Teaching Soccer

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, attitude, and expressions of the coach can shape, reinforce, or damage the players self esteem and confidence.

When coaching youth soccer, mental strength is required to meet the challenges through a positive willpower. So, it is the coach who should be the starting point in practice and competition both.

In order to make sure that the coach does not get either too high or too low, he or she should pursue a disciplined post match routine. 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 must show the ability to deal handle emotional setbacks regardless of personal feelings in order to build a mentally strong team.

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.

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.

Utilizing failures as an opportunity to give feedback to the players and guiding them towards their improvement can be opted as the first choice. The players should be persuaded to recommit themselves to the challenge with improved inspiration.

The failure can be used as substantiation of the player’s insufficiency and evidence that he cannot meet the prospects. Players will get de-motivated because of this emotional overreaction.

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.

We call it 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?”

This way the players must think through and account for his or her reactions which are a vital 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. 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 is a choice and your players have to first choose to become confident. Explain this point in coaching youth soccer by telling them the conduct to two parrots sitting on both shoulders.

Out of the two, one has a positive behavior and he keeps telling the player to face the challenges head on by saying “You can do it.” Then there is the other parrot who is full of negativity and keeps telling the player “You can’t do this.” Without a doubt, it’s the player who has to choose which parrot to take note of.

Also teach them to take full responsibility of the consequences that follow their choice. And this may be an everyday decision. 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.

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.”
Thus, confidence for the next strike is remains unaffected because of the distress of the miss.

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

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. 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.

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 the feeling that he or she has the knowledge, has been there before, and knows what to look forward to.

Never doubt it. In coaching high school soccer, constructing confidence is a daily task and hence, players should intimate on the key steps to find out their positives.

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.

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.

I’ll share with you a 12 step strategy to help players learn the ability and discipline of self-control. Still, it is better that players take up these steps only when they feel that it is going to be of value to them.

The players should be ready to accept full responsibility for their acts as well. The strategy has been given below in 12 steps for your reference.

1. Awareness: Help the players figure out their weak points during the course of coaching youth soccer. Allow them to investigate when, where and how loss of control happened on field in their past.

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: 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 instance: It may be the guilty feeling in a player that he let the whole team down due to his acts.

5. Belief: Help the players raise their own expectations including self-control as one of the character. Support them so they can change.

6. Reinforcement: A change in behavior is promoted by reinforcement. 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: Put together different behavioral action items to uphold 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 them know that improvement always comes in a series of ups and downs.

11. Setbacks: Help the players in accepting the setbacks, as these will continue to happen. Therefore, try to learn something new from every setback.

12. Remembrance: Last but an important point is to let the players identify the good reason behind the change. They should always be clear about what are they doing and why. How important the change is for their future?

We all now that a soccer player who can act speedily with comfort is in a perfect performance state. In other words, the stress-free efficient performance.

This is of utmost importance. 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.

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.

When it comes to soccer coaching, I’ve observed that most of the coaches often are the ex-players. Still, there are several problems that they have to find solutions to. Majority of these issues come up due to communication lags. You must recognize that there are certain issues related to communication that need special attention if your job is to be made easier.

Let me explain them to you one at a time.

In the course of watching the young players on field, coaches often get emotional. They tend to become spectators rather than analytical observers. 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 instance; most coaches don’t use videos or flip charts in soccer coaching because they don’t know about them. When the coach finds it difficult to communicate his messages clearly, it brings monotony to the game even if he has a complete knowledge of the game.

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 executing soccer drills for a long time at different levels. 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 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:

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

• Use positive language that encourages players to give their best shot. Help them to improve rather than reprimanding them for not playing well.

• Pay equal attention to each player in the team. Research in this filed shows that coaches tend to spend comparatively more time with the best players (up to seven times more!).

• Communicate the potential issues that could arise and have a solution ready.

• Add force to the player’s confidence by harmonizing criticism with praise. 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. 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.