know, I’m not a fan of having kids standing in long lines, so that means every time we do splash drills. It is just one part of a circuit, it is never an exercise that we want to do on its own, even if we need to.

The solution, Tony Holland to the rescue

My good friend Tony Holland from Maryland solved this one. He went to Walmart and bought several camping air mattresses for $ 65 each. Each mattress is large enough to be a landing pad on its own. These things roll into a small box too, so you don’t need a van to load them. Tony bought a small electric air compressor for $ 20 that not only inflates each mattress in under 2 minutes, but also sucks in the air when you’re done. Tony has several of these mattresses so his kids can do splashing exercises at the same time and in much smaller groups. He didn’t have a single leak to repair and said all of his are ready for next season.