Soccer Shooting Drills

Goals are the salt and pepper of soccer and they can only be scored by either shooting, or heading the ball. Heading the ball is an unnatural process, whereas kicking the ball is quite a natural "need" that humans have, deep down. How many times have you walked on the street and instinctively kicked a leaf, or some small rock, just for the heck of it?

Now, how many times have you walked on the street and started hitting your head against solid objects? I hope not a lot. So heading is a lot harder to train, because we have to fight against our own natural fear of hitting our head against an object. That's why soccer shooting drills are so much more diverse and common in training sessions. Let's take a look at the different types of shooting drills.

-Soccer Shooting Drills - Static Positions

Static position soccer shooting drills refer to the player's position, not the ball (although in the case of free kicks, both the ball and the player are static). Free kicks are very helpful for your players in training their shot accuracy and usually they are used for just that, instead of being a means to get your shot power trained. You could try having all your players execute free kicks, or just select a handful that you noticed are better at this role and form them as specialists in free kicks.

The other way you can practice soccer shooting drills in a static position is by having one player in the center, receiving passes from the sides and shooting, without moving towards the ball. This simulates a match scenario that occurs quite often, with a striker or a central midfielder having to shoot the ball with a single touch from a static position, because he has no space to move around, or no time to do so.

-Soccer Shooting Drills - Dynamic Positions

There's a wider array of soccer drills for shooting that can be practiced from dynamic positions, than from static ones. One of the most popular is the run-and-shoot: have your players positioned in a line at the center of the pitch and send a keeper in the goal. Now, have each player sprint with the ball at his feet up to a certain point that you decide (place a cone as a visual marker), then cannon a shot to goal from there.

If you want to practice long range shots, you'll obviously have them shooting for far away, whereas if you want more finishing accuracy, you will have your players shoot from the edge of the box, or even inside it.

A slight variation of the run and shoot soccer drill is the wall-and-shoot. Basically, you'll have the same setup, with the players at half court and a goalkeeper guarding the net of one of the goals, but you will also have a player somewhere near the penalty area, who will act as a wall passer for your incoming players. So a player will sprint with the ball, when he is close to the wall passer he initiates a one-two and shoots the ball in full-on sprint, as soon as he receives it back.

After a while, the above mentioned soccer drills for shooting tend to get repetitive, so you might want to dig up some more, or simply create variations of these. You can work around the dynamic position ones and create new drills of your own.