Category: Training Drills

This training activity focuses on maintaining possession of the ball against multiple layers of defense so it’s replicating a slow play. There’s not much to this besides the starting formation but I’ll provide some constraints you can add to increase the challenge point of the activity. Here’s how it starts: Unlike my dodgy drawing, make...

I’ve posted about staying connected as a team throughout your ball movement and this activity trains this specifically. By using run from behind options, especially from out of the back line, you’re not forcing your forwards to lead up and out of position so even if they do get it, they are usually at a...

This is an excellent training activity that places puts into practice the art of drawing up defenders’s instead of kicking to them in a contest/pack situation. We all encounter teams that flood back or hold a spare defender in our forward line so to combat that you must draw other defender’s out so they become...

This training activity focuses on maintaining possession of the footy while drawing defenders out of their preferred positions. It can be used with youth up to senior level and I’ll provide variations and layers below. Here’s the basic set up: The ball starts at the bottom end with a 4v1 advantage to the red team....

We see it all the time in local football, especially in juniors, where the ball is your team’s back line, your mids have worked hard to assist the defender’s and then there’s a massive gap of no teammates between defensive and forward 50m area’s. In some cases this goes back to tactical design from the...

We’ve got end to handball with defender/s in the middle and we’ve also got end to end handball where some of the offensive players in the previous rep take up defensive duties immediately after the ball has made it to their end and they both train transition but in only 1 of the 2 ways...

This is a team defensive set up that Melbourne put to excellent use in their 2021 premiership year and still use a fair bit of in 2023. It’s a pretty simple formation that aims to force the opposition to kick it to where you want them to of which you can then organise your numbers...

If you’ve kept up with reading my content then by now you should have some familiarity with constraints and how they can provide affordances for your players which is one of the strongest learning methods there is, especially in team sports. To quickly recap, constraints are alternative rules a coach can include in traditional games...

This is a forward/defensive 50 game that’s pretty easy to set up and get going quickly once players know their roles. I’ve made the example with 12 players but you could easily increase that up to 16 players with 6v6 in the main area while staying with the 4 neutral players. This is how it...

There are real staple training drills that most coaches use year in and year out and if this continues then they’ll never die. This will lay out a framework to ensure that you are designing and using training activities that have far more representation to the game itself which will in turn change the focus...