In the first in a series of expert coaching articles helping to improve young players skills in youth football, Kids DXB owner Tom Green explains how to have your child scoring goals from either foot with some dedicated training.
Football is a great sport for children to be involved in from a young age and having experience coaching children from the ages of 3-11and upwards in the UAE for the last 10 years I can say first hand how rewarding it is to see children developing their skills and applying this in matches. The goal of this article is to give you as parents some tips, hacks and secrets that will help your child to accelerate their progress above and beyond the activities that they will be doing in their typical coaching sessions.
TWO FOOTEDNESS
In the modern game where modern coaches encourage their teams to play out from the back of the pitch it is key that all players on the pitch are comfortable on the ball, even the goalkeeper.
Being able to use two feet opens up both sides of the body and doubles the number of options that your child has available to them on the pitch.
From an attacking perspective it also puts the opposing player on edge as the option of putting the player onto their weaker foot is not available, making the attacking player much harder to defend and a more significant goal scoring threat.
For all young players the issue of the weaker foot largely stems from the fact that children want to be successful on the pitch.
As they learn that they can execute a variety of skills better with their dominant side they rely less and less on the weaker foot.
This can lead to a downward spiral of lack of use, resulting in no improvement, resulting in poor performance, creating a perpetual cycle.
The key here is to give your child the opportunity to practice with their weaker foot away from matches.
As a parent a great way to do this is to have parent and child practice sessions in the garden or at the park that are exclusively weaker foot practice where you are working on passing, shooting and dribbling.
As your child gets more comfortable with their weaker foot the goal should be to extend this practice to a game. A great way to do this is to put an incentive on scoring with the weaker foot in game style situations.
- If you are interested in getting your children involved in a football academy then why not take a free trial of Kids DXB’s Kidster program where you can get access to a 30 day free trial of unlimited sports coaching, with high level sports coaching in football as well as seven other sports! We have football coaching sessions running throughout the day for children with children between the ages of 3-11 divided into three age groups.