Customer Reviews

Dutch Soccer Drills

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I don't claim to be an expert soccer coach. However, I do know that there are two schools of thought about how to coach soccer. In one school, coaches emphasize simple drills to teach and then perfect particular ball handling skills (for example, trapping or heading a high ball, or sprinting down the field and then sending a long crossing pass). These skills are then allowed to be put to use in small scrimmages, in order to allow each player to have a maximum number of ball touches to develop confidence in handling the ball under pressure, and also to allow for creativity. In the other school, coaches emphasize rigid pattern drills, which attempt to simulate particular play situations in soccer, and in this way, the players also learn to perfect their ball control skills.

Well, this book definitely belongs to the second school of thought. I don't happen to believe in this school, at least not yet.

I have to say that the title of the book made me think that there was some connection to Dutch Soccer. Visions of Johan Cruyff, Marco Van Basten, Ruud Gullit, Wiel Coerver, and all of those wonderful Dutchmen, who coach and play some of the most inventive and creative soccer in the world (oh, okay, maybe not in the whole world, just in Europe) danced through my head.

Instead, the author turns out to be really an Englishman, and the book's only connection to Dutch Soccer seems to be that these drills are borrowed from the Dutch Soccer Academy. The drills are really all about dribbling, passing, and shooting, in well-defined patterns. The pages are just filled with symbols - triangles, dots, and squiggly lines. Some of the drills are relatively straightforward and easy to do. Some of the patterns are quite complex. After trying to figure out several pages worth of these patterns, my eyes just started to glaze over. I don't know how the coaches or players memorize all of these patterns in the first place. And you would have to memorize them, otherwise the really complex drills would fall into total chaos.

I can only guess that if anybody were to use these drills, they would have to be 1) fairly advanced soccer players, probably at high school or college level or above, and 2) heavily into a structured style of soccer.

Maybe it will work for you. I didn't find the book to be very useful. The blurb in the title about "Individual Skills" is also misleading since there is virtually no information, not even one pearl of wisdom, about how to teach individual ball skills to a player.

I found most of the drills to be quite complicated and difficult to implement on the field. I did find some useful drills and others may become more useful in the future as I coach upper age groups, up to U-12 right now. But the time lost explaining the drills and setting them up is better spent on less complex drills with more ball touches per player. I also prefer small sided games to allow the game to teach the players.

This book, and the other Dutch Soccer Drills book is full of drills, that if you are interested in running them from a coaching perspective, involve a lot of "pattern" play and running. As a competitive level youth coach I personally only use only a handful of drills from these books, and mostly the small-sided games, which do not constitute a large part of this book. Drills where players pass from one position to the next, move, then do some function are good conditioning exercises for the beginning of practices, but they are robotic and repetition oriented and really have limited use training players to make good decisions during games. Stick to the Weil Coerver series for skill development and then keep practices to 2 vs 2, 3 v. 3, 3 v 4 small games for the best development of youths.

I have had this book for a year and I have found it to be extremely useful. To get most out of this book, players should have good talent level and they should have got used to long-term practicing. This book is good handbook when creating an own playing system or way to play. It is excellent handbook, when planning own practices - it gives new ideas and it may be used as the base of all coaching work.

For a coach desiring to teach skills to individuals, small groups, or team drills, this book has it all. As a newcomer to the game three years ago, but a former coach of other High School level sports, I found this book jam-packed with useful drills. It can be beneficial to everyone from a U-6 coach to the High School level. The wide variety of drills addressing so many different skills, allows me to keep my practices fun and fresh for my team. I can't comment from the viewpoint of an experienced soccer coach, but from my perspective of coaching youth teams for 3 years, it was easily the best spent money of the year for my team. Any coach wanting to teach his/her team new skills in a fun and organized way should really take a look at this one. It even prompted me to invent two or three new drills of my own that the team (U-10) loves to practice.

This book gives you a lot of ideas for you and your team to do. It really helped my soccer skills.