Drill Soccer

When it comes to coaching high school soccer, we must accept the fact that self-control is a choice just like confidence that players must make. 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 share with you a 12 step strategy to help players learn the ability and 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. These are the 12 steps for your information.

1. Awareness: Help the players figure out their weak points during the course of coaching youth soccer. Have them analyze where, when, and how they lost control on field during the 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: 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: The player may be feeling guilty that he let the entire team down due to his actions.

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: 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: Set up multiple performance based methods to boost the confidence level. For example: Course of action must be clear in the minds of players when a certain situation arises.

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. So, the best way is learn from them and become even stronger.

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 would the change mean to them 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. Including relaxation techniques in coaching high school soccer and help players control their thinking so they can generate emotions that remove unnecessary tension and save energy.

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.

In coaching high school soccer, you may wish to disagree but it’s true that communication is the most important aspect to get 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.

When it comes to soccer coaching, I’ve observed that most of the coaches often are the ex-players. Yet, there are a number of issues that they are forced to handle. Majority of these issues come up due to communication lags. There are some major communication issues that you must understand as a coach to make your job easy and more effective.

Let me explain them to you one at a time.

When coaches watch their kids playing, they tend to become emotional. Instead of acting as analytical observers, they become more of spectators. 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; use of flip charts and videos in soccer coaching is not applied by many coaches as they aren’t aware of 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. 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. 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 guiding principles for coaches in football coaching are given below:

• 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.

• Spend equal time with all players. 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.

• Accentuate your player’s self worth 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.

When it comes to coaching high school soccer, the first step towards success is the confidence building amongst players who have the potential to become brilliant players. 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.

Confidence is a choice and your players have to first choose to become confident. 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 is the negative parrot, constantly warning the player “You can’t do this.” Without a doubt, it’s the player who has to choose which parrot to take note of.

After they’ve made a choice, train them to take the accountability for their acts. This choice may have to made every single day. 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.

Likewise in coaching high school soccer, it’s imperative to teach the players to repeat the phrase “I’ll get the next one” whenever they miss out on any opportunity.
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.

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. Success in Soccer comes with the belief in yourself that you are well equipped and ready for every situation that may build pressure. In order to make the players emotionally power-packed, a phrase “If you are not preparing to win, you are preparing to fail”, is frequently used.

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. Building of confidence in coaching high school soccer is an everyday task, so players should reflect on certain key steps to discover what works for them.

To know the latest and the best on soccer, it is preferable to subscribe our youth soccer coaching community as it has bundles of information in the newsletters, articles and the videos.

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.

Speaking of coaching high school soccer, the outlook and behavior of the coach are the most important influences affecting a player’s performance. 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. The body language, attitude, and expressions of the coach can shape, reinforce, or damage the players self esteem and confidence.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

To give a response to the players in order to improve them, their failures can be used as an opportunity to correct them. 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.

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.

Such an exercise is called self-reference. The coach can encourage the players by 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.

If you feel inspired to know more about being a better coach, subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community that has a lot of relevant information in form of videos, relevant articles, and newsletters.

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.