Developing the High School Striker and Midfielder

Matt Soto presents drills and exercises to strengthen your strikers' and midfielders' goal scoring abilities.

Using on-field demonstrators, Coach Soto presents over 25 practice drills that will strengthen both individual skills and develop your team's ability to control the ball and create more goal scoring opportunities.

Using his high school team, Soto shows how you can use basic skills like hits, pushes and aerial passes to get the ball to the attacking circle. He discusses important receiving skills and how to get the ball into an advantageous position for your attackers to score.

Practice is initiated with simple passing and trapping techniques. These are used as warm-up exercises to prepare players for what will be a challenging, technique-driven practice.

Each exercise builds on the last to further challenge your players' abilities. These carefully thought-out drills continue to develop until the players find themselves efficiently performing highly skilled ball handling drills in a game-like setting.

Throughout these progressions players practice how to fake, double pull, reverse stick techniques, purposely getting the ball into the air, and a number of other advanced skills to help them become better ball handlers. The difficulty of the drills continues as players are expected to move the ball purposefully to advance it down the field in a specifically choreographed manner.

Tipping drills will expose your players to advanced passing techniques that require the passer to "time" the runner as they move down the field together.

A key advantage to this DVD is the impact it will have not only on your individual players, but on your whole offensive unit.

The more advanced drills have the consistent element of getting a striker in position on the far side away from the goalie. By always working towards the far post, players develop their "field vision" and will find better positions on the field. The application of these drills in game situations provides the offense with confidence in knowing where their teammates positioning themselves. Therefore, these drills will provide increased scoring opportunities for the entire team.

Each evolution of drills is presented with clear and well defined expectations that will challenge even experienced players to elevate their standards to meet a higher level of expectations. There are a number of drills described in the video that can be used by players in individual practice while others must be practiced in a group setting.

This video has a wealth of drills you can use to develop your high school players into effective strikers and midfielders. The drill variations will keep your players engaged in working on and improving their skills.

91 minutes. 2013.