How do you beat press coverage when coaching youth soccer? Most undrafted teams in youth soccer do not play this type of coverage with their defensemen, as it requires very physical and athletic corners. Press coverage almost always has defensive backs right in front of your receivers, with defensive backs playing very physically, they will try to get their hands on your receivers and try to jam them in the line of scrimmage. You may come across one or two teams per season that may get press coverage some of the time, or if you play in a tournament, you may see a team stacked with this type of coverage all the time. In any case, if you are a good coach, you want to be prepared.

Press coverage is almost always coverage of men in youth soccer. Remember this is not the NFL, a defensive back can put his hands on the receiver as long as the ball is not in the air and until the receiver has made it apparent that he is no longer a potential blocker (after he is behind the defender). ). ). If you throw a lot of timing routes like tilts, arrows, short jerks, and screens, press coverage often completely disrupts the timing and effectiveness of these plays. On longer routes, the defensive strategy is to move receivers out of their route paths and slow down, giving linebackers more time to sack the quarterback before the receiver can get open or into his spot.

hitting him

To beat press coverage, you need to create space between your receiver and the defender. Space gives your receivers a chance to make a move and put extra space between themselves and the defender before rushing contact can be made. You do this by lining up, making sure your main threat receivers are out of the line of scrimmage by placing them in a flanker, slot, or wing position. The most effective way to put space between your receivers and press coverage is to get your biggest threat receiver moving. The move creates extra space and if you move under another receiver or even through the formation, defenders often have to switch man assignments, creating havoc and creating space for your other receivers as the defense realigns.

other solutions

Another way to counter male press coverage is through technique. If a receiver wants to get out, he can use a swimming move to get past the defender. If he wants to go inside, he can use a rip move, if he wants to run over or go to either side of the defender, he can also use a club move. If you have a dominant athletic pass receiver and the defender is less physical than your man, these are effective techniques for beating this coverage. Even if the defender is physical, he can get tired of getting hit on his forearms every time he tries to get his hands on his receiver. I’ve seen defenders stop putting their hands on receivers after they’ve been hit multiple times in a row.

the shallow

Against press coverage teams, you’ll always want to hit cross-country vertical shots early, as well as run “shallow” routes. Shallow routes are routes where the receiver runs parallel to the line of scrimmage behind the defensive linemen and crosses the formation to the other side. We often combine this with dips from both receivers from the opposite side, to create a wide-open short zone where we can hit the shallow receiver, on the run. That kind of route is usually wide open against teams that use press coverage, since those teams often like to attack linebackers as well. Just run into that open space and make them pay for the blitz with a pass that hits very fast and generally has a good chance for yardage after catching. The surface move is extremely effective when using the move towards the quarterback.

While we could use some of these concepts outside of our base set, we generally run them outside of our Spread Single Wing set, the one we use to run the Jet series. Obviously, you could adapt these concepts to just about any offense.

This is something you want to work on as the season progresses because eventually you’re going to run into a team that has the kids to use the press coverage. Our job as coaches is to make sure that we put our kids in a position to succeed.

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