Why skill learning may not transfer

In a representative U15s training session on a cold Thursday evening in January, my co-coach and I were instilling a skill: a pull-back pass.

For some, it wasn’t new because they were using it in their club or school environments. Others were aware of it but had never formally trained it, and, for a couple of players, it was completely new.

The activity plan was to name the skill, set up an exercise for the players to have lots of goes at the actions of the pass, and then emphasise a couple of points before returning to the activity.

We aimed for around 12 minutes for each rotation. Depending on their progress, I had another set-up where they could run the skill in a more game-like context.

We were pretty efficient in rolling out the exercise, with three groups running, and each player passing at least every 15 seconds. We adjusted the starting points, because you never know how the players react.

Halfway through, using think-pair-share, we quickly reviewed why they were using the pass, and two specific actions to help execute the skill more effectively.

We returned to the activity, and, with rotations, we easily filled up the 12 minutes.

We had intended to move on to another game-specific exercise, but other timings meant we had about 10 minutes left, so we decided to play a game of 9v9.

The rules meant there were plenty of opportunities to use the skill. We saw it happen about twice!

Should we have been disappointed? Not really. Firstly, we had only instilled the technical aspects.

Secondly, while we had emphasised the context, we hadn’t walked players through the scenarios.

And thirdly, while we should always give players access to the full range of skills, only a few players will use them, primarily because of how a game is set up.

How do we balance our approach?

• Should we spread our time more thinly on a full range of skills, some of which might be rarely used? 
• Or should we focus on the skills the players will use most of the time?