COPA Kids Takes Big Steps Forward
See the improvements coming to our COPA Kids curriculum.
Learn, Grow, and Have Fun!
We all want what’s best for our children, and COPA STC’s mission is to provide just that. With the ever-improving education and performance industries, we strive to find the best of both methodologies to help develop your young stars. With this in mind, we will be updating our COPA Kids curriculum.
What will change?
Our session plans are structured in a simple to complex progression, allowing each young athlete to progress through each level. Each focuses on a key technical soccer skill that will take a stair-step approach, leading up to the complex real-world application. Especially when learning a new skill, it’s important to break it down into steps that build upon each other.
The beginning of each session has a designated time to strengthen the body and motor skills. This time is also used to challenge each child’s mind and increase cognitive processing while performing physical activity.
COPA Kids places a large emphasis on developing technical skills. These new skills are acquired with high repetition and low pressure to quickly boost confidence and performance.
To ensure our young stars are given an opportunity to transfer their new skills into a more game-like environment, we add a little pressure with directional play to understand when and how to use each skill. The goal here is to expose them to decision-making situations. The class will culminate with this new technical skill being utilized in gameplay, providing a live opponent to practice against. They must make quicker, purposeful decisions to achieve a goal. These scenarios will be realistic to what they might face in a future match.
Each class has a learning objective and is part of an overall curriculum designed to develop young soccer players. Curriculum advances and adapts monthly to ensure that our athletes have many opportunities to learn and grow.
How will this help?
New approaches allow us to better build an athlete’s confidence every step of the way. When an athlete is confident in themselves, they are more like to continue to see what else they can accomplish. We want to provide an environment to nurture this so each athlete will strive for more.
By introducing new concepts and skills, our goal is to make them instinctual. Without guidance, children tend to lean on their dominant features. Elite athletes want to break away from such limitations and be able to use every part of their bodies. This opens the possibilities of what they can do.
We use learning objectives to activate and strengthen cognitive processing as our children progress through the program. Many of the games use colors and numbers to help challenge each athlete to make purposeful decisions. As they graduate into our 6–9-year-old/Juniors Program, we integrate the Speed Zone into the curriculum. This utilizes math and spelling to challenge players’ cognitive abilities while executing motor skills, quickening the reaction time between the brain and body’s responses.
For more information on COPA Kids and any of our amazing programs, please visit copastc.com/copakids.
