Play-Practice-Play

A misunderstood, misused — and thus controversial — training session methodology

Play-Practice-Play is a training session methodology that’s been widely taught by the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) over the past five years or so. Taken in part from the English FA (where it is referred to as Whole-Part-Whole), it’s a simple approach that has generated a surprisingly strong debate about its effectiveness and practicality.

This controversy comes from misconstruing its fundamental purpose and overlooking how coaches can implement it to develop their players.

Brief Description of Play-Practice-Play

For the uninitiated, Play-Practice-Play is a training format broken down into three separate phases. In the first phase, the players scrimmage unimpeded. During the second component, players run through a training exercise that focuses on developmentally-appropriate situations. Finally, the players return to a normal scrimmage again.

Roots of Play-Practice-Play

The USSF introduced Play-Practice-Play for two main reasons. First, the USSF thought too many coaches were using exercises which made players wait in lines, which in turn drove kids from the sport (remember Principle 4 of Good Coaching). By using Play-Practice-Play, kids spend more time running around and less time waiting around.

Second, the USA lacks a robust free-play/street soccer culture where kids play on their own. By encouraging coaches to implement more unstructured play, the USSF was hoping it would help create more impassioned and creative footballers. (For the record, Germany and England have also claimed free-play culture has declined in their countries as well, and have reworked their youth development system because of it. It’s also worth noting that during my time spent in southern Texas and California, I have seen plenty of groups playing on tennis courts at night and under street lights in parking lots — both of which are weather dependent however.)

And here lays a quick distinction. While Play-Practice-Play can be used for everyone, the USSF rolled it out to primarily help recreation players and coaches. Its purpose was to widen the funnel of potential players instead of driving them away. Kids join soccer teams to run have fun, hang out with friends, and run around (Principle 1, Principle 2 and Principle 4 of Good Coaching, respectively) and too many coaches were getting in the way of that.

While Play-Practice-Play was aimed primarily at the lower levels of the United States’ soccer pyramid (for lack of a better term), that doesn’t mean only a subsection of the soccer player population (or soccer coach population), can benefit from it. But to do this we must think of Play-Practice-Play not as a prescriptive methodology, but as a conceptual tool meant to help players play and learn more.

U8 Players (Play-Practice-Play-Practice-Play)

One of the key challenges with young players is keeping them moving and engaging with the training exercises. Games need to be mentally and physically engaging with clear progressions to keep players interested.

For this age group, I’ve found it best to incorporate another cycle of Play and Practice — thus making it a Play-Practice-Play-Practice-Play training format. If the session runs for an hour, then each of these sections would last for 8-10 minutes with water breaks between. Quick turnover keeps activities fresh for the player and helps the coach better adapt to player needs.

For this age group, each Play section of training should be a normal scrimmage, except that players have the option to dribble to restart play.

The first Practice phase should introduce a ball-mastery skill (such as pulling back the ball with the sole of the foot).

During the second Play phase, the coach has the option to amend scrimmages to encourage players to perform the skill (for example, having each successful sole of the foot pullback count as a goal/point).

The second Practice phase would focus on the same skill in a different context. This can be achieved by adding more defensive pressure, changing the direction of pressure, altering the dimensions of the playing area, adding or moving goals, etc.

The final scrimmage should return to the normal modified scrimmage rules.

Adding another cycle of Practice-Play adds enough variation to keep players engaged, but not changing so much that it becomes hard to manage. Once players learn the routine, the transitions become smoother and they begin to understand what behavior is expected from them.

U10 Players (Play-Practice-Play)

U10 players generally have longer attention spans than their younger counterparts, so coaches can spend more time on each phase. At the U10 level, training sessions can abide by a true Play-Practice-Play format. However, it’s entirely possible for the coach to fit two Practice phases between the scrimmages if they believe it will be helpful (thus turning it into Play-Practice-Practice-Play).

The Practice phase of the Play-Practice-Play format should attend to a problem that naturally arises when players play. But that does not mean coaches should watch the first scrimmage then makeup an exercise to do on the fly.

Doing this slows down the flow of the session and wastes precious brain power that should otherwise be focused on observation and teaching. Although different circumstances exist for the first training session of the season, the coach should be able to accurately predict what topics to address to further player development and forecast what players will do when they’re presented with problems. Coaches should know ahead of time what issues their players will come up against and have exercises planned accordingly.

