It seems like every time you turn your head, everyone is busy looking for effective and time-tested tips on how to coach soccer? After all, youth soccer coaching is a dynamic and a difficult job and it is not easy to keep the players motivated to deliver under extreme pressure.
Let me tell you 5 simple tips that’ll help you improve your team’s performance significantly, when followed religiously.
1.Make comprehensive plans: Careful and meticulous planning is essential to achieving success in coaching. When deciding the team goals and the timelines to achieve them, involve the players and take their opinions into consideration too. The team’s progress is affected when the timelines are not met and desired results are not realized.
Once the plan is finalized, remain loyal to it but do keep some space for minor changes as and when required. No matter how well made the plans may be they need changes due to sudden events.
2. Practice sessions should be thrilling and fun-filled: When designing a practice schedule for kids, give due importance to the fact that variety in drills and exercises does the trick. You can introduce these in a variety of ways. For example: keep a few extra minutes for players after practice and have them perform a fun activity of a game that is fun and helps develop a bonding between them.
3. Freedom and Discipline should be exercised together: For a coach, discipline in the team should always be a priority. However, you must also understand that freedom and some respite from control is as important as the respect for rules. In teaching soccer, freedom and relaxation are extremely valuable.
Give the players sufficient time between the drills so that they can do their own stuff, interact with each other and simply relax. In preaching how to coach soccer, it is also extremely important to venture out with the kids on a picnic or an outdoor get together.
4. Be Supportive and tolerant: Always inspire the team to experiment on new things and when they make mistakes, be tolerant. Keep their activities under check. If you must intervene to correct a potential blunder or a silly mistake, do it without reprimanding them.
Keep in mind that angry behaviour leads to fearful players while compassion and encouragement leads to fearless players.
5. Balance things: It is in training sessions that kids get to know about their soccer skills and inherent talent. It is expected that in a team, there are some great players, some regular, while others are poor in performance. It becomes your obligation as a coach to use your best players to improve the poor ones.
Group the bad players with the good ones so that the bad players learn from their good counterparts during and after the sessions. It is also vital that they players do not feel that a comparison is being drawn between them.
It must now be your aim to use these techniques in your training sessions to improve the strategies about how to coach soccer.
You can also join our youth soccer coaching community to learn more and dramatically improve your coaching skills.
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: Youth Soccer Training.
Tags: How to coach soccer, nteaching soccer, soccer coaching, soccer skills