Soccer Drills For Youth

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

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 coaching youth soccer, mental toughness is about meeting challenges with positive self control. Therefore, the coach must be the starting point in both practice and competition.

The coach will find that a disciplined post-match routine is helpful in ensuring that he or she does not get either too high or too low. A successful coach will exploit ideas, anecdotes, and images, videos, and all that to shape the collective attitude of the team and train them to be mentally tough in practice.

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.

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, another critical area for which the coach is responsible is handling mistakes and failure. 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 of the choices can be employing the failure as a prospect to provide advice and guiding the players towards their improvement. Influence them to recommit themselves to the attempt with transformed motivation.

Second, use failure as evidence of the player’s inadequacy and proof that they cannot meet expectations. Such a heartbreaking overreaction might 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. During the course of soccer coaching, coaches can help by questioning and listening rather than always tell the players what they did wrong. The players should be encouraged to talk about their better performance which they could deliver.

This can be referred to as self-reference. Self reference can be encouraged in the players by the coach to motivate them to perform better. 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?”

It is important for the players to think deeply and thoroughly and then account for their reactions which are very critical part of the learning process.

Whatever methods that you’ve just learnt, go ahead and start applying 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.

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

Like many choices we make, confidence as an attribute is also chosen by players. When coaching youth soccer, illustrate this point by telling them the behaviors of two parrots sitting on either shoulder.

One of them is the positive parrot, always urging the player to face up to the challenge saying “You can do it.” The other is the negative parrot, constantly warning the player “You can’t do this.” That’s why it the player who has to make a choice between which parrot to follow.

Once the choice has been made, teach them to take responsibility for their actions. The players may have to make this decision on a daily basis. Prepare a team of successful players full of confidence by directing their attention, energy, and enthusiasm in practice towards their role in past success.

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.

Also, in coaching high school soccer, the players should learn by heart the phrase “I’ll get the next one” to keep them going whenever they lose any opportunity.
The distress of the miss instantly motivates, hence ensuring no effect on confidence for the next strike.

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. In football coaching, there is always a close call between judging physical and mental readiness, but in the end, physical readiness wins the battle.

To facilitate this type of judgment, look for clear messages. Look for both verbal and non verbal messages that the player is sure of his or her ability to succeed in the game.

Confidence is the fruit of success. When you are completely satisfied with your work that you have done and when you are ready to face a pressure – cooker scenario which is anytime possible, you achieve success in soccer. The common stimulus used for motivating the players is “If you are not preparing to win, you are preparing to fail.”

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 of he or she having the knowledge, a little more know – how due to experience and thus, the thought process of planning the next step, prevails.

Know this. 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.

Let’s face it that like confidence, self-control in coaching high school soccer is an option that players can choose. In soccer coaching, the connection between emotions and thoughts establishes the self-control strategies. 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. But make sure that your player’s only take these steps when they are sure of its value to them.

Also, players must be ready to take full accountability for their actions. These are the 12 steps for your information.

1. Awareness: Assist the players in finding out their weaknesses in coaching youth soccer. Let them examine when, where, and why loss of control has occurred previously on field.

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: Let the players recall situations in the past when they did and did not lost control. 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: A players may be feeling responsible of letting the entire team down because of his actions.

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

6. Reinforcement: Reinforcement encourages a change in behavior. So, as a coach, you must reward improved behavior of players on their way to permanent change.

7. Goals: Set a series of small goals for players that will lead them along the road to change. Guide the players in understanding the correlation between way of thinking, thought process, and actions.

8. Techniques: To maintain the confidence level, employ a set of behavioral practices. For example: Players must know which path to follow in a certain situation.

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. Help the players realize the value of ups and downs in the path to improvement.

11. Setbacks: Let the players understand that setbacks are there to stay. So, the better is to use these to learn new ways to tackle these.

12. Remembrance: Last but not the least, help the players understand that there is a reason behind their attempts to change. They should always bear in mind why they’re doing this. 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. This simply means use of full energy without stress.

Make no 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.

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.

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 art of communicating to the team is what coaching truly is. 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. Even then they have to deal with many issues in coaching young players. Most of these issues are a result of lack of communication. There are some major communication issues that you must understand as a coach to make your job easy and more effective.

I’ll explain them one by one.

Coaches generally allow their emotions to become involved while watching their kids play. The coaches become spectators instead of adopting a critical approach to observing the kids. As such they are not able to see the key points that could make all the difference in 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, use of a video or a flip chart is not very common since most coaches don’t know about them. The daily practice gets monotonous when there are communication gaps even though the coach may be technically very sound.

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 working on these drills for some time but the standards are different. And one of the ways to avoid the boredom of repeating important messages is to keep varying the format.

It may come as a surprise to you that coaches often forget that their training sessions are carried out by people. They get so absorbed in the training and coaching as a process that they lose their ground. For example; Sending out instructions without taking the player’s name leads to uncertainty and confusion.

There are certain guiding principles in football coaching which are as follows:

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

• Your messages should have a positive impact on the players to put their best foot forward. Let them become better players with every passing day rather than pointing out their weaknesses.

• Make sure you spend quality time with all your players. Studies indicate that coaches spend relatively more time with star players in team (up to seven times more!).

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

• 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.

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

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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.