Anthony Brenner Coaching

Want to generate more power on your laces shots? Try this.

This simple training exercise—placing the ball against a pad—does far more than just build power.

It teaches you what clean, solid contact should actually feel like on the hard bone across the top of your foot while allowing you to get a huge number of quality repetitions without constantly chasing balls.

Additional benefits include:
• Training your nervous system to strike the ball with greater force.
• Developing a locked ankle and properly pointed toe.
• Learning to get your knee over the ball to keep your shots below the crossbar.
• Teaching your knee to finish toward your target, helping engage your quadriceps—the primary source of speed and force in a power strike.
• Providing immediate sensory feedback so every repetition has purpose.

Sometimes the fastest way to improve isn’t adding complexity—it’s creating an environment that lets you feel the correct technique over and over until it becomes automatic.

Quality repetitions create quality technique. Quality technique creates consistent power.

Before the final pass. Before the finish. Before the highlight.

The foundation is the quality of the touches that get you there.

Today the boys worked on creating crisp, compact, rhythmic touches, but there was one rule: they didn’t earn the cue to attack until they established the rhythm first. Too often players rush to get to goal, and in doing so they sacrifice the quality, precision, and control that make the attack possible.

Once that rhythm became automatic, we layered in one of the most important concepts in the game: the second action.

What happens immediately after your touch or pass?

Can you explode into a new space? Can you change direction instantly? Can you move your feet with purpose, even if it’s only one yard?

The second action is one of the traits coaches and scouts consistently notice because it reflects intent, urgency, and game intelligence. Great players don’t admire their touch—they immediately prepare for the next moment.

If your whipped shots are missing the same way every time, don’t assume your technique is broken. Sometimes it’s nothing more than changing the geometry of your approach.

In this session, this talented young player missed her whipped shots about two feet wide on four or five consecutive attempts. That consistency told us something important—it wasn’t random. Instead of rebuilding her technique, we simply decreased the angle of her approach. Immediately, her natural swing path began bringing the ball just inside the post, just as you see in this video.

Whether you’re 12 years old or a 24-year-old professional, don’t overcomplicate what can often have a very simple solution.

Another common issue: if your whipped shots keep curling too far toward the middle of the goal, pay attention to your chest. Many players unknowingly rotate their chest toward the center of the goal during the strike, which allows the hips to rotate more and brings the ball inside. By keeping your chest aligned with the angle of your approach, you often “lock” the hip in a better position, helping the ball stay wider and bend toward the post instead of drifting into the middle.

Small adjustments. Massive results.

This incredibly talented young player drove up from Charlotte this morning with one goal: improve the accuracy of his power shots.

After just a few sets, I noticed a clear pattern—more than 50% of his shots were missing to the right of the target.

The biggest reason? He was lifting his head too early.

As soon as his head came up, his left shoulder came forward, which brought his kicking hip forward, and the ball was pulled off its intended line.

So we used one simple constraint: a numbered coin placed on the ground. His job was to keep his eyes down long enough to call out the number immediately after striking the ball.

That tiny adjustment created immediate awareness and began building the correct motor pattern. By keeping his eyes down through and after contact, his shoulder stayed back, his hip was locked in place and his accuracy improved dramatically.

Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs don’t come from working harder—they come from finally understanding why the ball isn’t going where you want it to go.

Last year I began working with a young player from Michigan born in 2018.

At the time, I had no idea I was watching what I believe is the most technically complete 8-year-old I’ve ever worked with.

His level of technical refinement is extraordinary. The quality he demonstrates today is what I would typically expect from a top player who is three or four years older.

What you’ll see in this reel is just a snapshot of the work we’ve done together. The clips aren’t in chronological order, but every session from day one followed an incredibly intentional process. Every exercise, every progression, and every refinement had a specific purpose. Nothing was random. Everything was built upon a structured methodology designed to create a complete technical foundation.

Watch closely. Pay attention to the details—not just what he does, but how he does it.

This is what happens when exceptional talent is paired with deliberate practice, patience, and a relentless commitment to mastering the fundamentals.

Pay attention to this one.

“You’re not just watching a talented 8-year-old. You’re watching what a year of intentional technical development can look like when every detail matters.”

Note: I’m not claiming he is the best 8-year-old player. What I am saying is that, in more than 30 years of coaching, I have personally never worked with or seen an 8-year-old who demonstrates a higher level of technical competence or more consistently sound technique across all of the fundamental technical areas of the game.

Most players are taught to “kill” their first touch. I teach them to create their next action.

This morning I worked with an incredibly talented player from the North Carolina Courage Academy who wanted to improve receiving balls out of the air.

