How to Fix Your Soccer Shot

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Guillermo Gomez. I coach youth soccer and today I'll be talking about how to fix your soccer shot. So, what is fixing your soccer shot? It's actually you want to improve your kicking technique. So, to do, at first you want to remember all the points on how to kick a soccer ball properly. We know that our supporting foot comes right next to the ball, pointing at our target so that it's the direction that we want the ball to travel. We put our knee over the ball and then we bring our chest forward, lock our ankles and then take that swinging motion, both moving your chest forward and your leg down as you take the shot. That's really easy when you explain it but when you really do it, you find that sometimes the ball just goes in different paths. So here what you want to do, you want to observe your body mechanics when you're doing the shot. You want to look at how you're positioning yourself. It's very important that you look very closely at your supporting leg when you come close to that ball. If you're too behind it, there will might up. If you're too far away from it on one side, you might get the ball going at the wrong direction or with not enough power. So, you got to look at those skills very carefully. Another thing is as you kick the ball. make sure you watch your knee. The knee over the ball and then finish with a swinging motion. Okay. Next thing is to emphasize the importance of locking the ankle. Locking the ankle is one of the difficult concepts of young players to grasp. Right? It's difficult because I'm telling the players to lock the ankles, which means making it stiff, point the toes down, while at the same time moving the leg in a forward motion. So, they think they have to tense the leg, therefore slowing the motion or breaking the rhythm of when you are kicking a soccer ball. So, one way that you can fix your shot is by picking up a soccer ball with your hands. A way for you to tell if you're locking your ankle or not is by dropping the ball and as the ball comes down, you want to kick the ball upwards with the toes down. You kick the ball with the shoe lace. If you kick the ball up and the ball is going up with a lot of speed, that means that you are not locking your ankle. Okay? So, you want to watch that very carefully. The ball will be spinning very fast and perhaps it's not going straight up. Perhaps the ball is going to one side, to the left or to the right. So, a way for you to tell when you're locking the ankle is when you actually grab the ball, you kick it with your shoe lace pointing toes down locking the ankle. You have a nice fixed locked ankle and when you kick the ball you will see that the ball actually rises up, straight up and you can actually see the logos on the soccer ball because they have very little spin. Okay? So my recommendation is that you work on that, see where you're locking your ankle when you take your shot before you continue shooting the ball back onto the net. If you can see that you're successful by locking your ankle, then when you're on the net everything will be a lot smoother and a lot easier for you. Okay, have fun, score some goals and this is how you can improve your soccer shot."