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I think establishing a passing rhythm is an important concept that only became really clear to me once I observed how a dominant “fast, scoring machine” player on our team disrupted our play (U11G). Having a player on your team that can often just run by people and score against weaker, slower teams will build bad habits, as the other players will just pass to dominant player and just watch her go. Players will stop moving not only because they think she is likely to score, but more importantly, because they don’t know where to move as there are no patterns in her play that give the rest of the team cues as to where the ball might go. Against a stronger team, or when the dominant player is having an off day, our play suffers.
When we mandate that the kids establish a passing rhythm, players know where to move as they can see patterns emerging. In addition to allowing us to get into our shape, multiple passes also allow our players to predict where the ball will be played, and therefore, where they should be making their runs. Everyone is involved, we are less reliant on any individual, there is much more movement off the ball, and the game is much more pleasing to watch.
Although we often use 7+ pass rule to get a point in possession games during practice, we don’t mandate that during games as we have quite a few players that are more likely to play the ball back to safely circulate the ball even when there is clearly space to progress forward. In general, we try to reinforce establishing a passing rhythm in all areas except the attacking third where we are encouraging the kids to aggressively attack.
That sounds like a reasonable adaption. We tend to play 2-3-2 for our U10/U11G teams with the 2 center backs split wide and the center mid (CM) at the top of the box. On our team, we don’t have a specialized goalie so we just rotate field players in the goal. Our goalies are comfortable with the ball at their feet, so we actually prefer to NOT drop the CM back for cover, and instead just use the goalie in that slot. This tends to work better for us as we found that the opposing team would often have a player that would follow the CM back in the box, making it more difficult for us to work the ball out of danger. By keeping the CM high, the goalie has more room to operate. Of course, this depends on how much the other team presses, and in general, most of our competition will give us some space once we have demonstrated that our goalie can hit a long enough ball.
