Our new direction

After seven years of testing and trying different ways to improve the development path of all students in our program, we have settled on our four-tier setup. Youth football should be all about developing an individual so that they can adapt to a team environment in the future. A good youth coach is focused on what will benefit each individual player in the future and not the present.

Our model 

Our model will give all players the type of training and level of training that suits their current level of comprehension. This does not mean that they won’t play with their friends in inter-school sports competitions, and they will of course continue to train with both boys and girls in their class-time sessions to build relationships that are crucial to the development of the person. In this model, coaches will collaborate closely to find the right group for every single player in our program without prejudice. If we can improve everyone to be the best version of themselves using the same development curriculum and allowing for things like Relative Age effect, early and late developers and growth spurts, then we believe that by the time our students reach the final two years of the program that the gap between the strongest and weakest players will be significantly smaller.

Our Objective

We don’t want any players inside the comfort zone, and we don’t want any players in the impossible zone. Players that stay in a comfort zone will get bored and form bad habits, and if a player is out of his or her depth, they are more likely to quit the game. No person in the KDC Soccer School is at the same level either biologically, technically, physically, and mentally. The four zones are defined as:

Comfort zone-

Routine work (boring and repetitive) 

Challenge too low for skilled players

Proximal Development zone-

Challenge suitably high with deliberate practice

No immediate reward but focused on improvement.

The 'Flow' zone -

Purposeful practice and the challenge is suitable enough to reach a state of 'Flow'

Impossible zone -

Challenge too high (out of your depth)

Struggle is one or two steps too far.