Soccer Coaching Tips

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. Coaches cannot expect to have a mentally tough team unless they plan a program that emphasizes and reinforces positive winning attitude.

In a player’s career, the coach is an important and a prominent authority figure. The coach’s body language, mind-set, and expressions can shape, strengthen, or harm the player’s confidence.

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. A competent coach will draw on ideas, narrative, and symbols, videos, and like that to shape the collective outlook of the team and ready them to be mentally strong on the playing field.

Coaching Youth Soccer

In football coaching, the coach should aim at building a mentally tough team by demonstrating his or her ability to cope with emotional setbacks in spite of personal feelings.

As a result of the coach’s total belief in the ability of the team to reach their goals regardless of the barriers, the team gets a structure to build a mind-set on the same lines.

In coaching high school soccer, handling mistakes and failure is another important area of responsibility for the coach. 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 choices available to the coach.

One is to use failure as an opportunity to give the players feedback on how to improve. Persuade them to recommit themselves to the effort with renewed motivation.

The player’s dearth and attestation that he cannot meet the expectations can be used as an evidence of failure. 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 can be motivated by having a one-to-one conversation with them and discussing with them about what they could have done better.

Such an exercise is called 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. In order to explain, we can take the instance “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.

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

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.

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

Like many choices we make, confidence as an attribute is also chosen by players. 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.” Without a doubt, it’s the player who has to choose which parrot to take note of.

Once the players have made up their minds, teach them to become liable for their acts. The players may have to make this decision on a daily basis. 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

Train the players of the fact that in soccer coaching that putting the blame on something or someone else is a mark 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.

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.”
This instantly ensures that the distress of the miss has not affected the confidence for the next strike.

In a team, caliber, mental strength and judgments regarding a player’s ability to survive the demands of competition, hold the key for its success. 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.

Success and confidence share a parent- child relationship. Success in Soccer comes with the belief in yourself that you are well equipped and ready for every situation that may build pressure. “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. The reservations, mistakes, losses and denunciation should be taken up calmly by the players so that their underpinning of experience can be built. It is always felt that he or she has the knowledge, has practiced it before and knows what to do next.

Make no mistake about 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.

It is advisable to subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community as lot more can be determined by the newsletters, videos and articles which keep you updated about the latest developments in 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.

When it comes to coaching high school soccer, communication is the most vital part to consider on way to achieve success. Coaching is an art of communication. It enables you to let people understand exactly what you wish them to do and in what sense.

In soccer coaching, I’ve come to notice that generally the former players have assumed the responsibility of being 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.

Let me explain them to you one at a time.

Emotions of the coaches take over their minds while they are watching their kids play on field. The coaches become spectators instead of adopting a critical approach to observing the kids. They fail to notice the important points that could better their team’s performance. As such they lose the focus on directing the team towards a win by way of an effective conversation.

The coaches are generally not trained to communicate effectively although they have all the knowledge of the game. For example; in soccer coaching, many coaches are not aware of the utility of a flip chart or a video. The coach may be technically talented but if he not able to communicate properly, regular practice sessions get really boring for the kids.

Coaching Youth Soccer

In coaching high school soccer, communication becomes all the more important because the kids start to understand the game quite well. 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. Only with a view to execute the training program well, coaches tend to ignore every other aspect of it. 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 guidelines meant for coaches in football coaching include the following:

• All messages from the coach are important for players. So it’s necessary that they are deduced correctly.

• Your language should be positive enough to push the players to try hard to perform well. Challenge them to be better rather than punishing them for being poor.

• All players should get an equal opportunity to sit with you and learn. Research in this filed shows that coaches tend to spend comparatively more time with the best players (up to seven times more!).

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

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

Believe my words. Your training programs will be immensely benefitted as a result of adopting these simple exercises.

There’s lot more to know and understand about this aspect of soccer only if you wish to. Just subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community, and get access to the most important and informative topics concerning 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.

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. In soccer coaching, self-control strategies are based on the relationship between thoughts and emotions. We are all aware that our feelings influence our emotions and this consequently boosts our performance.

With a view to help the players in learning the skill and discipline of self-control, there is a 12 step strategy which I shall discuss with you. 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: Help the players figure out their weak points during the course of coaching youth soccer. Help your players evaluate the reasons how, where and when they lost control on the ground in their past.

2. Understanding: Allow the players to make out the reason that affected their thinking in such a way that they lost their emotional stability.

Coaching Youth Soccer

3. Differences: Give them time to recollect situations when they did lose control and when they did not. Let them judge the distinction between their behavior, attitudes, and emotions then.

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

5. Belief: Teach the players to raise their expectations for their own selves with self-control as one of the qualities. Give confidence to players to change themselves.

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. Assist the players in identifying the relationship between opinions, outlook, and actions.

8. Techniques: Set up multiple performance based methods to boost 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: Teach them how to be patent. Let the players understand that the ups and downs are integral parts of path to improvement.

11. Setbacks: Train the players to accept that setbacks are bound to happen from time to time. Thus, utilize these to learn new things for improvement.

12. Remembrance: Last but an important point is to let the players identify the good reason behind the change. They must understand the importance of what they are doing. What would be there in future for them, if they don’t try?

It is well known that a soccer player must act swiftly and yet comfortably to be perfect performer. It signifies the ability to use energy without any fear.

This is of utmost importance. 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.

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.