#toccer

Last January, a gym teacher in England wrote me and asked for some lessons to introduce his students to toccer. Here’s the email I sent him:

Whenever I introduce toccer to a new group, we almost always start from the position of explaining the game very briefly. Which involves someone serving as goalkeeper, explaining the premise of the game which is to get the ball into the goal by passing it until you score or playing defense.

The intro itself never lasts more than a few minutes and then we start playing. The kids almost always figure it out on their own and we've done this both indoors and outdoors without incident. It's been played at elite summer camps and at schools for delinquents and the kids liked it the same in each case because the sport was designed to be 1) easy to understand 2) portable and 3) not requiring a lot of materials to pull off.

What I did below was to try to break down the various elements of the sport into lessons. I'll keep thinking on it, but my suggestion would be to do things like introduce them and let them play games. You can start an intra-class league where they are on teams, there's a table of standings for wins and losses and the kids can change teams or players if you want. We even did a World Cup style tournament at once place, where over the course of an evening we'd play several mini-games of toccer to determine a World Champion with the teams being that country. -------------------

Here are some lessons you can perform to introduce kids to tennis polo (you can also call it toccer, that's the original name)

Lesson 1: Dribbling try running and throwing the ball in the air and catching it. do that repeatedly while running towards a teammate.

Lesson 2. Goalkeeping & defense Everyone wants to score goals, but whats cooler than scoring goals? Stopping goals. Defense is the way we stop people from scoring goals. In toccer, offensive players are not allowed in the goal box but defenders are. Always make sure your team has a few defenders outside the box, the tennis ball is small and it's hard to defend it with your hands(like a basketball) and only the keeper has a racket. You cannot make contact with a defender by touching them, without incurring a penalty.

Lesson 3. Passing Passing the ball to your teammates is important. The 3-second rule means that you cannot run with the ball in your hand for more than 3 seconds before passing it another teammate. 

Lesson 4. Penalties We tried to keep toccer simple so there aren't a lot of rules ten years on. But when penalties are committed the referee has final authority to issue a 1) verbal warning (yellow card) or a 2) timed penalty which can be 5 seconds, 10 seconds or 20 seconds. During a timed penalty, the offending player has to freeze for the duration of that time in the spot of the foul. The referee then alerts them at the end of the penalty phase.