There’s a new site starting up with the aim to be a clearing house for youth soccer practice videos. Using Magnify.net, Jeff Geiser has setup a new site called YouthPractice.com where people can view and share practice videos. It’s an interesting concept:

If you google soccer practice drills you get no shortage of web sites that contain practice plans. The issue is that most of the sites either charge for the content, organize themselves like online infomercials (always make me skeptical) or are designed so inefficiently I can never figure out how to actually get the practice plans.

Aggregating skills related videos is only a small step in the right direction. Maybe it is time for one of the elite youth sports organizations to establish a wiki or other "crowd sourced" resource for youth sports that provides development goals for each sport at each age-group, season goals by age group and sport, etc.

I don’t think charging for practice plans is the right business model here. I advocate providing the content for free – and subsidizing the costs with advertising revenue. Actually, revenue is not the goal – improving the quality and consistency of skills development is the higher priority.

I like the motivation for sure, as I’ve always found too many things in the soccer world are more about the money than the kids (*gasp!*). My only concern is how much video is out there that is unencumbered for people to upload. Creating practice videos isn’t that easy (since the ideal angle is above the field, not the sideline). What we really need is an open source animation application that allows you to use icons and simple animation to lay out a practice drill.

I’ll definitely be watching to see how this goes. A central clearing house of practice videos would be VERY useful. Good luck Jeff!