SC Soccer Forums SCSoccer.com Forums Girls Varsity Soccer Chest trap/handling

From my experience the chest trap in the early 90s was ok for girls on any occassion, using for control or protection.

I remember asking about it then during games and never saw it in a rule book, usually just a town/club/field rule.

After 2002 ish refs started calling it more and in turn coaches stopped teaching it.

The main thing I see if you call it "protection" don't play it to your feet and control it. Both males and females have a nose can the protection clause be used there as well?

I have a few players that do it and I have grilled them to no end on stopping it. I can count maybe 15 times 6 in the box and I never had it called.

I see many players now with much better chest conrol than years past. It's all training what you see are some end results of teaching the technique properly.

There is no "protection" clause. It simply comes down to whether or not the referee believes the player is deliberately playing the ball with her hand or arm. Is it "hand to ball" or "ball to hand"?

Both guy's and girls do it, i dont usually see it cause anything drastic in a game. They do it to keep themselves safe and i think thats fine.

Maybe it's just my daughter, but she very rarely chest traps. She will put her head down and spear the ball forward or time it so that she knocks the ball to her feet with her head. (that's probably hard to picture) I do believe that coaches should work more on teaching these ladies to chest trap the ball. As someone stated in another post, a chest trap is high on the chest and not in the area that would cause discomfort.

I'm gonna get kind of medical for a second, partly because I just finished going over that section of pathology, but also to maybe help some guys understand how and why girls need to trap balls a little differently when they chest the ball.

For one, the chest of a girl is not just made of fat. If you're a dad, you know that it serves a very important purpose early on and because of that, it's built of a lot of dense connective tissue with a lot of glands and basically a tube system. The chest isn't going to squish in like a pillow when it's hit from any direction. There's a little give, but at a certain point you're just trying to smoosh solid tissue where it won't move anymore against a hard sheet of muscle and ribs.

Secondly, there's also a reason that the chest is a 'special' zone of the body. There's a lot of nerves in and around the area that can respond quite angrily when irritated. Again, causing pain.

To avoid this, if you can't trap properly, a lot of girls will cross their arms or tuck them so that the ball hits that instead of the chest.

For most girls, the proper way to trap is to think of the upper slope of the chest as a shelf. As you let the ball drop onto the shelf, you bend your knees so your body acts like a compressed spring, absorbing the momentum of the ball and letting it drop to your feet. This avoids some of the sensitive nerve areas, decreases the force with which the ball hits you, and avoids compressing the tissue to a painful degree.

Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't other ways to successfully trap a ball with the chest. It depends on the physique of the girl and speed of the ball, etc. But this is usually the safest bet to bring a ball down safely and control it.