July 15, 2010
Coaching High School Soccer: 5 Things You Must Know
When it comes to Coaching high school soccer, communication is the most vital part to consider on way to achieve success. The term coaching signifies the art of communication. This has the effect of expressing yourself to people with a view to perform them things in precisely the same manner.
Speaking of soccer coaching, almost all the coaches are the former players who decide to take on as coaches. Even then they have to deal with many issues in coaching young players. These issues come up due to the inability to communicate properly. Your role as a coach would become far easier if you just pay attention to some most important communication issues.
These have been described one by one.
When coaches watch their kids playing, they tend to become emotional. They tend to become spectators rather than analytical observers. They ignore the important facets of the game that could improve the team’s performance significantly. They therefore lose the opportunity to have an objective conversation aimed at winning the game.
Although coaches have a complete knowledge of the game, but they have a little training in communication. For instance; most coaches don’t use videos or flip charts in soccer coaching because they don’t know about them. When the coach finds it difficult to communicate his messages clearly, it brings monotony to the game even if he has a complete knowledge of the game.
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. One effective method is to continuously vary the format of training in order to avoid the repetition of boring messages.
It’s a fact that sometimes the coaches completely forget that it is people who perform in the practice sessions. They get so absorbed in the training and coaching as a process that they lose their ground. For example; Sending out instructions without taking the player’s name leads to uncertainty and confusion.
Some guiding principles for coaches in football coaching are given below:
• All messages that come from the coach are very important. So make sure that they are interpreted correctly.
• Your language should be positive enough to push the players to try hard to perform well. Let them become better players with every passing day rather than pointing out their weaknesses.
• 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!).
• Adopt a proactive approach to identify the impending problems and solve them.
• Accentuate your player’s self worth by balancing praise with criticism. Tilt the balance a little more towards praise with respect to coaching high school soccer.
Believe me. Once you start to apply this in your training programs, the benefits will far exceed your expectations.
There’s lot more to know and understand about this aspect of soccer only if you wish to. Just subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community, and get access to the most important and informative topics concerning the game.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
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: Youth Soccer Coaching
