Shooting in Soccer

With no opportunity to use your hands as a field player in soccer, kicking provides your means of advancing the ball for a dribble, pass or shot. The more types of kicks you master, the more weapons you have during a game. Shooting is a skill where a person hits the ball at the goal to score a goal. Soccer shooting is an essential part of soccer as you cannot win the game if you cannot score goals.

Positions of Soccer Shooting

Static Positions

Static position soccer shooting drills refer to the player's position, not the ball (although in the case of free kicks, both the ball and the player are static). Free kicks are very helpful for your players in training their shot accuracy and usually they are used for just that, instead of being a means to get your shot power trained. You could try having all your players execute free kicks, or just select a handful that you noticed are better at this role and form them as specialists in free kicks.

The other way you can practice soccer shooting drills in a static position is by having one player in the center, receiving passes from the sides and shooting, without moving towards the ball. This simulates a match scenario that occurs quite often, with a striker or a central midfielder having to shoot the ball with a single touch from a static position, because he has no space to move around, or no time to do so.

Dynamic Positions

There's a wider array of soccer drills for shooting that can be practiced from dynamic positions, than from static ones. One of the most popular is the run-and-shoot: have your players positioned in a line at the center of the pitch and send a keeper in the goal. Now, have each player sprint with the ball at his feet up to a certain point that you decide (place a cone as a visual marker), then cannon a shot to goal from there. If you want to practice long range shots, you'll obviously have them shooting for far away, whereas if you want more finishing accuracy, you will have your players shoot from the edge of the box, or even inside it.

A slight variation of the run and shoot soccer drill is the wall-and-shoot. Basically, you'll have the same setup, with the players at half court and a goalkeeper guarding the net of one of the goals, but you will also have a player somewhere near the penalty area, who will act as a wall passer for your incoming players. So a player will sprint with the ball, when he is close to the wall passer he initiates a one-two and shoots the ball in full-on sprint, as soon as he receives it back.

After a while, the above mentioned soccer drills for shooting tend to get repetitive, so you might want to dig up some more, or simply create variations of these. You can work around the dynamic position ones and create new drills of your own.
Valuable Soccer Shooting Tips

1. Bigger Leg Muscles

Building bigger leg muscles will make it easier to shoot harder. However, you will also get more resistant against serious muscle injuries. It is therefore vital for you to combine your leg training with ball training. One way is to lift weights one day and practice on shooting next day. By practicing like this you will be able to increase your muscle mass while you will maintain your flexibility and adaptability on the soccer field.

2. Shooting with accuracy

Shooting doesn't only mean kicking the ball with great force. What is more vital is to kick the ball with accuracy. If you can't kick the ball with accuracy then how do you then expect to get it on the goal?
You may have luck and get one of this great hard shoots but you will score many more goals by having a solid accuracy.

3. Find a goalkeeper to practice with

It is great for your overall soccer skills to find a goalkeeper to practice with. You will also have much more fun comparing to practicing by yourself and an empty goal. A goalie will keep you more focused and you will also get a chance to practice on real game situations.

4. Different methods for shooting
You should not only focus on improving one type of shoot. While practicing on your shooting skills you should try to use your instep, outside, and inside of foot. You can't just limit yourself to one shooting method as different situations require different types of shoot. For ex; it is better to shoot with the inside of your foot from 8-12 yards range. However, 20 + yards ranges are perfect for instep shoots.

Other things to adopt

Don't think about it, just do it!
If there is an opportunity to shoot, go for it. To win a game of soccer, you must score goals. If you don't take shots on goal, you have no chance of scoring and winning.

Too many times, you will see a player pass up a good opportunity on goal by passing the ball. Goal poachers, however, have a different approach. As soon as they receive the ball, their first thoughts are to shoot, even at the tightest of angles. Only when there is a very low percentage of success that they might consider looking for another option instead of soccer shooting. Some people might consider this greedy for goal, but in the long run, they will most likely score more goals then someone who doesn't shoot at all.

Analyze your game

You should try to analyze your performance after every soccer game. You may for ex use a block and take notice on how many goals you have scored, the amount of shoots that have hit the goal, how many times you have managed to dribble your defender and so on. By analyze your own performance you will be able to spot mistakes and correct them in the next game.

Satisfied? Yes or No
You should never feel satisfied with your shooting skills. Keep in mind that there are always things you can improve and you should always try to improve these no matter how good you are.