Soccer Drills - Why Coaches Should Never Use Knockout Drills in Practice

Coaches that use knockout drill during their training sessions run a great risk of destroying the confidence of the weaker players on their team, and creating disharmony within the team. Knockout drills are drills where players get progressively eliminated until you are left with a winner. Your winner will most likely be the best player on your team. My experience with coaching children is that the great majority of coaches already know who the best player on the team is. So my question is do you want to find out what you already know, or do you want to improve the ability of the players in your team? If your answer is the latter, then you have no reason to use knockout drills.

My aim with any practice is to maximise the number of touches on the soccer players that all players achieve. All soccer drills should be engineered so as to achieve this goal. Without argument, there are many valuable skills that a player must learn which do not involve touching the ball, however of the major skills (trapping, passing and tackling) all require the player to be able to control the ball in an effective manner. So for this reason, I have always tried to create sessions which get players touching the ball more. If you have a weaker player on your team and you want them to improve, get them kicking the ball more. Encouraging them to kick a ball outside of practice sessions will also speed their improvement.

Soccer Drills

Another effective way to achieve the goal of increasing touches on the ball for all players is to divide your team into small groups at practice. This may mean that you have to enlist the aid of your team manager or parents to help with supervision. Having players stand in line to wait for their turn to kick the ball is not an effective means of practice. Yet it is one seen on many training paddocks. It is definitely more challenging to supervise a number of small groups, particularly if you do not have any help, but a coach can rotate amongst the groups to aid supervision. Dividing your team into groups of 3 or 4 players, rather than 1 group of 12 to 14 players will potentially increase the number of ball touches for each players by at least three times. How much more quickly will your players improve by this method?

Soccer Drills - Why Coaches Should Never Use Knockout Drills in Practice

If you want to introduce an element of competition into your practices and you have been using knockout drills for a long time this may be a little difficult to come to terms with. All players respond better to competition (except the ones on the sideline!!). Another means of getting around this problem is to use a rotation of players. Maybe you have three team of four playing four vs. four. If you want an extra element of competition have one team sit out, replacing the team that does not win, and so on. Or if you have three teams of four set up two fields and rotate the teams around the fields.

So for those coaches that have been using knockout drills in their practice I hope you have been very successful with these. I would also hope that you may experiment with using some of these techniques, and that you continue to see improvement in your players. For new coaches I would strongly encourage you not to use knockout drills, but rather to use small groups, soccer drills that maximise the number of ball touches for all children (not just the stronger ones), and rotation of small teams. Good luck with your coaching.

Soccer Drills - Why Coaches Should Never Use Knockout Drills in Practice