At the end of our 30 week season with our U12 DS we produced a standard report for each parent assessing the lads on a variety of criteria and also produced a personal report for each identifying some specific areas they needed to work on over the summer.

Many of the lads had similar areas to work on such as weaker foot, first touch and they can always do more ball mastery work.

So myself and my fellow coach Mark decided to put on one last session to give the boys and their parents some structure to their off season practise...something that they could do on their own against a wall or garage door or with a mate/parent. These exercises could be done for 5 minutes or 5 hours, at home, the park or the beach.

I used the example of Wesley Sneijder who in a recent interview with FourFourTwo said that at the age of 12 (the same age as these kids) he was almost completely right footed...but then spent the next 2-3 years practising with his weaker foot every day for 3 hours a day until he is now, as we all saw at the World Cup, capable of taking world class set pieces with either foot.

There is no substitute for hard work and no-one ever went to bed and just woke up a better player. What's that great golfing line from Gary Player - "the more I practise the luckier I get'?

The idea behind the session was to give some structure to their practise...to get them into the habit of not just aimlessly kicking a ball around but to have targets to keep pushing themselves and introduce different sized balls to hone their technique further and keep it interesting.

A lot of the lads needed to work on their acceleration over short distances and general conditioning over the summer to hit the ground running at the start of next season so we also produced some ideas for their fitness as well.

Of course we also encouraged them to keep playing as much football as possible through summer soccer, futsal or just grabbing some mates and heading down the park.

We've already had some great feedback the parents that they are using this.

The ball work session is here

The fitness session is here

Let me know your thoughts and if you coach yourself...do you do something similar at the end of the season to keep your players ticking over the summer? Feel free to throw up any other ideas you may have along these lines.