Coach Youth soccer

If you are like me, you probably know that in coaching high school soccer, the journey to becoming a complete player begins by building confidence. As a coach, when you declare that your players are under pressure, you are really identifying in them a lack of confidence to deal with a situation. This is because it is only with confidence that we expect success.

Confidence again is a matter of choice and only a player can make this choice. In coaching youth soccer, use the behaviors of two parrots perched on either shoulders to demonstrate this point.

One parrot is a positive parrot that constantly motivates the players to take every challenge that comes in his way by saying “You can do it.” The other is the negative parrot, constantly warning the player “You can’t do this.” And it’s their choice to select which player to pay attention to.

After they’ve made a choice, train them to take the accountability for their acts. This choice may have to made every single day. Develop successful players in your team by helping them build strong inner confidence by focusing on their contribution to success or failure.

Coaching Youth Soccer

Teach your players during soccer coaching that holding someone or something else responsible is a symbol of insecurity. In fact they should be taught to see setbacks as a part of the learning curve and not let it shake their confidence.

Likewise in coaching high school soccer, it’s imperative to teach the players to repeat the phrase “I’ll get the next one” whenever they miss out on any opportunity.
Automatically, the confidence for the next strike overshadows the distress of the miss.

Accurate and quick judgments regarding a player’s caliber and talent is a key to manage a successful team. Judging mental readiness is often a bit tougher challenge than judging physical readiness in football coaching.

To make such judgments easy, there is a need of searching clear messages. To check player’s capability to thrive in the game, it is necessary to browse their verbal and non verbal messages.

Success and confidence share a parent- child relationship. Self-belief, hard work done and the mental preparation to face tough situations, hold the key to success in soccer. “If you are not preparing to win, you are preparing to fail” is a phrase often used to motivate players.

Confidence is built on experience. To build a strong base of the much needed experience, the players must be trained to cope up with their mistakes, defeats and criticism and fears, calmly. It is always felt that he or she has the knowledge, has practiced it before and knows what to do next.

Know this. Building of confidence is an everyday task in coaching high school soccer, so players ought to reflect on positive and main steps for their realization.

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Andre Botelho is known online as “The Expert Youth Soccer Coach” and his free ebooks and reports have been downloaded more than 100,000 times. Learn how to skyrocket your players’ skills and make practice sessions fun in record time. Download your free ebook at: Soccer Coaching.

I don’t know a thing about you, but I’ll bet that the attitude and behavior of the coach in coaching high school soccer strongly influences the performance of the players. Coaches cannot expect to have a mentally tough team unless they plan a program that emphasizes and reinforces positive winning attitude.

The coach is an important and an influential authority figure in player’s lives. The body language, experiences, and attitude of the coach are key attributes that can shape, reinforce, or damage the player’s sense of worth and confidence.

In relation to coaching youth soccer, mental strength is about meeting the challenges with a positive attitude. For this reason, in practice as well as in competition, the starting point should be the coach.

The coach will find that a disciplined post-match routine is helpful in ensuring that he or she does not get either too high or too low. An experienced coach will apply ideas, chronicle, and descriptions, videos, etc to shape the collective approach of the team and prepare them to be mentally tough in their game.

Coaching Youth Soccer

A coach should display control in football coaching, when dealing with emotional setbacks notwithstanding personal feelings, with a view to create a mentally strong team.

Only when the coach shows a firm belief in the team’s capability to accomplish in spite of the problems, the team will have an outline for developing the same mind-set and feel motivated.

In coaching high school soccer, handling mistakes and failure is another important area of responsibility for the coach. How coaches react to failure decides the player’s motivation and his desire to towards correcting the mistakes. There are two choices available to the coach.

To give a response to the players in order to improve them, their failures can be used as an opportunity to correct them. Convince them to recommit themselves to the endeavor with renewed enthusiasm.

The failure can be used as substantiation of the player’s insufficiency and evidence that he cannot meet the prospects. This poignant overreaction will de-motivate the players.

Players can be made psychologically strong by accommodating the accountability for their judgment, stances, and actions and rejecting all probable excuses. The coaches can help the players by being quizzical and lending ears to them rather than pointing at their mistakes while soccer coaching. The players can be motivated by having a one-to-one conversation with them and discussing with them about what they could have done better.

We call it self-reference. The coach can take part in this by always encouraging the players to self reference. Instead of giving the players a definition of the situation, the coach can ask the player his or her reactions. Take an example: “How do you feel you played?” or “Why do you feel you behaved that way?”

The players should think all the way through and account for his or her version of reactions which are a fundamental part of the learning process.

Whatever methods that you’ve just learnt, go ahead and start applying in coaching high school soccer.

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Andre Botelho is the author of “The Expert Youth Soccer Coaching Guide” and he’s a recognized expert in the subject of youth soccer coaching. Learn  how to explode your players’ skills and make coaching sessions fun in less than 29 days! Download your free pdf guide at: Kids Soccer Drills.

