Youth Football Kicking: A Guide for Parents and Coaches

If your child wants to kick, you are in a good position. The entry cost is a tee and a ball. The contact exposure is far lower than any other position. And unlike almost every other role, starting late is genuinely fine — plenty of kickers begin at fourteen or fifteen and are competitive within a season.

The tricky part is that youth kickers usually receive very little specialist coaching. Most youth staff have no kicking background, so a child who wants to develop is largely dependent on whoever is helping them at home.

That is what this guide is for. It covers what to buy, what good practice looks like at this age, what to expect physically, the safety points that genuinely matter, and how to be helpful without accidentally teaching the wrong things.

Why Kicker Suits Young Players

Several things make this position genuinely well suited to youth football.

Low contact exposure. Kickers take far less contact than any other position on the field. For families weighing football participation, this matters, and it is worth knowing.

Very low entry cost. A tee and a correctly sized ball is a complete starter setup. Compare that with almost any other sport’s equipment requirements.

Size does not matter. Kicking rewards leg speed, coordination and repeatability rather than height or mass. A smaller child is not disadvantaged.

Late starts work. The skill is technical rather than developmental, so a fourteen-year-old picking it up is not years behind. This is unusual in sport and genuinely encouraging.

It can be practised alone. A patch of grass, a tee and a ball is enough. No team required.

Kicking is one of the few positions where a child who simply turns up three times a week with a ball can become genuinely good, without expensive coaching or exceptional athleticism.

What Age to Start

There is no single right answer, but a few useful markers.

Under about 10: keep it entirely playful. Kicking a ball around, getting it airborne, enjoying it. No technique instruction, no volume targets, no drills. The goal is that they like doing it.

Around 10–13: basic technique becomes appropriate — plant foot placement, laces forward, a consistent approach. Short sessions, low volume, lots of encouragement. Still primarily about enjoyment and coordination.

14 and up: structured practice becomes genuinely productive. This is where a young kicker can start following something like our beginner drills programme and see real progress.

An important note: many youth leagues have modified or removed kickoffs for younger age groups on safety grounds. Check what your child’s league actually does before assuming a kicking role exists in the way you imagine.

What to Buy (And What Not To)

Genuinely short list. Resist buying more.

What not to buy yet: kicking shoes (they will not help until technique is stable), portable goalposts (expensive and bulky), and any training gadget promising to fix a swing. A tee, a ball and some cones covers everything a young kicker needs for a long time.

What Good Practice Looks Like

The temptation at this age is to see how far they can kick it. That is the least useful thing they can do.

1. Warm up first, always. Five minutes of running around, leg swings and lunges, finishing with a few gentle kicks. Children skip this instinctively and it matters more than they realise.
2. Keep it short. Twenty to thirty minutes is plenty. A young kicker who finishes wanting more will come back next time.
3. Stay close to the target. Fifteen to twenty yards. At close range they can actually succeed, and success is what sustains interest.
4. Repeat the same setup. Same steps, laces forward, same approach. The whole point is repetition, and repetition only works if the reps are the same.
5. Do one no-ball drill. Ten approaches landing on a cone where the plant foot belongs. Dull, and the highest-value thing available at this age.
6. Finish on a make. End the session with something they can achieve. It sounds soft and it genuinely affects whether they want to do it again.

How Much Is Too Much

Young bodies tolerate considerably less repetitive single-leg loading than adult ones, and this is where enthusiasm causes problems.

Those numbers will look low to an enthusiastic child. They are deliberately low. Once technique degrades from fatigue, additional kicks are rehearsing faults rather than removing them — and at this age they also raise injury risk meaningfully.

Growth Spurts and Injury Risk

This section matters more than any other in the guide, and it is the one most parents have not been told about.

During rapid growth, bones lengthen faster than the muscles and tendons attached to them. The result is a period of genuine, involuntary tightness that has nothing to do with training habits or flexibility work. A child can be doing everything right and still be measurably tighter than they were three months earlier.

That tightness raises strain risk substantially — and it tends to coincide with the age when young kickers are increasing their training and being asked to kick further.

What to do during a growth spurt:

• Reduce volume rather than increasing it. Fewer kicks, shorter sessions.
• Increase mobility work. Daily hip flexor and adductor stretching, done gently.
• Treat complaints as information. A child mentioning tightness during a growth period is giving you useful data, not making an excuse.
• Never stretch aggressively into pain. Firm stretch, never sharp pain, at any age.
• See a professional for anything persistent. Growth-period injuries in young athletes deserve proper assessment.

Our injury prevention guide covers the wider picture.

How to Help Without Hindering

Well-meaning parents can accidentally reinforce exactly the wrong things. A few practical points.

Ask about consistency, not distance. “How many did you make from twenty?” is a far better question than “how far can you kick it now?” — because the second reinforces the metric that matters least and encourages maximum-effort kicking.

Film rather than instruct. Unless you have a kicking background, your instinct about their technique may be wrong. What you can do reliably is hold a phone behind their plant foot and let them watch it themselves. That footage is genuinely more useful than most advice.

Protect the warm-up. Children skip it. You can simply not let the session start until it has happened.

Let them be bored occasionally. The cone drill and the short-range repetition work are dull and they are what produces improvement. Helping a child tolerate that is a real contribution.

Keep the stakes low. A missed kick in a youth game is not a crisis. Children who feel their parent’s disappointment after a miss tend to stop enjoying the position, and enjoyment is what keeps them practising.

Notes for Youth Coaches

If you are coaching rather than parenting, a few things save time.

Check whether your league even uses kickoffs at your age group. Many have modified or removed them, which changes what your kicker needs to practise entirely.

Buy tees in one consistent legal height for the squad. Mixed heights in a shared bin mean kickers unknowingly practise on the wrong ball position and miscalibrate their contact point.

Give specialists a few minutes of actual attention. Kickers typically get the least coaching time of any position. Even ten minutes a week of someone watching them is more than most receive.

Teach the warm-up as a rule, not a suggestion. It is the single highest-value habit you can install at this age, and it will follow them for years.

Buy high-visibility tees and mark them. Orange tees get returned to the bin; black ones get lost in the grass.

Common Mistakes

Frequently Asked Questions

What to Expect at Each Age

A rough developmental picture, so you know whether what you are seeing is normal.

The column worth reading twice is the last one. Parents frequently worry about distance and accuracy years before either is a reasonable expectation, and that worry transmits to the child. At twelve, a kicker whose misses scatter is completely normal — consistency arrives later, and it arrives faster in children who are still enjoying it.

Keep Going

As an Amazon Associate we may earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. This guide is general information, not medical advice — consult a qualified professional about any injury or pain, particularly in young athletes.