Introduction

In the base drill, the coach calls "B!" and the player's job is to hear it and go. This variation replaces the name with a problem: the gates become numbers — 1, 2, 3 — and the caller calls "Seven minus five!" The player must solve it, say the answer out loud, and exit Gate 2 — all without the dribble dying in the sea.

The design borrows directly from dual-task training in cognitive science: a deliberate second task layered onto a motor task, so the motor skill learns to run on less attention. What degrades first under load — the ball, the maths, or the memory of where Gate 2 is — tells player and coach exactly where the next layer of work lives.

The football content is untouched from the base drill. The processing demand is roughly doubled. That asymmetry is the variation.

Setup

Identical to the base drill, with renamed gates.

10 m × 10 m grid, four corner cones.
The sea: 15–18 cones scattered inside — dense but navigable, re-randomised between rounds.
Three numbered gates, two cones each, 1 m apart: Gate 1 — centre of the north side; Gate 2 — centre of the east side; Gate 3 — centre of the south side. Number the gates visibly — a cone with pen-marked tape, a numbered bib draped on the gate cone, or chalk. The player must point to and name all three before round one.
West side is entry/re-entry; the caller stands outside it with sightlines to all gates.

The question list: the caller prepares 12–15 questions per round in advance, every answer being 1, 2, or 3. Baseline pool: subtraction and addition within ten ("seven minus five", "one plus two", "nine minus eight"). Pitch the arithmetic at "easy at a desk" — the sea supplies the difficulty.

Description

Player enters the sea from the west, dribbling — ball within one foot's reach, alternating feet, head up, exactly as the base drill demands.
Caller delivers a question at irregular intervals — no sooner than 10 seconds after the previous exit, no later than 25. One clear delivery, once. No repeats at baseline.
The solve-window: the player keeps dribbling while computing. Stopping the ball to think is the one prohibition — the dribble may slow and the route may widen, but the ball stays in motion.
The player says the answer out loud ("Two!") and then exits the matching gate — ball through first, player after. Answer before exit, always: it commits the computation and lets the caller verify the thinking, not just the destination.
Wrong answer or wrong gate: the caller says the correct answer neutrally ("It was two"), the player re-enters, play continues. No repeat of the question, no stoppage, no commentary. The miss is one tally mark of data.
Re-enter through the exit gate; open-sea dribbling resumes; the next question comes.
Round runs 3 minutes; rest 90 seconds; three rounds. Between rounds the caller moves 4–5 sea cones.

Caller observation notes (process, not scoreboard): per round, tally correct answer-gate pairs, misses (noting which channel failed — arithmetic, gate location, or ball lost during the solve), and dribble-quality dips during solve-windows. These inform the between-round word and the closing reflection. Never announced as a score.

Progressions

Level 1 — Baseline. As described: answers 1–3, easy arithmetic, single delivery, generous intervals.
Level 2 — Chained sums. Two-step questions: "Three plus four, minus five." The working-memory hold lengthens; the dribble must survive a longer solve-window.
Level 3 — Mixed channels. The caller rotates question types without warning: arithmetic, "how many red cones in the sea?" (forcing a fresh scan), "which gate did you exit last?" (memory), "odd or even: nine?" (odd = Gate 1, even = Gate 2 — rule held from the round's start). Adaptation to the question itself becomes part of the load.
Level 4 — Override. As in the base drill's spirit, the caller may issue a second question mid-solve ("Cancel — one plus one!"). The player must drop the first computation and run the new one. Inhibition under motor load — expensive and trainable.
Level 5 — Fatigue gate. Each exit is followed immediately by a hard 10-second dribble burst around the grid perimeter before re-entry. Questions arrive on the burst's heels. Computing while breathing hard is the closest the drill comes to the real thing: thinking clearly in minute eighty.

Coach guidance

Look for: the dribble surviving the solve-window — touches may shorten and slow, but the ball stays within reach; the answer spoken before the exit route commits; gate-map scanning during the quiet intervals (the player who glances at the gates between questions is doing the drill right).

Cues: "Ball keeps moving while you think." "Say it, then go." "Where's Gate 3 right now — without looking?" (between questions, to audit the map) "Slow feet are fine. Stopped feet aren't."

Praise (process before outcome): a maintained dribble through a long solve; a calm wrong answer followed by an unrushed next rep; an early scan that made the exit instant. "The ball never died while you were thinking — that's the drill." "Wrong gate, right response — you just played on."

Don't fix yet: slowed, conservative dribbling during the first round's solve-windows — attention is recalibrating, and pace returns as the dual task settles. Arithmetic errors in round one are noise, not signal; intervene on the maths only if misses persist into round three, and then by easing the question pool, not by coaching sums mid-drill.

Watch points

Ball stops while the player thinks. The tasks have become sequential, not simultaneous. Redirect: "Ball keeps moving while you think — slow feet are fine, stopped feet aren't."
Searching for the gate after the maths resolves. The gate map was never built. Redirect: "Where's Gate 3 right now — without looking?"
Player exits first, answers after (or not at all). Redirect: "Say it, then go — the answer comes before the gate."
Flustered, rushed reps after a wrong answer. Redirect: "Wrong gate, right response — just play on to the next one."
Dribble quality holds but every answer is wrong by round three. The question pool is too hard for now. Redirect: ease the arithmetic, don't coach sums mid-drill.