Warm up the twelve metre pass and the short return in one repeating cycle. Players alternate between striking a ball the length of the line and cushioning one over five metres, so both ranges are live from the first minute.
Lay two markers about fourteen metres apart with a narrow gate of two more at the midpoint. Three players, one at each end and one at the gate. Play the long pass end to end, then a one-two with the player at the gate, then the long pass back. Keep the long ball along the ground and through the gate. Rotate which player works the middle every couple of minutes.
Warm-ups are the part of a session where complexity does the most damage. Players arrive cold, half of them are still talking, and anything that requires a diagram gets explained three times and started late. The best warm-up passing exercises are the ones a group can begin within thirty seconds of arriving.
This is about as simple as a useful one gets: three players, a line, and a gate in the middle. The cycle repeats identically every time, so nobody has to remember anything after the first repetition, and the coach can spend the whole ten minutes watching technique rather than managing the exercise.
What lifts it above a straight passing line is the gate and the one-two. The long pass has to go through a narrow gap, which makes accuracy matter from the first ball rather than the tenth, and the one-two at the midpoint means every cycle contains both a struck pass and a cushioned return. Alternating those two ranges is exactly what a warm-up should do, and a plain back-and-forth line does not do it.
The middle role is the one to rotate. It receives roughly twice as often as the ends, faces across the line rather than up it, and does all the first-time work. Leaving one player there for ten minutes gives him a good warm-up and the other two a mediocre one, which is easy to miss because the exercise looks symmetrical from the outside.
Save it to your private drills, then change the animation, adjust positions, swap equipment, or drop it into a session block. Or start from a blank pitch and build your own.