Kick the soccer ball with the laces of your shoe not your toe! Why? Controlling the ball with a toe is very difficult, you have to strike it in just the right spot to get it to go where you want it. By using the laces of your shoe you have a larger surface to make contact with the ball that will give you much more control. Now lets look at some other types of kicks and how we may use them.

The first kick we will look at is the inside of the foot kick. For this one we will kick the soccer ball with the inside of the foot. Again with the inside of the foot we have a much larger striking surface than we would have with a toe kick. We use this kick to move the ball across your body, this can be a pass or a shot. The inside of the foot kick is a short to medium kick.

You can kick the soccer ball with the outside of your foot to send the ball away from your body. They outside of your foot kick is great way to send the ball toward the sidelines to a streaking midfielder. With this kick you turn your foot slightly inward and strike the ball with the outside surface of your foot, this can be from a very short kick to a medium length kick.

Use the laces of your shoe to kick the soccer ball forward and with good distance. A lace kick can be used for a short pass or shot as well as a long pass or shot. Striking the ball directly on top of your foot gives you a lot of control because of the large flat surface area.

This next kick is the power kick. For this we kick the soccer ball with the inside of the foot right at the knuckle of the big toe. This is called the sweet spot. The sweet spot of the ball is right in the middle and if you put both sweet spots together, you will get all the power you need to send the ball all the way across the field for a pass or even getting a shoot from outside the 18.

So we have covered how to kick the soccer ball with all four parts of your foot. Although we only touched on the basics of how to kick the soccer ball, this should give you a foundation to start. When teaching the different types of kicks I always make sure my players learn to use both feet.