Dribbling, Shielding, Field Awareness
Comment:
This is a really fun game that emphasizes dribbling, shielding, and parent participation
Teaches:
Dribbling and Shielding (protecting your ball from an attacker), keeping the head up.
Set-up:
This game is simple a Dribbling, Shielding, Field Awareness and fast to set up. Every player starts with their ball inside a field. This is one of the few games that I think doing inside a defined field works better. Make your field a big square or a rectangle with cones. It doesn’t have to be a real field, cones work fine, but if you do not use a field, most of the kids will start running for the four winds and never turn back!
The Game:
Tell the players that a Monster is coming to try to steal their pet ball and that they must keep it away from the Monster by dribbling it around the field (tell them they must stay inside the field). The Coach or a parent is the monster. Use all of your parents together for a good Monster Invasion! Ideas: drag your leg like Frankenstein, make monster noises, make a face, and say things like “Don’t let me get your ball!!” But don’t actually scare them. The idea is just to have them try to get away. Don’t catch the players, just have fun.
Be fun monsters, not scary monsters!
The hardest part of this game is getting them to stay inside the field! Don’t worry too much if they go out now and then, but keep encouraging them to stay inside the field. I have seen kids run off 50 yards giggling playing this game and the parent monster really has to chase them to get them back to practice!
Time:
Play for as long as it looks like they are having fun.
Comments:
This game is a very good ball control game. It teaches control dribbling and “shielding”. Shielding is a soccer term for protecting your ball against a defender trying to steal it. The game also teaches awareness of the sidelines as well as field awareness in general, because most of the time they are dribbling away from a monster, in order to see who they are being chased by they have to lift their heads, check over their shoulder, etc. They also have to avoid running into all the other kids doing the same thing, which also forces the head up. This game has good pressure and traffic to teach excellent control dribbling.