Soccer!

In soccer there are two teams. Each team has one goalie, three full-backs, two mid-fielders, one striker, and one sweeper.

The goalie is one of the most important player because they block the ball from getting into the goal. The goalie is the only person who can touch the ball with there hands, but they can only pick it up if the ball is inside the goalie box. If they touched the ball outside of the box, it would be a handball and would be a free kick for the other team.

Now lets talk about the full-backs. They try to take the ball away from the attacking offense and feed the ball up to their own offense. There are three positions, right, left, and center. The right and left cover the sides of the field and the center defends the center of the field and can help the sides if they are in trouble.

The sweeper gets the ball from the defense and passes it up to the striker or the mid-fielders.

The strikers job it to push up as far as the other teams defense will let him without going off-sides. When the Striker goes up as far as they can, he passes it to one of the mid-fielders. Or if the defense are back far enough he can go up farther and take a shot on the goal.

Now I'll talk about plays. A throw-in is when a player kicks the ball out-of-bounds, and the other team gets to throw the ball in down the side-lines to one of their team-mates. A goal kick is when a player on the other team kicks the ball out on the end lines. It is usually the goalie who kicks it in, but another defender can kick it if they want to. A corner kick is when the other team kicks it out on the sides close to the end lines.

Lastly I'm going to talk about off-sides. This happens when you dribble the ball past the last defender. To avoid this, all you have to do is pass it to one of your team-mates who is behind the last defender.