Football bowling
- The Boot Room
- 17 August 2021
Jo Williams, FA coach development officer, shares two ideas for arrival activities that will help young players improve their finishing skills. In part one, we focus on ‘football bowling’.
Key objectives
Players will develop their understanding of:
- how to strike the ball to hit different targets accurately
- using different finishing techniques.
Football bowling
Session plan
Want to try this with your team? Download the session plan to your device and give it a go.
Organisation
This activity works best in twos or threes and provides an opportunity for player ownership.
All that’s needed are a few cones, footballs and a small area to play in.
Once you have those, simply ask each group to place the cones where they want in their area and put a football on top of each one. This creates a ‘bowling pin’.
How to play
The aim of this activity is for players to practise using their finishing techniques accurately.
Players take it in turns to see how many footballs they can knock off the cones – in other words, how many ‘pins’ they can knock over. Whoever knocks the most footballs off wins.
A time or shot limit can be used to structure the session.
Progression
It’s important to think carefully about progressions. Learning doesn’t happen straight away, as players will be figuring everything out at first. Changing the game constantly can mean players miss the opportunity to learn. So, give them a chance to have a go at solving the problems they’re facing in this activity.
But, after a while, if you feel your players have cracked it or that they’re struggling, you could progress the game to alter the difficulty of the challenge.
Whenever you decide to progress the activity, think about using the STEP framework. And however you adapt the session, make sure you keep it fun, highly engaging and appropriate for your players.
But the beauty of this activity actually lies in the amount of choice and ownership players have to create their own version – or to progress from the original design when they’re ready. For example, they can decide:
- where the cones should be positioned
- how far away players should be from the cones
- what the scoring system is
- if it’s a collaborative game (working together to knock the balls off) or a competition (one against the other)
- the shooting techniques that are allowed, for instance: keeping the ball on the floor, allowing it in the air, using volleys, shooting with laces or with the inside of the foot.
QUESTIONS
After you have looked at the graphic above, ask yourself the following questions:
- How would you adapt or tweak the practice to make it appropriate to your own players?
- What additional challenges could you set to make the practice easier or harder for individuals or your group?
If you use this arrival activity with your team, let us know how you get on by posting in The FA Community forums.
