What Should My Child Do in the Off Season?
The case for rest and variety has its own piece — Why the Off Season Matters. This one is the follow-up. Once you've decided your child will do something over the summer, the question becomes: what?
There's no single right answer, but there is a hierarchy that works.
The Essentials
A different sport is the best off-season activity. Cricket, basketball, swimming, tennis, AFL, hockey — the choice barely matters. What matters is that it isn't football.
Free play counts more than parents think. Kicking a ball with mates in the park is doing real work. It's where confidence on the ball gets built.
If you do extra football, keep it to once a week. And use that session for the parts of their game they tend to avoid in matches.
Let your child lead the choice. Their enthusiasm for whatever they pick will do more for them than the "right" sport done reluctantly.
The Deep Dive
Pick a different sport, almost any one. What matters is that it's different from football and that they enjoy it. The body needs a rest from the same running patterns, the same kicking leg, the same twisting and turning. What other sports actually teach is more useful than parents realise.
Cricket builds scanning and tracking the ball through the air.
Basketball builds shielding the ball with your body in tight space.
Swimming builds aerobic capacity without punishing joints that are still growing.
None of these are football. All of them are building footballers.
“Free play is the most underrated training your child will do”
Kicking a ball with cousins in the back garden, beach football on holiday, mucking about after school. It's how kids in football-rich cultures grow up — not in academies, but on the street.
If your child wants extra football on top, my view is once a week is plenty. Academies are not the enemy. Many are excellent and run by good people, and there are perfectly reasonable reasons to choose one — structure, confidence, an extra adult mentor, kids your child enjoys training with.
“But more is not always better”
When I coached my son, we had him in an academy that started ad-hoc, became holiday programs, and by the off season was running several days a week. By the end of it, he just looked soccer-ed out. What worked, when we recalibrated, was a once-a-week one-on-one. It focused specifically on his confidence in goal — and the bonus was another adult mentor in his football life. Use any extra session for what they avoid in matches. The weaker foot is the obvious one. So is first touch under pressure, or coming for crosses in goal, or whatever the specific gap is. Training the side they shy away from doesn't just close a gap. It raises the floor for both sides at once.
The aim isn't to leapfrog the other kids in the team — it's to round out their game.
The Takeaway
Mindset Shift: A good off-season has a shape — different sport, free play, occasional extra football, real rest — and your child doesn't need all of it. They need the bits that fit their summer.
Permission Sentence:If your child spends the off-season playing cricket, swimming at the beach and barely touching a football, you're not falling behind.
This Week: Have a chat with your child about what other sport they fancy this summer. Let them lead it. If they want to add a once-a-week football session, ask them — not the academy — what part of their game they'd most like to work on.
