Coaching High School Soccer: Secrets Revealed
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.
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.
When coaching youth soccer, mental strength is required to meet the challenges through a positive willpower. For this reason, in practice as well as in competition, the starting point should be the coach.
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.
In football coaching, the coach who wants a mentally tough team must demonstrate a controlled way to deal with emotional setbacks despite 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.
In coaching high school soccer, another critical area for which the coach is responsible is handling mistakes and failure. How coaches react to failure decides the player’s motivation and his desire to towards correcting the mistakes. The coach has two choices.
To give a response to the players in order to improve them, their failures can be used as an opportunity to correct them. Influence them to recommit themselves to the attempt with transformed motivation.
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 poignant 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.
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. For 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.
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.
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