Coaches Club – Playing Into The End Zones
In this series of posts, we share with you some drills and session plans for you to apply to your training sessions.
Today’s activity is a classic game that I’m sure many of you may have come across in the past. It’s essentially a directional possession and combination game that is similar to Rugby and American football. The aim of the game is to play into an end zone for a player to receive to score a point.
The video below by The Performance Locker shows some great examples of where teams have used combination play effectively to build their way up the pitch. In the activity below the only difference is that instead of a goal that the players are working towards, they have instead an end zone to play in.
The activity below could be used as a warm-up or part of the main section. You could as a variation play this game with the players using their hands instead. This may help with younger age groups and adding a condition of players not being able to move whilst they are in possession of the ball.
This activity is one that’s flexible in terms of numbers, and as per progression 3, you could if numbers are uneven or teams unbalanced, skip straight to this.
With older age groups, especially those who work with players who like to dribble and take lots of touches, I’d recommend implementing a 2 or 3 touch condition from the start.
Important to note how I’ve designed the activity below is that if a point is scored, the scoring team then kick the ball from their own end zone back to the conceding team. This is similar to watch they do in Rugby. What you might find is that this may encourage players from the scoring team who are kicking the ball back, go and press on the conceding team’s first touch. Although this set-up is a bit unconventional, the outcome of a player potentially being put under pressure on their first touch could become match realistic. If you don’t like this you can always just restart with the conceding team taking a goal kick from within their defending end zone.
Drop us a message in the comments section below if you’ve used this session before and let us know how it went.
Also if you have any great sessions that you’d like us to share or have found any online, then please let us know in the comments section.
Be sure to follow Half Time Cuppa on Twitter too @HalfTime_Cuppa and you can follow me on Twitter too @DannyCook1996
You can also check out our other Drill Share Sessions by clicking here
Please don’t take the drill sources as gospel, we’ve tried to credit drills, especially those we’ve seen elsewhere, alternatively if that’s not possible, we’ve credited the coach that has put on that version of that drill. Please get in touch, using the comments section below if there’s another source.