Soccer Conditioning

When coaching high school soccer, it is the behavior and approach of the coach that has a major impact on the performance of the players. In order to have a team that is mentally strong, the coaches should plan a course that strengthens a positive winning mind-set.

The most important and a prominent authority figure in a player’s career is his or her coach. 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.

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.

The coach can observe that closely controlled post-match schedule helps him or her in not getting either too low or too high. 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 who wants a mentally tough team must demonstrate a controlled way to deal with emotional setbacks despite personal feelings.

If the coach shows an unwavering belief in the team’s ability to achieve despite the obstacles, then the team has a framework for building the same mind-set and will become increasingly motivated.

Dealing with mistakes and failure is another area in coaching high school soccer, for which the coach is solely responsible. How strong the players feels motivated to correct the mistakes made is largely dependent upon the coach’s reaction to failure. A coach has got only two choices.

One is to use failure as an opportunity to give the players feedback on how to improve. Influence them to recommit themselves to the attempt with transformed motivation.

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

To make players mentally strong, one way which can be adopted is by accepting responsibility for their thoughts, feelings, and actions and rejecting all possible excuses. While soccer coaching, the coaches can help the players by questioning and listening them rather than always telling the players 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?”

In this way, players must think through and account for his or her view points which are an important part of the learning process.

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

If you feel inspired to know more about being a better coach, subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community that has a lot of relevant information in form of videos, relevant articles, and newsletters.

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.

Like any other sport, in coaching high school soccer too, confidence is the prerequisite that each players need to discover and instill in him or herself to get successful. Often when you say that the players have to play under pressure in a game, it indicates your player’s lack of confidence to handle any situation. I say this because only confident players expect to win and get successful.

Confidence again is a matter of choice and only a player can make this choice. 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 second one is a negative parrot that is always cautioning the player “You can’t do this.” And it’s their choice to select which player to pay attention to.

Once the choice has been made, teach them to take responsibility for their actions. And this may be an everyday decision. Build confidence in the players by emphasizing their involvement in past successes and ready successful players to make a strong team.

Coaching Youth Soccer

In soccer coaching, players should be made to know that blaming someone or something is a signal of insecurity. Rather teach players to take the setbacks as an integral part of the learning curve and not something to deter their confidence levels.

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.”
The distress of the miss instantly motivates, hence ensuring no effect on confidence for the next strike.

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

Such a judgment needs clear messages. The spoken and unspoken messages of the player should be taken into account to ensure his or her ability 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. The feeling that he or she has the knowledge has some experience and knows how to handle the situations, always prevails.

Know this. Building of confidence in coaching high school soccer is an everyday task, so players should reflect on certain key steps to discover what works for them.

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.

In coaching high school soccer it’s a proven fact that self-control is a choice and players have to choose it just like they do for confidence. Self-control strategies in soccer coaching depend upon the relationship between emotions and thoughts. All of us know our mental state influences our passions that accordingly enhance 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. 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 step strategy is explained in the following paragraphs.

1. Awareness: In coaching youth soccer, lend a helping hand to players in identifying their weak points. Let them examine when, where, and why loss of control has occurred previously on field.

2. Understanding: Make the players realize why their thinking changed and how it caused them to lose their emotional balance.

Coaching Youth Soccer

3. Differences: Allow them to go back in time and recall situations where they did not lose control and where they did. Have them decide the differences in their attitudes, behaviors, and emotions.

4. Problem: Make an attempt to identify the exact problem in coaching high school soccer. For example: Is it the guilt of letting the whole team down because of their performance?

5. Belief: The players should be taught to raise their expectations for themselves with self-control as one of the traits. Support them so they can change.

6. Reinforcement: Behavior change is accelerated by reinforcement. Being a coach, you need to appreciate the good changes in the players to ensure that these remain forever.

7. Goals: Start with multiple smaller goals, so that you can take your players along the path to changes. 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 understand the principle of gradual improvement including the ups and downs.

11. Setbacks: Let the players understand that setbacks are there to stay. So, the best way is learn from them and become even stronger.

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 bear in mind why they’re doing this. What would be there in future for them, if they don’t try?

For a soccer player to achieve a perfect performance state, the player must be trained for relaxed swiftness. It means possessing energy without tension.

You must not make any mistake about it. To teach the players in channelizing their energy in way that they are able to produce emotions to help them get rid of tension, include relaxation techniques in coaching high school soccer.

Subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community that has lots of relevant information in form of articles, newsletters, and videos to help you become a better coach and your player’s champions.

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.

When it comes to coaching high school soccer, communication is the most vital part to consider on way to achieve success. The term coaching signifies the art of communication. This has the effect of expressing yourself to people with a view to perform them things in precisely the same manner.

Majority of coaches in soccer coaching are the players who used to play the game in their younger days. 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. As a coach, you need to work upon certain communication related problems for effective execution of your responsibilities.

These are described for you one at a time.

Coaches generally allow their emotions to become involved while watching their kids play. They tend to become spectators rather than analytical observers. They tend to overlook some chief points that could help the team improve on certain fronts. The coaches fail to have an effective conversation that could help the players get to the winning post.

Even though the coaches are well versed with the technicalities of the game, they are not trained specifically on communication. For example; in soccer coaching, many coaches are not aware of the utility of a flip chart or a video. The daily practice gets monotonous when there are communication gaps even though the coach may be technically very sound.

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 performing soccer drills on the same lines for quite some time, although at different levels. One effective method is to continuously vary the format of training in order to avoid the repetition of boring messages.

You’ll be amazed to know that coaches tend to forget sometimes that it is people who carry out the trainings. 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.

• Convey your messages in a positive language to encourage players to play their best game. Let them become better players with every passing day rather than pointing out their weaknesses.

• Spend equal time with all players. Research indicates that coaches spend a lot more time (up to seven times more!) with star players.

• Be proactive in communicating the problem the moment you see it coming.

• Strengthen the player’s self respect by matching criticism with praise. When it comes to coaching high school soccer, tilt the balance slightly more towards praise.

Believe me. Once you start to apply this in your training programs, the benefits will far exceed your expectations.

There’s not limit to the amount of information that you can lay your hands on. You can subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community which has tons to videos, and articles to improve your team’s overall performance.

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.