Youth Soccer Drills

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 because it is only with confidence that we expect success.

The players must promise themselves and accept confidence as an attribute to develop. In the course of coaching youth soccer, this point can be made clear to them by describing the behavior of two parrots that sit on either shoulder.

One is a positive parrot that pushes the player to accept and conquer every challenge coming his way by repeating “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.” And clearly they have to choose which parrot to listen to.

Also teach them to take full responsibility of the consequences that follow their choice. And this may be an everyday decision. Build confidence in the players by emphasizing their involvement in past successes and ready successful players to make a strong team.

Coaching Youth Soccer

When it comes to soccer coaching, let it be known that blaming somebody or something else is a symptom 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.”
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. In football coaching, there is always a close call between judging physical and mental readiness, but in the end, physical readiness wins the battle.

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

Success gives rise to confidence. Self-belief, hard work done and the mental preparation to face tough situations, hold the key to 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.

Confidence grows up with 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.

Make no mistake about 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.

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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.

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. We all know that our state of mind influences our emotions, which in turn strengthens our performance.

I’ll explain to you a 12 step strategy that’ll allow you to assist your players in learning the discipline of self-control. Nevertheless, it’s imperative that players agree to these steps after that are sure that it holds a lot of importance for them.

Besides this, they must also assume total responsibility for their actions. The strategy has been given below in 12 steps for your reference.

1. Awareness: When coaching youth soccer, help players identify their weak points. 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: Allow them to go back in time and recall situations where they did not lose control and where they did. Let them gauge the difference in their attitudes, emotions, and behavior.

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: 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: Reinforcement encourages a change in behavior. 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: Set a series of small goals for players that will lead them along the road to change. You need to make the players understand the link between actions, thoughts, and feelings.

8. Techniques: Put together different behavioral action items to uphold the confidence level. For example: When a particular situation comes up, this is the path that the players must go by.

9. Plan: In football coaching, teach a planned and systematic way of chasing the goals to players.

10. Progress: Teach them how to be patent. Let them know that improvement always comes in a series of ups and downs.

11. Setbacks: Train the players to accept that setbacks are bound to happen from time to time. 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. The players must always know that why and what are they doing. How important the change is for their future?

We all agree that a perfect performance state for a soccer player is that of a relaxed promptness. In other words, the stress-free efficient performance.

You must not make any mistake about it. 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.

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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.

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 is an important and an influential authority figure in player’s lives. It’s the body language, outlook, and expressions of the coach that can outline, add force to, or damage the players self esteem.

With respect to coaching youth soccer, mental toughness is all about meeting challenges with a positive outlook. Thus, in both practice and competition, the coach should be the starting point.

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 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 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.

Dealing with mistakes and failure is another area in coaching high school soccer, for which the coach is solely responsible. The coach’s reaction to failure is the key to player’s motivation and desire to work hard to correct mistakes. 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. 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. Such a heartbreaking overreaction might 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. During the course of soccer coaching, coaches can help by questioning and listening rather than always tell the players what they did wrong. By discussing about their better performance which they could’ve delivered, the players can be encouraged.

We call it self-reference. Players can be encouraged to practice self reference by the coach for their improvement. Rather than delivering a definition of the situation to the players, the coach can ask the player of his or her view point on the situation. 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.

So go ahead and apply these methods in coaching high school soccer that you’ve just learnt.

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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.

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 explains what you want of people in such a way that allows them to perform it.

Speaking of soccer coaching, almost all the coaches are the former players who decide to take on as coaches. Then also they have to face a number of issues while coaching young players. The reason why many of these issues show up is the coach’s inability to communicate. You must recognize that there are certain issues related to communication that need special attention if your job is to be made easier.

These have been described one by one.

In the course of watching the young players on field, coaches often get emotional. They tend to become spectators rather than analytical observers. They tend to overlook some chief points that could help the team improve on certain fronts. They therefore lose the opportunity to have an objective conversation aimed at winning the game.

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 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 working on these drills for some time but the standards are different. You can do away with the monotony of repetitive messages by frequently changing the layout of training.

It may come as a surprise to you that coaches often forget that their training sessions are carried out by people. The objective of training is lost because the coaches get so much occupied in just conducting the sessions well. 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.

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

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

• Use positive language that encourages players to give their best shot. Challenge them to be better rather than punishing them for being poor.

• 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!).

• Don’t wait for the problems to arise to sort them out.

• Add force to the player’s confidence by harmonizing criticism with praise. Tip the balance more towards praise with players in coaching high school  soccer.

Accept as true. Application of these simple strategies to your training programs will have far reaching results for your team.

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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.