One important note: just like all of my instructional videos, this session had one specific objective.

Today’s objective wasn’t simply to take a “soft touch.”

In my experience, a touch that dies at your feet often creates an extra problem—you now have to take another touch before you can actually do something meaningful.

Instead, why not take a touch that gives you the most options?IF you have the time and space.

When time and space allow, I want the ball to finish roughly half a yard in front of the player that sets up the next action. From that position, you can:
• Play a pass.
• Dribble immediately.
• Strike a long ball.
• Shoot.
• Change direction.

If your first touch ends up too close to your feet, you’ve already eliminated several of those options before you’ve even made your next decision.

The second objective was learning how to remove the spin from the ball.

A ball without spin settles into the grass much faster and behaves far more predictably, making your next action cleaner and more consistent.

The difficult part isn’t relaxing your foot—it’s discovering the very precise angle of the foot that neutralizes the spin.

If the angle is slightly off, the ball will either spin back into your body or glance away from you.

When the face of the foot is perfectly perpendicular to the line the ball traveled on—and the foot is neither too rigid nor too soft—the ball simply absorbs the impact, loses its spin, and settles exactly where you intended.

The best players aren’t just controlling the ball—they’re controlling what the next play looks like before the ball ever arrives.

Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come from mastering the fundamentals.

This talented young player reached out after recovering from a devastating injury and returning to play with Hurricane FC. Rather than jumping into advanced exercises, we went back to the foundation—because the details that are often overlooked are usually the ones that create the biggest improvements.

The first adjustment? Her plant foot.

Most players plant too close to the ball, and that one mistake creates a chain reaction:
• It’s much harder to get the face of the foot flat and vertical, which is essential for keeping passes on the ground.
• Your vision becomes restricted because the ball is underneath your body.
• Power generation is reduced.
• It’s more difficult to open your foot so it’s perpendicular to your passing line.

The results speak for themselves.

Watch the ball carefully. Several of these passes leave her foot with virtually zero spin—a sign that contact was made almost perfectly through the center of the ball. The accuracy improved dramatically because her ankle bone continued straight toward the target after contact instead of swinging across her body or up at an angle.

The final—and perhaps most overlooked—detail is body weight.

If your weight is behind your plant foot at contact, the ball wants to lift. By keeping her weight centered over her plant foot and allowing her body to move forward with her passing foot after contact, she was able to consistently drive crisp, accurate passes that stayed on the ground.

High-level technique isn’t about working harder.

It’s about understanding the details that most players are never taught.

A D-I commit to Tennessee Tech came to me with one goal:

“My crosses are floating too much. I need to be able to drive them.”

Sixty minutes later… this was the result.

What changed?

-Slightly adjusted her plant foot width.
-Slightly adjusted her plant foot depth.
-Increased the tempo of her approach.

That’s it.

Technique isn’t always about making massive changes. Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come from refining the smallest details.

These balls are absolute class.

Sometimes the best coaching tools aren’t expensive… they’re creative.

This U14 MLS Austin FC Academy center back invited me to Austin after receiving one very clear piece of feedback from his coach at the end of the season:

“Improve your long balls.”

Before we ever worried about distance, we started with the foundation—learning how to consistently create height, backspin, and clean ball flight.

One of my favorite ways to teach this?

✅ Bare feet for instant sensory feedback.
✅ Chalkboard stickers and chalk to make the contact point visible.
✅ A flipped-over goal using the net as the target.

It’s simple, inexpensive, and incredibly effective.

The net provides immediate feedback on both trajectory and consistency. If you set up multiple flipped goals about 5 yards apart, players can begin learning to control not only the height of their long balls, but also their distance with remarkable precision.

Sometimes the fastest improvement doesn’t come from doing more.

It comes from creating an environment where the player can feel exactly what’s happening at contact.

LongBalls BallStriking TechnicalTraining SoccerCoach YouthSoccer SoccerSkills

Sometimes the biggest improvements don’t come from working harder…

They come from removing what doesn’t belong.

This U14 player was already incredibly talented, but one small detail was creating unnecessary variability in every first touch.

Just before making contact with the ball, there was a little too much foot action.

That tiny movement changed the contact point on the ball over and over again, making consistency almost impossible.

By simply calming the foot before contact, her touches immediately became cleaner, softer, and far more predictable.

The lesson?

Consistency isn’t just about repeating the same movement. It’s about removing the movements that don’t need to be there.

So here’s a question for you:

Are you aware of how much your foot moves in the split second before you make contact with the ball?

Sometimes the answer you’ve been searching for isn’t in adding something new…

It’s in taking something away.