Why focus on skills?
There are all sorts of things that kids can get out of footy – mateship, fitness, confidence, a sense of co-operation, tactical awareness, the value of persistence, the ability to work within a defined set of rules and many other useful qualities. From a football viewpoint the most important thing a coach can do for a player is to help improve their skills. This is self-evident for the youngest teams – every 8 year old can improve their kicking – but we must also strive to constantly improve basic skills for all age groups. Even the elite kids striving for higher honours will need work on some aspect of their game – can they really hit every target by foot and hand on both sides of their body? The links below provide access to coaching manuals, presentations and documents which will hopefully help coaches to get kids kicking, handballing, marking, tackling, sherherding etc at the highest level possible.
Kicking
At every coaching course there will be a high-level official from an AFL club addressing the budding coaches an filling ther heads with all sorts of terrific, high-tech caoching jargon. At the end of the presentation someone will put up their hand and ask “What is the most important thing AFL clubs look for in potential recruits?” The answer is always the same – “Can the kid kick properly”. These days no-one gets drafted unless they can hit targets at speed under pressure, no matter how good the rest of their game is. This principal applies equally at every level of the game – if you can’t kick it to our guys, your value to the team will be seiously reduced. For this reason, we must strive to teach our players to kick properly at every opportunity. The files accessed below will hopefully help with this process.
Kicking in Australian Football - Prepared by Anton Grbac, then head coach at AFL Victoria (follow links to download file).