Soccer Training Tips

Let’s face it that like confidence, self-control in coaching high school soccer is an option that players can choose. In soccer coaching, self-control strategies are based on the relationship between thoughts and emotions. All of us know our mental state influences our passions that accordingly enhance our performance.

I’ll share with you a 12 step strategy to help players learn the ability and discipline of self-control. However, players should adopt this strategy only when they are certain of its utility for them.

What’s more, the players should also be prepared to take full responsibility for the actions they take. The strategy has been given below in 12 steps for your reference.

1. Awareness: Assist the players in finding out their weaknesses in coaching youth soccer. Help your players evaluate the reasons how, where and when they lost control on the ground 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. And then they should determine the difference in their emotions, attitudes, and behavior.

4. Problem: When coaching high school soccer, attempt to pinpoint the problem. For example: The player may be feeling guilty that he let the entire team down due to his actions.

5. Belief: The players should be taught to raise their expectations for themselves with self-control as one of the traits. Give confidence to players to change themselves.

6. Reinforcement: A change in behavior is promoted by reinforcement. Being a coach, you need to appreciate the good changes in the players to ensure that these remain forever.

7. Goals: Set a series of small goals for players that will lead them along the road to change. Assist the players in identifying the relationship between opinions, outlook, and actions.

8. Techniques: Put together different behavioral action items to uphold the confidence level. For example: If a certain situation happens, this is the course that players must follow.

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

10. Progress: Tell them to learn the skill of patience. Let them understand the principle of gradual improvement including the ups and downs.

11. Setbacks: Teach the players on how to live with the setbacks that are unavoidable. So, the best way is learn from them and become even stronger.

12. Remembrance: Last but an important point is to let the players identify the good reason behind the change. They should always bear in mind why they’re doing this. What will their future be like, if they don’t change.

It is well known that a soccer player must act swiftly and yet comfortably to be perfect performer. This simply means use of full energy without stress.

This should not be taken lightly. 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.

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.

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.

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.

If you feel inspired to know more about being a better coach, subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community that has a lot of relevant information in form of videos, relevant articles, and newsletters.

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. 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. I say this because only confident players expect to win and get successful.

Confidence is a choice and your players have to first choose to become confident. In coaching youth soccer, use the behaviors of two parrots perched on either shoulders to demonstrate this point.

One parrot is a positive parrot that constantly motivates the players to take every challenge that comes in his way by saying “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.” That’s why it the player who has to make a choice between which parrot to follow.

Once the players have made up their minds, teach them to become liable for their acts. 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

Teach your players during soccer coaching that holding someone or something else responsible is a symbol of insecurity. Rather they should take responsibility and consider setbacks as a part of the learning curve, not a failure that could shake confidence.

Likewise in coaching high school soccer, it’s imperative to teach the players to repeat the phrase “I’ll get the next one” whenever they miss out on any opportunity.
The distress of the miss instantly motivates, hence ensuring no effect on 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. While football coaching, it is relatively easier to judge physical readiness than judging mental readiness.

Such a judgment needs 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 and confidence share a parent- child relationship. Self-belief, hard work done and the mental preparation to face tough situations, hold the key to success in soccer. “If you are not preparing to win, you are preparing to fail” is a phrase often used to motivate players.

Confidence grows up with experience. To build a strong base of the much needed experience, the players must be trained to cope up with their mistakes, defeats and criticism and fears, calmly. The feeling that he or she has the knowledge has some experience and knows how to handle the situations, always prevails.

Don’t take it for granted. Building of confidence in coaching high school soccer is an everyday task, so players should reflect on certain key steps to discover what works for them.

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.

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. Coaching is an art of communication. This has the effect of expressing yourself to people with a view to perform them things in precisely the same manner.

When it comes to soccer coaching, I’ve observed that most of the coaches often are the ex-players. Yet, there are a number of issues that they are forced to handle. These issues come up due to the inability to communicate properly. You must recognize that there are certain issues related to communication that need special attention if your job is to be made easier.

I’ll explain them one by one.

Emotions of the coaches take over their minds while they are watching their kids play on field. 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. Here, they miss out on the important part of having a professional conversation aimed at getting a win.

Although coaches have a complete knowledge of the game, but they have a little training in communication. For example; use of flip charts and videos in soccer coaching is not applied by many coaches as they aren’t aware of them. The daily practice gets monotonous when there are communication gaps even though the coach may be technically very sound.

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 executing soccer drills for a long time at different levels. One effective method is to continuously vary the format of training in order to avoid the repetition of boring messages.

It may come as a surprise to you that coaches often forget that their training sessions are carried out by people. Only with a view to execute the training program well, coaches tend to ignore every other aspect of it. 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.

Some guidelines meant for coaches in football coaching include the following:

• All messages that come from the coach are very important. So ensure that they are understood completely and correctly.

• Convey your messages in a positive language to encourage players to play their best game. Allow them to grow and become better players instead of highlighting their flaws.

• Spend equal time with all players. Research in this filed shows that coaches tend to spend comparatively more time with the best players (up to seven times more!).

• Be proactive in communicating the problem the moment you see it coming.

• Reinforce the player’s self esteem by balancing praise with criticism. Tilt the balance a little more towards praise with respect to coaching high school soccer.

Trust me. When you apply these rules to your training sessions, the benefits will be much more that you’ll expect.

You have a lot more information coming your way if this is what really inspires you. You can subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community which has tons to videos, and articles to improve your team’s overall performance.

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.