u/Luke010NL

Hey everyone!

I’m a 34‑year‑old coach working with a mixed youth team (ages 12–14) playing in the boys’ division. After a few sessions, it’s clear the team has big differences in skill and experience — some players have years of training, others only just started.This makes planning sessions tricky: certain drills are too easy for some, too hard for others.

I’m looking for practical training ideas, drills, and coaching insights to help develop:

Defensive systems (6‑0, 5‑1, 4‑2 — especially how to teach them to beginners)

Attacking structure (simple patterns that still challenge advanced players)

Individual technique (passing, shooting, throwing — with scalable difficulty)

Team cohesion (getting them to communicate and defend as a unit)

If you’ve coached mixed‑skill youth teams before, I’d love to hear:

What drills worked best

How you balanced difficulty

How you taught defensive discipline

How you structured attacking play for beginners

Any PDFs, videos, or session plans you recommend

I’m really hoping to gather new training material and learn how to help this group defend better and build a more effective attack.

Thanks in advance, excited to learn from this community!

Hey everyone!

I’m a 34‑year‑old coach working with a mixed youth team (ages 12–14) playing in the boys’ division. After a few sessions, it’s clear the team has big differences in skill and experience — some players have years of training, others only just started.This makes planning sessions tricky: certain drills are too easy for some, too hard for others.

I’m looking for practical training ideas, drills, and coaching insights to help develop:

Defensive systems (6‑0, 5‑1, 4‑2 — especially how to teach them to beginners)

Attacking structure (simple patterns that still challenge advanced players)

Individual technique (passing, shooting, throwing — with scalable difficulty)

Team cohesion (getting them to communicate and defend as a unit)

If you’ve coached mixed‑skill youth teams before, I’d love to hear:

What drills worked best

How you balanced difficulty

How you taught defensive discipline

How you structured attacking play for beginners

Any PDFs, videos, or session plans you recommend

I’m really hoping to gather new training material and learn how to help this group defend better and build a more effective attack.

Thanks in advance, excited to learn from this community!

Hi all! I hope it's okay to post this here.

I'm a 34-year old coach to a youth team in the age 12-14. It's a mixed team, boy and girls, that will play in the boys competition.

We've only had a few trainingmoments this far, but I notice a great difference in skill, experience and technique between my players. Some already are playing for a couple of years and some have played for like a year now. Before I usually trained teams that were all equally experienced and somewhat equally skilled. I notice that some excersises are either to difficult for some or to ease for some.

I'd really appreciate some tips and possibly trainingmaterial, certain plays and excersises I can use to improve the following things:

-Teambuilding

- Defending (6-0, 5-1, 4-2)

- attacking plays

- improve passing,shooting,overall technique throwing but excersises where the more experienced kids kan add something extra to add difficulty.

Would love to get some tips and also give some tips or share trainingmaterials etc.

Anyways, hope it's okay to post it here and hope to receive some tips from anyone.