Soccer Training

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. The coach can build a mentally tough team only when he has devised a plan that supports a positive attitude aimed at winning.

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. Thus, in both practice and competition, the coach should be the starting point.

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

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.

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.

Coping with failures and mistakes in coaching high school soccer is another area of responsibility for the coach. How coaches react to failure decides the player’s motivation and his desire to towards correcting the mistakes. A coach has got only two choices.

Utilizing failures as an opportunity to give feedback to the players and guiding them towards their improvement can be opted as the first choice. 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. Players will get de-motivated because of this emotional overreaction.

By making the players to accept the responsibility for their judgments, outlooks, and dealings and rejecting all possible excuses, players can be made mentally tough. While soccer coaching, the coaches can help the players by questioning and listening them rather than always telling the players of their mistakes. By discussing about their better performance which they could’ve delivered, the players can be encouraged.

We call it self-reference. The coach can take part in this by always encouraging the players to self reference. The coach can discuss the situation by asking the players their reaction rather than giving them a definition of 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.

Hence, apply these methods 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.

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. You tend to spot the player’s weakness in terms of less confidence to cope with a situation whenever you use the term “pressure” in the game. 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 is a positive parrot that pushes the player to accept and conquer every challenge coming his way by repeating “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.

After they’ve made a choice, train them to take the accountability for their acts. This decision could also be an everyday task. Develop brilliant players in your team by constantly reminding them of their participation in past successes to boost their confidence levels.

Coaching Youth Soccer

Teach your players during soccer coaching that holding someone or something else responsible is a symbol 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.

When coaching high school soccer, condition the players to see every lost opportunity as a lesson and they should keep telling themselves “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. While football coaching, it is relatively easier to judge physical readiness than judging mental readiness.

Understandable and apparent messages are required to make such judgments possible. 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 gives rise to confidence. 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.

Experience is a building block of confidence. 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.

Never doubt 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.

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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.

When it comes to coaching high school soccer, communication is the most vital part to consider on way to achieve success. The art of communicating to the team is what coaching truly is. 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. The reason why many of these issues show up is the coach’s inability to communicate. 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.

When coaches watch their kids playing, they tend to become emotional. They forget that they have the duty to observe the players analytically rather than merely watching them play. They ignore the important facets of the game that could improve the team’s performance significantly. Here, they miss out on the important part of having a professional conversation aimed at getting a win.

Even though the coaches are well versed with the technicalities of the game, they are not trained specifically on communication. For instance; most coaches don’t use videos or flip charts in soccer coaching because they don’t know about them. 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 executing soccer drills for a long time at different levels. By keep on changing training format, coaches can avoid the monotony of repeating the same messages again and again.

You’ll be amazed to know that coaches tend to forget sometimes that it is people who carry out the trainings. The objective of training is lost because the coaches get so much occupied in just conducting the sessions well. 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:

• Every message from the coach is equally 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. Help them to improve rather than reprimanding them for not playing well.

• Make sure you spend quality time with all your players. It has come to light through various studies that coaches spend much more time with their top players (up to seven times more!).

• Don’t wait for the problems to arise to sort them out.

• 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.

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

There’s lot more to know and understand about this aspect of soccer only if you wish to. Subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community and get tips, and tricks in form of articles, newsletters, as well as videos.

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.