Heading the ball is one of the most important skills within the modern game, however, it is often one of the least developed skills at the youth level. Many coaches find student-athletes arriving at university with little to no experience heading the ball. This is a result of two factors.
1. Wide play and crossing the ball is not emphasized at the youth level,
2. Since the majority of youth players are not prepared to challenge for a ball in the air, the players that they play against do not challenge for the ball.
There are several aspects to heading a ball.
1. Willingness - Players must be willing to head a ball. It is not natural to stick your head in front of something moving toward it. Players must be able to move beyond this as heading is a vital part of the game at all levels and the earlier that you can work on the technique, the better. This can begin with juggling, where the player is in complete control of the height of the ball.
2. Posture - Like all techniques in the game, heading the ball begins with a consistent posture of hips forward and shoulders back. This helps with juggling as well as winning headers while jumping in the air and challenging an opponent.
3. Tracking Ability - Soccer is a difficult game as we are tracking an object over a great distance and getting our body into a position to make contact with it as it drops back to field level. Certainly this is done in sports such as baseball and football, however unlike those sports where a hand(s) can be moved quickly and adjusted over a large area by using the arms, the head's ability to move is limited to the extension of the neck and the flex of the body's hips. Consequently the ability to track a ball through the air, predicting its landing spot, and moving to that spot, is critical and must be very precise.
4. Timing of Movements in the Air - Being able to jump in the air and head a ball requires not only the ability to get underneath a ball by moving your feet but the last step becomes the timing to get in the air and make head contact with the ball. This requires exceptional tracking ability but then the ability to gauge the timing of a jump and the magnitude of the jump.
