What is "Soccer Awareness"?

The “Soccer Awareness” idea originated from what I felt were the most important things to teach players.

I looked beyond the technical process as that is easy to implement and wanted to get INSIDE the head of the player.

Thus the “Thinking Process” of a player became my focus, developing ways to teach an awareness of space, time, and movement, but significantly BEFORE the player received the ball.

I drew from my own experience as a player knowing if I had more of this great ability I would have been a far better professional player than I was.

Now, as the game gets much faster, players MUST think, move, pass, position, and transition much more quickly and have the ultimate ability to make much faster and more accurate decisions than before.

Soccer Awareness training does this and more, and it also develops SELF THINKING players who are not coach driven; but coach guided, and within this they are allowed to make mistakes without criticism; but rather; encouraged to learn from them.

Therefore Soccer Awareness training is a very positive experience for all players, they are empowered to self determine on the field, they are encouraged to offer their own opinions even from 7 years old.

They are always only “guided”; not told; to decide for themselves, when, where; how and why they do things on the field, what I call the SKILL FACTOR of technical development.

This produces; in time, much more Soccer Intelligent; self confident and successful players than all other coaching styles combined.

To be successful and produce the best players you can; the coach and player have to have a two way relationship; that in time is led more by the player than the coach, which perhaps is a rather new concept to the game of today in the USA.

Wayne Harrison

Book Review - Soccer Awareness: Developing the Thinking Player

This is a review from Amazon on the book: Soccer Awareness: Developing the Thinking Player

As a long time coach (not of soccer though), I took to the task of coaching my daughter’s travel soccer team. It’s not difficult to find drills for dribbling and passing and small sided games and such. What is difficult is getting the kids to look around and play the game. These drills provide dribbling and passing practice, but also awareness training.

This book details drills that get the kids heads up and checking out the game. I think you could run practices the entire year with stuff from this book and little more. Before long, the kids start to “get it” if you will. They start to think a play ahead of the game and are looking around for options. Players start to make runs to get the ball from a teammate. Before this I had a kid with the ball and the rest were watching the game.

One simple idea was having kids call out who they plan to pass to before they receive the ball in a pass and move drill. So simple yet so genious. Works great to get the kids heads up and looking around. All the drills are geared toward kids looking around the field.