Soccer Rules

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 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.

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 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.

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.

Dealing with mistakes and failure is another area in coaching high school soccer, for which the coach is solely responsible. How strong the players feels motivated to correct the mistakes made is largely dependent upon the coach’s reaction to failure. A coach has got only two choices.

One of the choices can be employing the failure as a prospect to provide advice and guiding the players towards their improvement. The players should be persuaded to recommit themselves to the challenge with improved inspiration.

Making use of the failure as an evidence of the player’s inadequacy and proof that he cannot meet the expectations, can be the second choice. This emotional overreaction will de-motivate the players.

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. In soccer coaching, players can be questioned and listened by the coaches rather than always being accused of their mistakes. The players can be motivated by having a one-to-one conversation with them and discussing with them 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. The coach can discuss the situation by asking the players their reaction rather than giving them a definition of the situation. For example; “How do you feel you played?” or “Why do you feel you behaved that way?”

The players should think all the way through and account for his or her version of reactions which are a fundamental part of the learning process.

So, start applying the methods you just learnt, in coaching high school soccer.

The information in the form of videos, relevant articles and newsletters, that are posted on our youth soccer coaching community can help you in brushing yourself as a good coach, hence, subscribing it is advisable.

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.

Confidence again is a matter of choice and only a player can make this choice. 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.” 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 decision could also be an everyday task. Build confidence in the players by emphasizing their involvement in past successes and ready successful players to make a strong team.

Coaching Youth Soccer

In soccer coaching, players should be made to know that blaming someone or something is a signal 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.

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

A team is said to be successful if you have the ability to make quick judgments regarding a player’s ability to survive in competition. Judging physical readiness in football coaching is relatively easier than judging mental readiness.

Understandable and apparent messages are required to make such judgments possible. It is necessary to deeply go through the player’s spoken and unspoken messages about his or her knack to succeed in the game.

Success and confidence share a parent- child relationship. 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 a building block of confidence. Players must be conditioned to take in their stride all fears, mistakes, defeats, and criticism to build the foundation of experience they need. It is always felt that he or she has the knowledge, has practiced it before and knows what to do next.

Don’t take it for granted. 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.

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.

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.

You can aid your players in learning the skill and discipline of self-control with the 12 step strategy that I’m going to share 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: 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: Let the players find out and admit the reason that influenced their thoughts and resulted in them losing their emotional poise.

Coaching Youth Soccer

3. Differences: Allow them to go back in time and recall situations where they did not lose control and where they did. Have them decide the differences in their attitudes, behaviors, and emotions.

4. Problem: Make an attempt to identify the exact problem in coaching high school soccer. For example: A players may be feeling responsible of letting the entire team down because of his actions.

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

6. Reinforcement: Behavior change is accelerated by reinforcement. To make the improved skills of players as their permanent skills, you, being a coach, must reward them.

7. Goals: To improve the skills of the players, you must start with several small goals. Assist the players in identifying the relationship between opinions, outlook, 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, train the players to systematically and considerably follow their goals.

10. Progress: Tell them to be patient. Let the players understand that the ups and downs are integral parts of path to improvement.

11. Setbacks: Teach the players on how to live with the setbacks that are unavoidable. So, the better is to use these to learn new ways to tackle these.

12. Remembrance: Last but an important point is to let the players identify the good reason behind the 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 should not be taken lightly. 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 must subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community to get access to plenty of articles, newsletters, and videos to know new and improved soccer skillsyou’re your players.

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.

Majority of coaches in soccer coaching are the players who used to play the game in their younger days. 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.

These have been described one by one.

Emotions of the coaches take over their minds while they are watching their kids play on field. They forget that they have the duty to observe the players analytically rather than merely watching them play. They tend to overlook some chief points that could help the team improve on certain fronts. The coaches fail to have an effective conversation that could help the players get to the winning post.

Even though the coaches are well versed with the technicalities of the game, they are not trained specifically on communication. 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. 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 is especially important in coaching high school soccer since the players have been into the sport for quite some time. They have been performing soccer drills on the same lines for quite some time, although at different levels. By keep on changing training format, coaches can avoid the monotony of repeating the same messages again and again.

The coaches have a tendency to just forget that training sessions are being executed by human beings and not machines. Only with a view to execute the training program well, coaches tend to ignore every other aspect of it. 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 from the coach is equally important. So make sure that they are interpreted correctly.

• Your language should be positive enough to push the players to try hard to perform well. Allow them to grow and become better players instead of highlighting their flaws.

• Make sure you spend quality time with all your players. Research in this filed shows that coaches tend to spend comparatively more time with the best 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.

You have a lot more information coming your way if this is what really inspires you. Just subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community, and get access to the most important and informative topics concerning the game.

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.