What are the “good” soccer plays when coaching youth soccer?

There are many ways to define a “good” soccer play, but many youth soccer players, parents, and coaches get it wrong.

Many youth soccer coaches don’t even bother to analyze their soccer plays. They have a general “feel” for what’s working and what’s not, and they rely on that “feel” to determine which plays to continue with or which ones they feel should stop running.

First step: the statistics guy

The first season we had a movie and an actual stats person, I was amazed at how my perceptions varied from the movie results and our stat tables. Many times our internal biases or emotions get in the way of accurate analysis of what is really happening in the field.

We now use a very simple manual method “Easy Scout” which is detailed in my book. Our stats person knows in advance what move we’re going to make. We are a no-meeting team and our stats person, like all of our players and coaches, has a wristband and knows the codes we use to call plays. This lets our stats guy know what play we’re running before we run it. Accurate stats from it give us a non-biased and non-intrusive “real-time” data compilation of our plays, ready for all to see.

EasyScout

Using the “Easy Explorer” we determine during each defensive possession our strategy and adjustments for the next series. But how do you do that for your team? Many coaches only use an average yards per carry stat to determine whether or not a play is successful.

real world example

Let’s take an example, a play of 43 Reverse. Let’s say your team had the following yards the 5 times you ran it: -5, 0, -7, 1, 80. The average yards per carry would have been 14, a good average, right?

On the other hand, let’s take a play like 16 power, let’s say you make gains of: 6,1,7,5,2,6,10,0,5,6 for an average of 4.8 yards. If you compare the average yards per carry, it seems like the 43 Reverse is a much better play, doesn’t it? You have 4.8 yards compared to 14, seems like a no-brainer, but keep your horses.

How to determine “success”

The way we determine whether or not a play is successful is if we achieved our intended goal in the play. However, not all soccer plays are the same, each of these plays has its own unique goal. We don’t run the 43 Reverse very often, we only run it when we see the back end linebacker flow into the QB’s initial flow. Our yardage target on the 43 Reverse is 14 yards. Using the average yards per carry stat, one would have called this a hit play in the previous game, right? Let’s look a little closer.

Power 16 is one of our base plays that we will try to establish, with the intended goal of causing the defense to switch too much or overreact to said play, which opens up several other options outside of the backfield action itself. We are looking for 5 yards each time we make this play for it to be considered a successful play. In the example above, we didn’t achieve that goal if we look at the average yards per carry stat of 4.8 yards.

Useful statistics

But how accurate is the average yards per carry stat? In the 43 Reverse example we had one big play and four that were pretty bad. In the 16 Power example we were fairly consistent but averaged less than our intended goal. But did we really do it? In the 43 Reverse example, we hit our intended goal of 14 yards, just 1 out of 5 attempts, for an average of 20%. On the other hand, our 16 Power got 5 yards on 7 of 10 attempts for an average of 70%.

What this new stat tells us is which soccer plays really work and which ones don’t. Don’t let a big play or a missed tackle skew your stats and give you a false idea of ​​how the play is going. It’s consistency and execution you’re looking for, and average yards per carry just isn’t what you need. I look at the percentage of times we hit our intended goal rather than the average yards per carry. What we are looking for is to hit or exceed the yardage goal for the play in 70% of our plays. When we do that, our team is performing well and our game is effective and efficient.

Statistics can be a very powerful tool when used correctly. One of the best youth coaches I know (Eric C) is a professional statistician and has been using variations of this model for years. His teams have done extremely well, I might add. But you don’t have to be a stats whiz like Eric to use stats effectively. This is very simple to do and just takes a bit of effort, a clipboard, wristbands, planning, and a stat guy who isn’t just paying attention to his own kid.