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» Week of 5/23/05

Published on May 20th 2005

Shooting 101

I believe that at least some part of each practice should be devoted to shooting. There are thousands of shooting drills. In the next few tips I would like to share some of my favorites.

This one is fun, exhausting and a bit time consuming. Use the penalty area of the field with a goal and a keeper in goal. The shooter is in the penalty area. The other players, with balls, are outside the penalty area, some on each leg including the goal line. One of the players outside the P.A. yells the name of the shooter, when he has eye contact with the shooter, he serves a ball which may be high, low, in front or back of the shooter. The shooter must finish with preferably one touch, at the most two. (S)he can use any part of the body except the hands of course. Once the shot is completed another server calls the shooter?s name and so on. Vary the order of service, so the shooter cannot anticipate. By about the 12th ball the shooter should be thoroughly exhausted and switches places with one of the servers. You can make it competitive by keeping track of the number of goals each shooter scores.