Football practice
Practice has a set tempo: warm up, drill, switch drill, play, cool down. For anyone who needs more time to shift between phases, the pace itself becomes the challenge. The visual support below lays out the session in order.
♂Football practice
A boy kicking a football in front of a goal with two orange cones.
About this visual support
What makes football practice demanding is not the running but the turns between phases. When the whistle ends the warm-up and the drill reshapes itself within two minutes, the brain has to catch up while the legs are already moving. For children who need a beat longer to close one thing before the next opens, that recurring shift is a tripwire.
Visual support places a stable schedule next to the coach's voice. The child can look at the picture, see that after passing comes small-sided play, and start the mental preparation early instead of being caught off guard. Attention can then point outward toward the ball rather than inward toward guessing what is next.
A practical tip: ask the coach to give a one-minute heads-up before changing drills, ideally with a hand signal visible from across the pitch. Combined with the pictures looked at before practice, transitions become less abrupt. In Routined, the full session can be saved as a checklist, so the child sees both backward and forward at their own pace.