Footballing "Style" within your club

[johnneycool]

Its an interesting discussion and although my background is hurling it is none-the-less as important to consider.
I'd always maintain that for the formative years the basic skills of the game are taught rather than develop any particular style of play. The style of play would come with the aspects of decision making, i.e when you're in possession and you look up the field, put the ball low in front of a speedy forward, but if he's big and good in the air and maybe less sprightly over the ground put the ball on top of him. A style of play then evolves around the type of players you have at your disposal and the variation on those styles comes with how well an individual player can execute the basics of the game.

Also, whilst perusing through the Ulster GAA youtube videos, I came across one from Damian Quigley on Technical & Psychological Development in Hurling' and he made an interesting point on player development.
He used the example of a young fella they had in goals and he was taught to put the hand up and catch every ball coming into him and not to bat it out. During a minor championship game the lad let two drop through into the net and they ended up beaten. He made the point that the young lad was doing as he was told and should be reassured that he was doing the right thing and that maybe he as a coach needed to work more with him on it and that batting the ball out would be the wrong option to revert to as that's not what a senior hurler should be doing. So during the development phase what you do and don't do is derived from what it takes to compete at senior level, not what it takes to win a minor game.

[manfromdelmonte]

Although mainly hurling, we've adopted the philosophy from U8 up to U12 to concentrate completely on skill development with a pathway for players' skills at each age group. Regular skills testing too.
We play small sided games at training of 4v4, 5v5 etc to get kids more touches.
We ensure every child gets to play the maximum amount of time and insist on opposing clubs playing 7v7 or 9v9 if the numbers allow.
We often get well beaten at round robin blitzes as other clubs don't split up their players, but all our lads get to play.
when it comes to the odd tournament, we generally compete very well and got to the final of two U10 and U12 tournaments this year.

We fail to win games at U14, 16 and minor due to the lack of skill level of the players so we had to change something.
It'll be interesting to see how it progresses