One drill I have my players do is 5 ball touches and sprint 5 yards. Another is ladder drills where the players use quick feet ( getting both feet, one after the other, in each rung) and then they explode out of the ladder for 5 yards. Try using flat cones if you don't have a ladder. As the players progress, have them use quick feet, explode 5 yards and feed them a ball to shoot into a goal. Good Luck.

Soccer is a game of changing direction and speed. A player's top end speed is not as critical as their ability to accelerate out of a move or on a run into a space. My team spends 5-10 minutes at each practice working on foot-speed and agility. Explosivness comes from the repitition of forcing your knees to come up and return to the ground as quickly as possible. During a warm up, have your child/team do "quick skipping" in 20 yard intervals. Have them concentrate on snapping the knee up as they drive their opposite elbow forward and vertical. Then work on a quick transition to getting that foot back on the ground and the other knee into the air as quickly as possible. The use of the arms is extremely valuable. Skipping is a great drill, it good for the dynamic stretching of the quads and groin and "quick skipping" is a great tool for leg and arm speed. For a nine year old it is important to do as much as you can with a soccer ball, but 5-10 minutes at each practice working on agility and foot-speed will be just enough to not loose their focus. Always finish your practice with a few minutes of static stretches. It is the stretching at the end of practice that encourages muscle flexiblity and strength and should not be overlooked. I hope this helps you.....all the best!!

Speed is as much about quickness as it is about strength and power. Ultimately, it is about the ability to get certain muscle fibers to fire fast, perhaps faster than the muscles themselves would like to. There is a natural component to speed but I have had remarkable success with athletes of all ages pushing them past their "natural" ability. I have had kids so slow you could time with a sun dial and inside of 12 weeks they were beating their competition in races! First, it is NOT too early for a 9 year old to start working with resistance exercises, particularly circuit training designed to improve neuromuscular coordination and fast-twitch muscle density. Care must be taken with young children but the results can be amazing. Additionally, kids who are training while going through adolescence, instead of waiting until after adolescence to begin weight training, are usually going to see additional benefits and may even grow closer to their actual genetic potential! Furthermore, kids who are in some sort of resistance training program will usually develop quadricep to hamstring ratios more in balance, thus improving power and avoiding certain "sprinter" and soccer player-related injuries! The first thing to do is explosive standing broad jumps, combined with 10 meter dashes with emphasis on the first few choppy, driving power steps.

There is also a drill where you simply have a player lean into a wall, so that if you knocked their hands away they would fall down. Their body should be at a 45 degree angle and the hands against the wall at shoulder level, with the athlete leaning into the wall. Then when you say start they are to push the wall while picking up their knees and putting them down as fast as the can! Push them to excel and drive! The "wall drills" should be 10-15-20-30 seconds in length and then back down 30-20-15-10, eventually "running" up to 10 times 60 seconds!

By the time they finish the wall drills, they are done for the day, so do it last! Combine this with a few other tips and your athlete will be the fastest, most conditioned athlete on the pitch in no time! The combination of circuit training, strength training, and skill work will make the athlete into a new player, one ready for ODP and premier play in as little as 8 weeks!

Should you wish to contact me, do so at excellencepaidforward@gmail.com (my personal email)

There's some conditioning drills and games here:

http://www.footy4kids.co.uk/conditioning.drills.htm