"So little Johnny what's your ILP/IDP"?

Whether your club uses the term individual learning plans, or individual development plans, call them what you will, how effective are they when developing youth football players?

For youth coaches working with young elite players, you will be familiar with the term Individual Learning/Development plans. These are a plan that is uniquely tailored to the individual that looks to develop them either through strengths, areas of development, or both. The area maybe technical/tactical focus, physical, psychological, or social corner and in some cases all! Usually these will be given to players at the start of the season, set by the coach, or the players and reviewed every 6/12 weeks. How much development will take place in this short period of time and will they change, or stay the same? Realistically players will need time to develop certain areas of their game and even when they are demonstrating some success, will need time to consolidate their new learning, rather than quickly moving onto the next target.

So how many areas should we be focusing on with our players? If players are given a plan that focuses on too many areas then surely this will water down the focus, as in the title to this article "So little Johnny what's your ILP/IDP"? I have asked this question myself to players and quite honestly at times they won't know! Is this because they have had too much to focus on, that it almost becomes almost pointless exercise. The other question to ask is what do we do as coaches to help players improve on these targets, how often when we set up our sessions, do we look to develop players at their ILP/IDPs (player is the syllabus), or is it just a group focus on the topic? If your lucky enough to work with a coaching partner, is this something they could do to help individuals as a ghost coach, whilst the other coach delivers the main theme of the session. Do we even know as coaches what all our player ILP/IDP's are, for them to work on? Is this more likely to happen in training and how often do we do we focus on players ILP/IDP's within our games programme. Does this go out the window in favor, or team targets and then getting hijacked by result/performance (easily done if we're completely honest).

An area I have used to help players work towards their ILP/IDP's Challenging Individuals/Groups (Differentiation), is to use the simple STEP principle. Space, Task, Equipment, People.

SPACE - Confined to an area (Zone), position specific, size of the area that the individual can work in, ie improve first touch smaller area, RWTB bigger area.

TASK - Limit the amount of touches, Trial & Error Challenge, Individual/Group Progressions (Stretch/Simplify), Use of a Floater in and out of possession, depending on needs.

EQUIPMENT - Size/weight of ball (stretch/simplify), Size of Goals.

PEOPLE - Player load, 1v1, 2v1, 1v2 etc, Paired with different Age/Size/abilities depending on needs.

This one way to support individuals within a session, some settings will focus on players being categorized as stoppers, creator, scorers (covered in another article To Rotate, or not to Rotate?) This then might lead their sessions to work with players generically around the key skills needed to be this type of player. This could possibly end up with doing away with ILP/IDP's altogether, there is a growing feeling that they may not be needed.

Whatever you thoughts are around this topic, if we are going to use ILP/IDP's they need to be very simple and perhaps include one Super strength and one area of development. By doing this then at least when we ask little Johnny, he will hopefully be able to respond with clarity.