Many soccer coaches I speak to love the idea of Coerver Coaching, but often struggle to adapt Coerver in their training sessions. As a select / travel soccer coach, we train twice a week with games on a weekend. Our training schedule is Tuesday and Thursday. I make sure that one of those sessions is Coerver based and the other a more tactical / team session.
I’ve found it beneficial for my team if we do the Coerver session on the Tuesday, and here’s why – the last thing I want them to take from the Thursday night’s session is any instruction for the game ahead. I use the Tuesday night’s session as a confidence builder with lots of 1v1s, 2v2s, 3v3s etc.
Firstly, the drills on the Coerver DVDs can be adapted for any age group so if you’re coaching some of the younger age groups, let’s say U8 – U11, your area should be made smaller (depending on the numbers).
Secondly, and this is an important thing to remember, just because the kids are getting older does not mean you need to let up on their fundamental technical skills. In soccer academies in Europe the youth coaches spend the majority of their time working on ball mastery – one of the components of Coerver Coaching.
Thirdly, there are a wide range of Coerver drills which you can use. In the space of a season you may not use the same session twice – but you could of course incorporate many of the Coerver drills into a technical warm-up.
I think that if you take some of these ideas and use them in your own sessions, you’ll find your players have fun at training, they come ready to learn, and leave with confidence from successfully being able to do Coerver moves. Which soccer coach wouldn’t want that?