Coaches Club – Social Distance – Social Distance – Scanning, Passing & Receiving
In this series of posts, we share with you some drills and session plans for you to apply to your training sessions.
Carrying on from the theme in our previous drill shares, we have another activity that you can use in your upcoming small-sided training sessions. The focus of this one is on scanning, checking shoulders and the player’s surroundings. The secondary elements are the player’s body position, more specifically the open body position, as well as passing and receiving.
I have included below a video by Snabb Sports Performance which highlights just one example of Xavi scanning his surroundings whilst playing for Barcelona. This a really good example to show your players.
The activity below is one that I have used recently during a small-sided training session with reasonable success. As mentioned the scanning is the main focus from the activity, so I’d make sure that the players do check their shoulders.
I noticed during the exercise that the outside players could be inactive, so I decided to add a further condition for them to keep them busy. Once an outside player had received a pass they then needed to dribble around a cone that would be placed just outside the box before returning back to the box.
An adaptation that I used was to change the gate into a diamond area and encourage players to occupy spaces outside the diamond to receive, although, they must still have passed through the diamond before receiving the next pass. The final progression I adapted in my most recent session was to restrict players to only receive outside the diamond without having to go through the diamond before receiving.
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.