For youth football training, I like to use this football drill to teach my players how to develop soft hands which is necessary to catch properly. This drill is fun and quickly shows immediate cause and effect of doing this football drill correctly or incorrectly.
Drill: Develop Soft Hands
Equipment required: Balloons (I go to a local dollar store and pick up a pack of 50 small balloons). Fill them with water and take them to practice in an old milk crate.
As kids at some event or another they most likely participated in an egg toss–and those that were successful learned how to cradle the egg into their hands when catching. Well I teach the same thing, but I use water balloons (field won’t smell like rotten eggs and it’s a lot easier to pick up broken water balloons than egg shells).
I show the kids the soft hands technique, where they want to make contact with the balloon as high as possible, but they then “use soft hands” to slow the descent of the balloon so that they can catch it without breaking. I show them what happens if I throw the ball into the air and catch it without proper cradling – them I show them the proper way – and “surprise” the balloon does not break.
The kid love this football drill – I pair-up the kids and starting 3 yards apart I have them toss the balloon to their partner – after every catch – those remaining move another yard apart.
This turns into a great competition and you quickly learn which kids have “natural soft” hands and you then turn kids with cement hands into softer hands kids.
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