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 most important and a prominent authority figure in a player’s career is his or her coach. 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. 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 successful coach will exploit ideas, anecdotes, and images, videos, and all that to shape the collective attitude of the team and train them to be mentally tough in practice.
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.
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. 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.
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.
To make players mentally strong, one way which can be adopted 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 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. 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. Take an example: “How do you feel you played?” or “Why do you feel you behaved that way?”
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.
Tags: Coaching high school soccer, coaching youth soccer, football coaching, soccer coaching