Soccer Field Positions

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. The term coaching signifies the art of communication. It enables you to let people understand exactly what you wish them to do and in what sense.

Speaking of soccer coaching, almost all the coaches are the former players who decide to take on as coaches. Yet, there are a number of issues that they are forced to handle. The reason why many of these issues show up is the coach’s inability to communicate. 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.

Coaches generally allow their emotions to become involved while watching their kids play. Instead of acting as analytical observers, they become more of spectators. They tend to overlook some chief points that could help the team improve on certain fronts. As such they lose the focus on directing the team towards a win by way of an effective conversation.

Though the coaches today are complete professionals fully acquainted with the game, they lack communication training. For example; in soccer coaching, many coaches are not aware of the utility of a flip chart or a video. 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 is especially important in coaching high school soccer since the players have been into the sport for quite some time. They have been performing soccer drills on the same lines for quite some time, although 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. 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.

In football coaching, there are some points that need special attention and they are as follows:

• Every message from the coach is equally important. So it’s necessary that they are deduced correctly.

• Convey your messages in a positive language to encourage players to play their best game. Help them to improve rather than reprimanding them for not playing well.

• All players should get an equal opportunity to sit with you and learn. It has come to light through various studies that coaches spend much more time with their top players (up to seven times more!).

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

• Reinforce the player’s self esteem by balancing praise with criticism. In coaching high school soccer, the balance should be a bit more towards the praise.

Trust me. When you apply these rules to your training sessions, the benefits will be much more that you’ll expect.

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.

Let’s face it that like confidence, self-control in coaching high school soccer is an option that players can choose. Self-control strategies in soccer coaching depend upon the relationship between emotions and thoughts. We are all aware that our feelings influence our emotions and this consequently boosts our performance.

I’ll explain to you a 12 step strategy that’ll allow you to assist your players in learning the discipline of self-control. However, players should adopt this strategy only when they are certain of its utility for them.

Besides this, they must also assume total responsibility for their actions. The 12 steps are explained below.

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

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. Let them judge the distinction between their behavior, attitudes, and emotions then.

4. Problem: When it comes to coaching high school soccer, try to point out the real problem. For example: Is it the guilt of letting the whole team down because of their performance?

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

6. Reinforcement: Behavior change is accelerated 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. 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: When a particular situation comes up, this is the path that the players must go by.

9. Plan: In football coaching, train the players to systematically and considerably follow their goals.

10. Progress: Teach them how to be patent. Let them understand the principle of gradual improvement including the ups and downs.

11. Setbacks: Help the players in accepting the setbacks, as these will continue to happen. Thus, utilize these to learn new things for improvement.

12. Remembrance: Finally another important point is making the players understand the importance of the reason for they are trying to change. They must understand the importance of what they are doing. What will their future be like, if they don’t change.

We all now that a soccer player who can act speedily with comfort is in a perfect performance state. This simply means use of full energy without stress.

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.

There is lots of good information available in the form of articles, newsletters, and videos on youth soccer coaching community to help you learn new coaching techniques; hurry subscriptions are open.

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.

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. In order to have a team that is mentally strong, the coaches should plan a course that strengthens a positive winning mind-set.

In a player’s career, the coach is an important and a prominent authority figure. It’s the body language, outlook, and expressions of the coach that can outline, add force to, or damage the players self esteem.

In relation to coaching youth soccer, mental strength is about meeting the challenges with a positive attitude. Thus, in both practice and competition, the coach should be the starting point.

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 who wants a mentally tough team must demonstrate a controlled way to deal with emotional setbacks despite personal feelings.

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.

Dealing with mistakes and failure is another area in coaching high school soccer, for which the coach is solely responsible. One of the keys to a player’s motivation and the wish to work towards correcting mistakes is the coach’s response to failure. There are two option for the coach to choose from.

One is to use failure as an opportunity to give the players feedback on how to improve. Convince them to recommit themselves to the endeavor with renewed enthusiasm.

Making use of the failure as an evidence of the player’s inadequacy and proof that he cannot meet the expectations, can be the second choice. This emotional overreaction will de-motivate the players.

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 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. Players can be encouraged to practice self reference by the coach for their improvement. The coach can discuss the situation by asking the players their reaction rather than giving them a definition of the situation. In order to explain, we can take the instance “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.

Hence, apply these methods in coaching high school soccer.

Hence, you must subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community as it information in the form of videos, relevant articles and newsletters in abundance which will help you in being a better coach.

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. 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. The reason being that confidence alone can ensure success.

The players must promise themselves and accept confidence as an attribute to develop. In coaching youth soccer, use the behaviors of two parrots perched on either shoulders to demonstrate this point.

One is a positive parrot that pushes the player to accept and conquer every challenge coming his way by repeating “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.

Once the choice has been made, teach them to take responsibility for their actions. This choice may have to made every single day. Build confidence in the players by emphasizing their involvement in past successes and ready successful players to make a strong team.

Coaching Youth Soccer

Train the players of the fact that in soccer coaching that putting the blame on something or someone else is a mark of insecurity. As a matter of fact, players should be trained on taking every setback as a lesson to become even more confident and not to feel discouraged.

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.”
Automatically, the confidence for the next strike overshadows the distress of the miss.

A team is said to be successful if you have the ability to make quick judgments regarding a player’s ability to survive in competition. Judging physical readiness in football coaching is relatively easier 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.

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. The phrase “If you are not preparing to win, you are preparing to fail”, is used over and over again to trigger off the players.

Experience is a building block of confidence. The reservations, mistakes, losses and denunciation should be taken up calmly by the players so that their underpinning of experience can be built. The feeling that he or she has the knowledge has some experience and knows how to handle the situations, always prevails.

Never doubt it. While coaching high school soccer, building confidence is worked out on an everyday basis so, the players should echo upon the certain key steps to determine what works for them.

To know the latest and the best on soccer, it is preferable to subscribe our youth soccer coaching community as it has bundles of information in the newsletters, articles and the videos.

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.