When the session’s topic is chosen — based on coach observations and guided by developmentally appropriate curriculum — coaches should use the first Play phase as a way to prime the players’ attention to the relevant moment. This means coaches should find a moment within the first scrimmage to highlight a situation that the training session will go on to address. The Freeze tool doesn’t necessarily need to be used here; it can be achieved by Coaching in the Flow and may sound like:

“Red team, when the ball is in your defensive third, you need to provide wide options to pass around their first defender!”

(Remember the SAW acronym and make sure to find a similar coaching point for the opposing team as well so all players are primed to the session’s topic.)

The following Practice phase will build on this priming by defining the selected term and putting it in the context of the playing principle that matches your game model. For this example, the term to be defined is “wide option” which fits under the attacking principle of Width.

Once players are primed and taught about the given topic, the principle of play, and the situational cues to observe for, the session moves into the final Play phase.

During the last Play phase a Freeze can be used to either highlight or reinforce the taught content. Either a way, a Freeze should be used to draw players’ attention to the specific moment.

At this point, because players have been primed, taught, and given clear on-field visual representations, coaches should use Knowledge Questions to guide player learning. These questions can be asked during a Freeze if time allows, but it’s probably better to ask them during a water break or at the end of training.

U12+ Players (Warmup-Play-Practice-Play)

Between the ages of 10-15, the psychological development of the athlete changes how players interact with each other and the coach. Special attention needs to be paid to the group’s mentality to ensure sessions are productive and the team is prepared. The first ten minutes of a practice or pre-game warmup will often foreshadow how the team will perform that day.

A potential downside to the Play-Practice-Play format is that the team may have an unfocused practice because the session starts in an unstructured way. This derails the session before it even begins, leaving the coach to play catch-up for the rest of practice. Starting the session with an organized warm-up allows the coach to maintain structure by giving the players something to focus on, thus setting the tone for a productive practice.

The other reason to start with a warm-up is that athletes in this age group are either entering or completing their peak-height velocity (i.e. when they grow the fastest) and beginning to put on muscle. This is accompanied by a decrease in coordination — all of which leads to an increase in potential injury. Having a warmup decreases the risk of injury occurrence, and should combine technical skill training with general agility, balance, coordination, and strength exercises.

While it’s still good to abide by the coaching process set forth in the U10 formulation of Play-Practice-Play, there is greater room for flexibility with older age groups. The first Play phase can have constraints that produces a desired behavior (although you may choose to have them play for a few minutes first without external constraints). As an example, if the session’s topic is focused on give-and-go’s, you could tell your players that a successful give-and-go around an opposing player counts as a point/goal.

Use Play-Practice-Play at the Beginning of a Season

Play-Practice-Play is one of many training session formats that a coach can use. As such, choosing when to use a given format depends on a variety of factors — and for Play-Practice-Play, a key determinant is how much time a team has spent together.

Play-Practice-Play is a great methodology to use at the beginning of a season. Players may feel nervous on their first day and team camaraderie needs to be developed. The Play-Practice-Play format creates a low-stakes environment where kids are given the freedom to perform without pressure and to have fun with each other. It encourages players to interact and build relationships with each other (Principle 2 of Good Coaching) under natural play settings.

Another benefit to using Play-Practice-Play at the beginning of a season is that coaches have more time to observe players and figure out each person’s abilities and tendencies. It gives coaches more information that can be used to tailor training activities to the needs of the individual players and the team.

Still Setup Everything Ahead of Time

One of the biggest hurdles to the Play-Practice-Play methodology is that it’s difficult to setup exercises ahead of time. Field space is limited for most teams, and players will generally scrimmage in the same space where the Practice exercise will be held.

The simplest solution is to setup everything ahead of time like you normally would. If possible, mark the scrimmage space in a different style or color of cone (large & red) than the Practice exercise (small & blue), and tell the players to ignore the Practice cones. Yes, some cones may get moved during the course of play, or the ball may bounce funny if it hits a cone, but it’s better to straighten a cone or have players adjust to a random bump than it is to waste players’ time during a training session (Principle 4 of Good Coaching).

Wrapping up Play-Practice-Play

Play-Practice-Play is not a prescriptive piece of coaching to be followed ad nauseam. Instead it should be considered as a conceptual tool meant to achieve an objective (i.e. increase playing time for kids). By understanding its strengths, limitations, and overall purpose, its format can be adjusted to suit the environment we coach in — which is dependent on age, psychological development, and sessional and seasonal objectives. By customizing the training format to what’s in front of us — and not simply following a cookie-cutter approach of best practices — we become better coaches, and more importantly, create a better experience for our players.