Session plan for U10s - shooting focus

[Lozzy V]

County FA is running a female coach mentoring scheme and I've now got a coaching mentor. She's coming to watch my U10 boys session on Thursday and I want her to be impressed so want to use some innovative ideas and have a decent structure and themes running through the session rather than going down my normal route of planning on the bus on the way to training!

Need to focus on shooting/accurate finishing this week as scoring goals has been our biggest problem recently. approx 14 kids of mixed abilities, not much space as we share with another age group, but it is outside on astroturf.

Anyone have a good session they use for shooting? I'm from the school of a-ball-each-for-as-much-of-the session-as-possible-and-no-queueing coaching, so don't really want to go down the lots of people standing round while a few get to take shots route.

Any help would be very much appreciated!

[sambacoach]

Very hard to do a shooting drill without lines, and usually does not tend to be the most efficient use of time. Have to be a little creative.

If I leave mine alone for a bit at the beginning of practice with a goal set up they invariably end up shooting at the goal. I let them go a little and call it shooting practice. Probably not the best because they're not properly warmed up at this point, but it does seem to help.

There are a lot of variations you can use in your SSG to encourage/work on shooting:
1 - two points for a shot 1 for tap-in or other finish
2 - play on a very short field where they are always in shooting range (see the closing game in Paul's book--also good for shooting)
3 - set up a line 10-20 meters from the goal depending on age, any goals scored from behind that line count double
4 - play with a full size goal and no keepers (shots come flying in like mad)

Have to mix them up. The last one sounds great for lots of shots, but if you use it too much without some other shooting you end up in the match with a bunch of shots aimed straight at the keeper in the center of the goal.

Sometimes you can work shooting drills into the down times in training. We sometimes play winner-stays-on in the SSG to encourage them to give maximum effort, then the team that's off can have a pk competition or something like that while they wait to get back on. Or we do some kind of shooting competition at the end of practice as part of cooldown.

[SRJFC]

Under 10's the focus should still be on fun, and in my experience they like a good go at Alamo to end a session. If you have plenty of kids put four goals in to keep the waiting time down, or give them a ball each and then dribble it or do tricks between stations

[Lozzy V]

Fun is always the focus of my sessions or at least I hope they are having fun anyway....

Will probably go with alamo cos they always like that one and it's easy to very, followed by ssgs with varied points for goals as samba suggested - try to encourage them to put things worked on in alamo into practice.

Cheers for the advice guys, made life much easier - now I've only got to come up with a fun warm up, something with lots of balls and maybe lots of little gates to shoot through...will keep me busy this evening coming up with something that hopefully won't descend into chaos!

[Moose]

SSG with short pitch as suggested can work really well. Explain to kids that idea of pitch size is to encourage lots of shooting. Introduce condition that goalie if using them not allowed to shoot or else can just become 2 player ping pong

[Lozzy V]

Snow & ice - astroturf unplayable. Shooting session will have to wait until next week. Unless we score lots of goals on Sunday, in which case we'll focus on something else ...hmm based on the season so far I could well be doing this session next week!