Development of aggression in youth football players, the splash tackle drill
Splash Tackling Drills
We are big fans of tackles and tackling drills when coaching youth soccer. These exercises are great ways to make it easier for your children to get into full contact. We believe it is imperative to perfect your blocking and tackling technique at the junior level. Too many youth soccer coaches simply don’t put in enough time or demand the perfection of the details that make kids great blockers and tackles.
Ruining the potential of good children
Despite what many youth coaches think, most kids are not born to be great blockers and tacklers, they are made. Unfortunately, there are plenty of kids who have the potential to be very good soccer players who are ruined by their youth soccer coach. These coaches rush kids into contact before they have perfected the perfect blocking and tackling technique with their NON-contact players. Too many kids are rushing to block and takedowns hurtling into space long before they’re ready for it. That’s a coach problem, not a kid problem. The coach is too busy trying to quickly see who the studs are, before giving his average and weaker kids a chance to build the skills and confidence to survive and compete in a full-speed tackling or blocking drill in the space.
splash drills
In our book Winning Youth Soccer: A Step-By-Step Plan, we detail exactly how you can do it. One of the key steps is to use “splash” exercises. The Splatter Drill allows a player to learn how to accelerate through contact without experiencing the consequence of a reciprocal hit. This drill also allows the player to take another player to the ground without hard impact to the ground. This exercise can also help you drill the correct landmarks for foot placement, head placement, and hip rotation.
For the player who plays the “scapegoat” role, the player who offers zero blocking or tackling resistance and gets slammed into a soft landing mat on every rep, the job doesn’t seem like much fun. But what I hear from coaches across the country is that their kids love being the ones holding up the shield and slamming it into the landing pad on every play. I thought our kids were weird, they all want to play cake, but I guess everyone’s kids are just as weird as mine.
Problems with splash drills
One of the things that always bugged me about this exercise was the fact that you need to have 4 long mannequins to use as landing pads. Well, at about $100 each, that’s $400, out of reach for many youth programs. Lugging around these dummies is also a huge hassle. Then once in the field, you only have one landing pad for 25 kids. As most of you know, I’m not a fan of having kids stand in long lines, which means every time we do splash drills. It’s just one part of a circuit, it’s never an exercise we want to do alone, even if we need to.
The solution, Tony Holland to the rescue
My good friend Tony Holland from Maryland solved this problem. He went to Walmart and bought several camping air mattresses for $65 each. Each mattress is large enough to be a landing pad on its own. These things also roll up into a small box, so he doesn’t need a truck to load them. Tony bought a small electric air compressor for $20 that not only inflates each mattress in less than 2 minutes, but also sucks out the air when you’re done. Tony has several of these mats so his children can do Splatter Drills at the same time and in much smaller groups. He didn’t have to fix a single leak and said they are all ready for next season.