Let’s face it that like confidence, self-control in coaching high school soccer is an option that players can choose. In soccer coaching, self-control strategies are based on the relationship between thoughts and emotions. We all know that our state of mind influences our emotions, which in turn strengthens our performance.

You can aid your players in learning the skill and discipline of self-control with the 12 step strategy that I’m going to share with you. However, players should adopt this strategy only when they are certain of its utility for them.

What’s more, the players should also be prepared to take full responsibility for the actions they take. These are the 12 steps for your information.

1. Awareness: In coaching youth soccer, lend a helping hand to players in identifying their weak points. Have them analyze where, when, and how they lost control on field during the past.

2. Understanding: Help the players acknowledge the feeling that changed their thinking and caused them to lose their emotional steadiness.

Coaching Youth Soccer

3. Differences: Give them time to recollect situations when they did lose control and when they did not. And then they should determine the difference in their emotions, attitudes, and behavior.

4. Problem: In coaching high school soccer, try to find out the exact problem. For example: The player may be feeling guilty that he let the entire team down due to his actions.

5. Belief: The players should manage to raise their expectations from them including self-control as one of the behaviors. Support them so they can change.

6. Reinforcement: Reinforcement has the potential to accelerate a change in behavior. Therefore, you must not forget your duty as a coach to recognize and honor the improvements of players so that they stick to these.

7. Goals: To guide the players through skill upgradation process, set a series of small goals for them. Assist the players in identifying the relationship between opinions, outlook, and actions.

8. Techniques: Put together different behavioral action items to uphold the confidence level. For example: If a certain situation happens, this is the course that players must follow.

9. Plan: In football coaching, teach the players to pursue their goals in a planned and systematic way.

10. Progress: Tell them to learn the skill of patience. Let the players understand that the ups and downs are integral parts of path to improvement.

11. Setbacks: Let the players understand that setbacks are there to stay. So, the better is to use these to learn new ways to tackle these.

12. Remembrance: Last but by no means the least, make the players understand that they are trying to change for a reason. They should always be clear about what are they doing and why. How important the change is for their future?

We all agree that a perfect performance state for a soccer player is that of a relaxed promptness. In other words, the stress-free efficient performance.

This should not be taken lightly. Coaching high school soccer must include relaxation techniques so that the players can learn to be in-charge of their emotions to save energy and kill any fears.

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Andre Botelho is a recognized authority in youth soccer coaching and has already helped thousands of youth coaches to dramatically improve their coaching skills. Learn  how to explode your players’ skills and make training fun by downloading your free ebook at: Soccer Practice Drills.

You might disagree, but hear me out on this when I say that in coaching high school soccer, communication is the first step to success. Coaching is an art of communication. It explains what you want of people in such a way that allows them to perform it.

Majority of coaches in soccer coaching are the players who used to play the game in their younger days. Yet, there are a number of issues that they are forced to handle. These issues come up due to the inability to communicate properly. There are some major communication issues that you must understand as a coach to make your job easy and more effective.

These are described for you one at a time.

When coaches watch their kids playing, they tend to become emotional. Instead of acting as analytical observers, they become more of spectators. They fail to notice the important points that could better their team’s performance. Here, they miss out on the important part of having a professional conversation aimed at getting a win.

The coaches are generally not trained to communicate effectively although they have all the knowledge of the game. For example; use of flip charts and videos in soccer coaching is not applied by many coaches as they aren’t aware of them. It’s important for the coach to know the game well but if he is unable to communicate his thoughts, the training gets repetitive.

Coaching Youth Soccer

This occupies greater importance in coaching high school soccer as the players are young but also know the various facets of the game. They have been doing these soccer drills for some time but at different levels. You can do away with the monotony of repetitive messages by frequently changing the layout of training.

It’s a fact that sometimes the coaches completely forget that it is people who perform in the practice sessions. Only with a view to execute the training program well, coaches tend to ignore every other aspect of it. For instance; the communication is incomplete when an instruction is given to a player but without his/ her name thus making it difficult for any of them to apply it.

Some guidelines meant for coaches in football coaching include the following:

• All messages from the coach are important for players. So ensure that they are understood completely and correctly.

• Your language should be positive enough to push the players to try hard to perform well. Let them become better players with every passing day rather than pointing out their weaknesses.

• Make sure you spend quality time with all your players. Research indicates that coaches spend a lot more time (up to seven times more!) with star players.

• Communicate the potential issues that could arise and have a solution ready.

• Add force to the player’s confidence by harmonizing criticism with praise. Tip the balance more towards praise with players in coaching high school  soccer.

Accept as true. Application of these simple strategies to your training programs will have far reaching results for your team.

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Andre Botelho is a recognized expert in youth soccer coaching. He influences well over 35,000 youth coaches each year with his unique coaching philosophy, and makes it really easy to explode your players’ skills and make training more fun in record time. To download your free youth soccer coaching guide visit: Coaching high school soccer.