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. 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. This is simply because success is the outcome of being confident of achieving it.

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.

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.” The other parrot has the tendency to de-motivate the players saying “You can’t do this.” And clearly they have to choose which parrot to listen to.

Once the players have made up their minds, teach them to become liable for their acts. This choice may have to made every single day. Develop brilliant players in your team by constantly reminding them of their participation in past successes to boost their confidence levels.

Coaching Youth Soccer

In soccer coaching, players should be made to know that blaming someone or something is a signal 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.”
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. Judging physical readiness in football coaching is relatively easier than judging mental readiness.

To make such judgments easy, there is a need of searching 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.

Confidence comes from 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 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 essential to build confidence. The players must be accustomed to their doubts, mistakes, defeats and condemnation so as to establish the experience they need. The feeling that he or she has the knowledge has some experience and knows how to handle the situations, always prevails.

Don’t take it for granted. 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.

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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.

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

The coach plays an influential and a key authority figure in the player’s career. 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. So, it is the coach who should be the starting point in practice and competition both.

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 successful coach will use ideas, stories, and metaphors, videos, and so on to shape the collective mindset of the team and prepare them to be mentally tough in performance.

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.

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.

Coping with failures and mistakes in coaching high school soccer is another area of responsibility for the coach. How strong the players feels motivated to correct the mistakes made is largely dependent upon the coach’s reaction 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. 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. This emotional overreaction will de-motivate the players.

Players can be made psychologically strong by accommodating the accountability for their judgment, stances, and actions and rejecting all probable excuses. While soccer coaching, the coaches can help the players by questioning and listening them rather than always telling the players of their mistakes. They should be encouraged to talk about what they could have done better.

This can be referred to as self-reference. Players can be encouraged to practice self reference by the coach for their improvement. Asking the players of their reaction for the situation is a better option for a coach than giving his own view points or definition on it. “How do you feel you played?” or “Why do you feel you behaved that way?” can be taken as references.

In this way, players must think through and account for his or her view points which are an important part of the learning process.

So, start applying the methods you just learnt, 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.

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. Coaching is an art of communication. It lets you speak to mind in the simplest way and allow the other to do the activity in exactly the same way.

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. Majority of these issues come up due to communication lags. Your role as a coach would become far easier if you just pay attention to some most important communication issues.

These have been described one by one.

Emotions of the coaches take over their minds while they are watching their kids play on field. Instead of acting as analytical observers, they become more of spectators. They ignore the important facets of the game that could improve the team’s performance significantly. The coaches fail to have an effective conversation that could help the players get to the winning post.

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 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 performing soccer drills on the same lines for quite some time, although at different levels. You can do away with the monotony of repetitive messages by frequently changing the layout of training.

You’ll be amazed to know that coaches tend to forget sometimes that it is people who carry out the trainings. They tend to get carried away in the process of coaching and training. For example; Sending out instructions without taking the player’s name leads to uncertainty and confusion.

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

• Every message coming from the coach carries equal importance. They should therefore be taken and read correctly.

• Convey your messages in a positive language to encourage players to play their best game. Allow them to grow and become better players instead of highlighting their flaws.

• Pay equal attention to each player in the team. 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.

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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.

Let’s face it that like confidence, self-control in coaching high school soccer is an option that players can choose. In soccer coaching, self-control strategies are based on the relationship between thoughts and emotions. It is a known fact that our emotional state influences our feelings and as a result of it, our performance is strengthened.

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.

The players should be ready to accept full responsibility for their acts as well. The 12 steps are explained below.

1. Awareness: When coaching youth soccer, help players identify their weak points. Help your players evaluate the reasons how, where and when they lost control on the ground in their past.

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: Let them recall various situations when they managed to maintain control and when he did lose control. Have them decide the differences in their attitudes, behaviors, and emotions.

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: 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: Behavior change is accelerated by reinforcement. Therefore, you must not forget your duty as a coach to recognize and honor the improvements of players so that they stick to these.

7. Goals: Start with multiple smaller goals, so that you can take your players along the path to changes. Help the players understand the connection between thoughts, feelings, and actions.

8. Techniques: To maintain the confidence level, employ a set of behavioral practices. For example: When a particular situation comes up, this is the path that the players must go by.

9. Plan: In football coaching, help the players in learning an organized and efficient way to pursue their goals.

10. Progress: Help them being patient. Let them understand the principle of gradual improvement including the ups and downs.

11. Setbacks: Teach the players on how to live with the setbacks that are unavoidable. Therefore, try to learn something new from every setback.

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.

Make no mistake about it. 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 should not wait to subscribe our youth soccer coaching community as by doing this you will be able to know lot more about soccer and soccer coaching skills with the help of various articles, newsletters, and videos available with us.

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.