Poll: At what age should our young players be taught how to pass the ball?

September 15, 2011 4 Comments


A couple of reasons for the poll here. Firstly, I wanted to see how they worked and looked within the blog. Secondly, the topic is one which I’ve seen discussed on Twitter recently and it seems that certain coaches are very keen to teach passing at an early age whilst others steer well clear until later in a child’s development, so I thought I’d open it up via a poll/discussion.

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4 Responses to Poll: At what age should our young players be taught how to pass the ball?

  1. Dennis Murray says:
    September 15, 2011 at 12:57 pm

    It’s important to separate the technical skill of passing (striking the ball with your foot to send it to a specific place at a specific speed) versus the tactical skill of passing. My survey response, 5-7 reflects the technical skill versus the tactical skill.

    The decision whether or not to pass is above the decision making ability of a five to seven year old in most cases, at least until they spend a lot of time playing the sport! It’s another way the youth game can be forced to reflect the adult version – focusing at a high level on creating passing players versus allowing kids to develop at their own speed and focus first on dribbling.

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  2. Pingback: When Should Passing be Taught? « Be An Athlete

  3. Telling It Like I See It: Coaching Soccer in America says:
    September 21, 2011 at 3:59 am

    I always find it funny when we ask our 5-7 year olds to share they might understand the concept but they really don’t want to do it or don’t even have a desire to do it. So trying to get them to pass is one more hurdle we don’t need at this age not to say that I don’t try. I have seen to may instances of kids almost in tears because they where asked to share there ball. So if you must work on passing I suggest planning your exercises in a way that they get to use there ball the whole time. Personally individual master of the ball with fun games is the key with these ages in my opinion.

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  4. Fernando Pires says:
    November 16, 2011 at 4:00 am

    At 5-7 the youngsters are way too egocentric to understand why they should pass the ball to their teammates because they think literally they are the best in world…they can score from goal to goal, they can dribble all the mates, and so on…

    So my opinion is that is counterproductive trying to learn a so tender boy to pass the ball in that age. The focus in that age would be ball mastery and keep the player involving in football with fun and interesting games (as said before) and keep the majority of players contacting the ball as often as they can not wasting minutes of play. 🙂

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