For many coaches who have or are considering taking the Football Association Level 1 coaching certificate, or the equivalent coaching qualification in their own country, the information they gain on the course proves a great help with their coaching. The qualification is designed to help coaches make football, safe, organised and fun for the players. The coaching drills and sessions they are introduced to provide a curriculum of coaching drills that coaches can refer to and use with their players on a practical level.

For some coaches, this is enough and they are happy to stay at this level. It is all they want from their coaching. But for many more, it opens their eyes to what they could achieve as coaches and provides an inspiration to progress as coaches. Like so many things in life, this introductory level to coaching leaves them wanting more. They want to stretch themselves as coaches and to provide sessions for their players that will not only be fun, safe and organised, but will also test and improve their players.

Grassrootscoaching.com have designed a series of coaching sessions and drills that help bridge the gap between the Level 1 and Level 2 coaching qualification, by introducing sessions that encourage coaches to start to provide their players with simple, common sense technical information, which is proven to improve players performance and enjoyment. For coaches that are considering progressing on the coaching ladder, the next level, Level 2 requires coaches to provide their players with a greater understanding of the technical requirements of football.

The basic premise of the initial group of sessions revolves around providing practices that are designed to focus on improving players specific techniques, such as ball control, turning with the ball, passing and moving, finding and creating space etc. The practices focus on players working and co-operating in groups of threes, which will assist them in matches, as just about every move in football revolves around this triangle of movement. One player passing the ball, one player receiving the ball and the third supporting the ball.

The practices are structured so that they are easy to organise, are fun and challenging for the players to participate in, are flexible and adaptable to cater for any number of players, can be progressed to further challenge the players and have a specific technical focus which will improve the players technical skills. Because they also involve three players, working and co-operating together, they provide a powerful understanding and foundation that the players will carry on into games of how to play in triangles and how the triangle shape moves, as the ball moves.

From a coaching perspective, the practices provide logical and progressive technical information that you can impart to your players to improve their performance. But they also throw a great deal of initiative on the players to work things out for themselves, to make their own decisions, to understand why and how they make these decisions. They are designed to develop the players own self learning capabilities, which arguably is the best way for players to learn and improve. The practices all have progressions which involve a degree of opposition and defending and competitions which the players will love, but will also, through the very nature of competition, further test the players technical performance and decisions. These competitions will really test the players ability to perform under pressure and their decision making process.

At first, the players might struggle with the sessions, as there is a degree of chaos, with groups of three players all trying to combine and co-operate together in a confined area and balls flying everywhere. But, this is all part of the self learning process for the players. With the coaches guidance and their own self learning abilities, they will have to work out for themselves how they can be composed on the ball, find space, make the right decisions, technically best execute those decisions and overcome the chaos.

Below are the links to these video sessions and PDF print outs that the coach can refer to at the training sessions.

Progressions to the Football Association Level 1

(Please turn on your speakers for the Video Tutorials)