I have recently spent a week at the Shrewsbury Town Academy.
Here are some of the outtakes.
The Shrewsbury Town Academy run their foundation development phase down from the U9 up to the U12 age category. Their FDP has three objectives:
- Production of players to youth development phase.
- Developing a love of the game.
- Developing a love for the club.
The children train three times a week – every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday (3 x 90 min) – and play a game at the weekend (4 x 20 min). Twice a week they train in a cage and only on Fridays they train on a bigger pitch, where they finish their session with a 7v7/9v9 match (U9s together with U10s and U11s together with U12s).
At Shrewsbury, across all age groups, they pay a huge emphasis on developing the weaker foot. They also place focus on the concept of disguised passing.
As far as a session plan is concerned, they tend to use interleaving, so coaches first provide their players with an exercise, then a game, then another exercise, another game and so on.
All players also have their individual learning plans with three targets per player for a given time. Coaches tend to focus their attention on three or four players per week in accordance with their ILPs.
Credit for the picture in use goes to Krystian Lamberski
BREAKTHROUGH 