Hi Simon - I coach under 9 girls team.  We spend a lot of time in training doing passing exercises focussed on executing a one-two pass after a dribble through cones.  We also do a similar exercise using passing to beat a line of defenders.  We focus a lot of praise on specific good passes in our game retrospectives - this is 5 mins in our training session where we share feedback from the previous match.  This may not help coach the specific issue with them being head down, but we have found that it makes our players want to pass the ball, and because they want to do it, they tend to try it more often.

Hi Simon - I coach under 9 girls team.  We spend a lot of time in training doing passing exercises focussed on executing a one-two pass after a dribble through cones.  We also do a similar exercise using passing to beat a line of defenders.  We focus a lot of praise on specific good passes in our game retrospectives - this is 5 mins in our training session where we share feedback from the previous match.  This may not help coach the specific issue with them being head down, but we have found that it makes our players want to pass the ball, and because they want to do it, they tend to try it more often.

Thanks Ian. Great input. Sometimes easy to forget how effective the simple motivator of praise is. High praise every time a player makes a smart passing decision rather than opting for a clearly unlikely dribble is going to help positive that reinforcement.