Free 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. All of us know our mental state influences our passions that accordingly enhance our performance.

I’ll share with you a 12 step strategy to help players learn the ability and discipline of self-control. Nevertheless, it’s imperative that players agree to these steps after that are sure that it holds a lot of importance for them.

What’s more, the players should also be prepared to take full responsibility for the actions they take. The 12 steps are explained below.

1. Awareness: In coaching youth soccer, lend a helping hand to players in identifying their weak points. Allow them to investigate when, where and how loss of control happened on field in their past.

2. Understanding: Let the players find out and admit the reason that influenced their thoughts and resulted in them losing their emotional poise.

Coaching Youth Soccer

3. Differences: Give them time to recollect situations when they did lose control and when they did not. Have them decide the differences in their attitudes, behaviors, and emotions.

4. Problem: When coaching high school soccer, attempt to pinpoint the problem. For example: Is it the guilt of letting the whole team down because of their performance?

5. Belief: Help the players raise their own expectations including self-control as one of the character. Encourage them to change.

6. Reinforcement: A change in behavior is promoted by reinforcement. So, as a coach, you must reward improved behavior of players on their way to permanent change.

7. Goals: To improve the skills of the players, you must start with several small goals. Guide the players in understanding the correlation between way of thinking, thought process, and actions.

8. Techniques: Set up multiple performance based methods to boost the confidence level. For example: Course of action must be clear in the minds of players when a certain situation arises.

9. Plan: In football coaching, teach a planned and systematic way of chasing the goals to players.

10. Progress: Tell them to learn the skill of patience. Let them know that improvement always comes in a series of ups and downs.

11. Setbacks: Train the players to accept that setbacks are bound to happen from time to time. 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 must understand the importance of what they are doing. What will their future be like, if they don’t change.

It is well known that a soccer player must act swiftly and yet comfortably to be perfect performer. In other words, the stress-free efficient performance.

You must not make any mistake about it. You must include relaxation techniques in coaching high school soccer and train the players on how to control the thought process so that they can keep themselves stress-free.

You must subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community to get access to plenty of articles, newsletters, and videos to know new and improved soccer skillsyou’re your players.

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. This has the effect of expressing yourself to people with a view to perform them things in precisely the same manner.

When it comes to soccer coaching, I’ve observed that most of the coaches often are the ex-players. Then also they have to face a number of issues while coaching young players. These issues come up due to the inability to communicate properly. Your role as a coach would become far easier if you just pay attention to some most important communication issues.

These are described for you one at a time.

In the course of watching the young players on field, coaches often get emotional. They forget that they have the duty to observe the players analytically rather than merely watching them play. They fail to notice the important points that could better their team’s performance. The coaches fail to have an effective conversation that could help the players get to the winning post.

Although coaches have a complete knowledge of the game, but they have a little training in communication. For example; in soccer coaching, many coaches are not aware of the utility of a flip chart or a video. When the coach finds it difficult to communicate his messages clearly, it brings monotony to the game even if he has a complete knowledge of the game.

Coaching Youth Soccer

It is even more important in case of coaching high school soccer because the players are not new to the game. They have been executing soccer drills for a long time at different levels. And one of the ways to avoid the boredom of repeating important messages is to keep varying the format.

The coaches have a tendency to just forget that training sessions are being executed by human beings and not machines. They get so absorbed in the training and coaching as a process that they lose their ground. When a coach tries to instruct something to the play but does not use that player’s name, it creates confusion and is an apt example of bad communication.

Some guiding principles for coaches in football coaching are given below:

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

• Use positive language that encourages players to give their best shot. Challenge them to be better rather than punishing them for being poor.

• 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.

• Adopt a proactive approach to identify the impending problems and solve them.

• Reinforce the player’s self esteem by balancing praise with criticism. Tilt the balance a little more towards praise with respect to coaching high school soccer.

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

There’s not limit to the amount of information that you can lay your hands on. You just have to subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community to get all the latest and relevant information pertaining to the game.

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.

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 most important and a prominent authority figure in a player’s career is his or her coach. The body language, attitude, and expressions of the coach can shape, reinforce, or damage the players self esteem and confidence.

With respect to coaching youth soccer, mental toughness is all about meeting challenges with a positive outlook. For this reason, in practice as well as in competition, the starting point should be the coach.

After the match, the coach should follow a disciplined routine to help him or her staying away from getting 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

In football coaching, the coach must show the ability to deal handle emotional setbacks regardless of personal feelings in order to build a mentally strong team.

When the coach exhibits a strong belief in team’s capacity to achieve the goals notwithstanding the hindrances, the team will get an agenda for developing a similar attitude.

In coaching high school soccer, handling mistakes and failure is another important area of responsibility for the coach. How strong the players feels motivated to correct the mistakes made is largely dependent upon the coach’s reaction to failure. The coach has two choices.

One is to use failure as an opportunity to give the players feedback on how to improve. The players should be persuaded to recommit themselves to the challenge with improved inspiration.

Second, use failure as evidence of the player’s inadequacy and proof that they cannot meet expectations. Players will get de-motivated because of this emotional overreaction.

One way that players become mentally tough is by accepting responsibility for their thoughts, feelings, and actions and rejecting all possible excuses. In soccer coaching, players can be questioned and listened by the coaches rather than always being accused of their mistakes. The players should be encouraged to talk about their better performance which they could deliver.

Such an exercise is called self-reference. The coach can encourage the players by encouraging the players to self reference. Rather than delivering a definition of the situation to the players, the coach can ask the player of his or her view point on the situation. Take an example: “How do you feel you played?” or “Why do you feel you behaved that way?”

This way the players must think through and account for his or her reactions which are a vital part of the learning process.

So go ahead and apply these methods in coaching high school soccer that you’ve just learnt.

The information in the form of videos, relevant articles and newsletters, that are posted on our youth soccer coaching community can help you in brushing yourself as a good coach, hence, subscribing it is advisable.

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.

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. I say this because only confident players expect to win and get successful.

Confidence is a choice and your players have to first choose to become confident. In the course of coaching youth soccer, this point can be made clear to them by describing the behavior of two parrots that sit on either shoulder.

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 parrot has the tendency to de-motivate the players saying “You can’t do this.” And it’s their choice to select which player to pay attention to.

Also teach them to take full responsibility of the consequences that follow their choice. This decision could also be an everyday task. 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

In soccer coaching, players should be made to know that blaming someone or something is a signal of insecurity. Rather they should take responsibility and consider setbacks as a part of the learning curve, not a failure that could shake confidence.

Similarly in coaching high school soccer, the most important self-conversation for any player missing an opportunity to score is the phrase “I’ll get the next one.”
Thus, confidence for the next strike is remains unaffected because of the distress of the miss.

One of the keys to managing a successful team is your ability to make quick judgments regarding a player’s ability to survive the demands of competition. While football coaching, it is relatively easier to judge physical readiness than judging mental readiness.

To facilitate this type of judgment, look for clear messages. It is necessary to deeply go through the player’s spoken and unspoken messages about his or her knack to succeed in the game.

Confidence is the fruit of success. Success in Soccer comes with the belief in yourself that you are well equipped and ready for every situation that may build pressure. In order to make the players emotionally power-packed, a phrase “If you are not preparing to win, you are preparing to fail”, is frequently used.

Confidence grows up with 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 the feeling that he or she has the knowledge, has been there before, and knows what to look forward to.

Make no mistake about it. 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.

There is lot more for you to discover and for that subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community that as tons of articles, videos, and newsletters that keep you updated with the latest and the best on soccer.

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.