Soccer Conditioning Drills

In coaching high school soccer, it’s a fact that similar to confidence; self-control too is a choice players need to 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 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.

Also, players must be ready to take full accountability for their actions. These are the 12 steps for your information.

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: Let the players find out and admit the reason that influenced their thoughts and resulted in them losing their emotional poise.

Coaching Youth Soccer

3. Differences: Let the players recall situations in the past when they did and did not lost control. Have them decide the differences in their attitudes, behaviors, and emotions.

4. Problem: Make an attempt to identify the exact problem in coaching high school soccer. For example: A players may be feeling responsible of letting the entire team down because of his actions.

5. Belief: The players should manage to raise their expectations from them including self-control as one of the behaviors. Persuade them that they can change.

6. Reinforcement: Reinforcement has the potential to accelerate a change in behavior. Being a coach, you need to appreciate the good changes in the players to ensure that these remain forever.

7. Goals: Start with multiple smaller goals, so that you can take your players along the path to changes. Help the players understand the connection between thoughts, feelings, and actions.

8. Techniques: Build a series of behavioral techniques for maintaining confidence. For example: Players must know which path to follow in a certain situation.

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

10. Progress: Tell them to be patient. Help the players realize the value of ups and downs in the path to improvement.

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: Last but not the least, help the players understand that there is a reason behind their attempts to change. They should always be clear about what are they doing and why. What will their future be like, if they don’t change.

For a soccer player to achieve a perfect performance state, the player must be trained for relaxed swiftness. It means possessing energy without tension.

This should not be taken lightly. Including relaxation techniques in coaching high school soccer and help players control their thinking so they can generate emotions that remove unnecessary tension and save energy.

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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.

In coaching high school soccer, the first and the foremost quality that the players need to have or develop is confidence if they wish to become complete 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.

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 of them is the positive parrot, always urging the player to face up to the challenge saying “You can do it.” The other is the negative parrot, constantly warning 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. This decision could also be an everyday task. Prepare a team of successful players full of confidence by directing their attention, energy, and enthusiasm in practice towards their role in past success.

Coaching Youth Soccer

In soccer coaching, players should be made to know that blaming someone or something is a signal of insecurity. Rather teach players to take the setbacks as an integral part of the learning curve and not something to deter their confidence levels.

Also, in coaching high school soccer, the players should learn by heart the phrase “I’ll get the next one” to keep them going whenever they lose any opportunity.
Automatically, the confidence for the next strike overshadows the distress of the miss.

A team is said to be successful if you have the ability to make quick judgments regarding a player’s ability to survive in competition. Judging mental readiness is often a bit tougher challenge than judging physical readiness in football coaching.

Such a judgment needs clear messages. The spoken and unspoken messages of the player should be taken into account to ensure his or her ability to succeed in the game.

Confidence comes from success. And success in soccer is more likely when you know you have done everything you could to get ready for situations that might build pressure. The common stimulus used for motivating the players is “If you are not preparing to win, you are preparing to fail.”

Confidence grows up with experience. Players must be conditioned to take in their stride all fears, mistakes, defeats, and criticism to build the foundation of experience they need. The feeling of he or she having the knowledge, a little more know – how due to experience and thus, the thought process of planning the next step, prevails.

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, of all the things that influence a player’s performance on field is the conduct and attitude of the coach. 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. 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. Therefore, the coach must be the starting point in both practice and competition.

The coach will find that a disciplined post-match routine is helpful in ensuring that he or she does not get either too high or too low. 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.

When the coach exhibits a strong belief in team’s capacity to achieve the goals notwithstanding the hindrances, the team will get an agenda for developing a similar attitude.

In coaching high school soccer, another critical area for which the coach is responsible is handling mistakes and failure. How strong the players feels motivated to correct the mistakes made is largely dependent upon the coach’s reaction to failure. A coach has got only two choices.

One of the choices can be employing the failure as a prospect to provide advice and guiding the players towards their improvement. Convince them to recommit themselves to the endeavor with renewed enthusiasm.

Making use of the failure as an evidence of the player’s inadequacy and proof that he cannot meet the expectations, can be the second choice. This poignant overreaction will de-motivate the players.

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. While soccer coaching, the coaches can help the players by questioning and listening them rather than always telling the players of their mistakes. They should be encouraged to talk about what they could have done better.

This exercise is known as self-reference. Self reference can be encouraged in the players by the coach to motivate them to perform better. 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. For example; “How do you feel you played?” or “Why do you feel you behaved that way?”

It is important for the players to think deeply and thoroughly and then account for their reactions which are very critical 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.

I don’t know if you know this but communication is the most important element to succeed in coaching high school soccer. Coaching is an art of communication. It explains what you want of people in such a way that allows them to perform it.

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. Most of these issues are a result of lack of communication. There are some major communication issues that you must understand as a coach to make your job easy and more effective.

These have been described one by one.

In the course of watching the young players on field, coaches often get emotional. They forget that they have the duty to observe the players analytically rather than merely watching them play. As such they are not able to see the key points that could make all the difference in their team’s performance. The coaches fail to have an effective conversation that could help the players get to the winning post.

Even though the coaches are well versed with the technicalities of the game, they are not trained specifically on communication. For example; in soccer coaching, use of a video or a flip chart is not very common since most coaches don’t know about them. It’s important for the coach to know the game well but if he is unable to communicate his thoughts, the training gets repetitive.

Coaching Youth Soccer

This is especially important in coaching high school soccer since the players have been into the sport for quite some time. They have been doing these soccer drills for some time but at different levels. One effective method is to continuously vary the format of training in order to avoid the repetition of boring messages.

You’ll be amazed to know that coaches tend to forget sometimes that it is people who carry out the trainings. They tend to get carried away in the process of coaching and training. An example of ineffective communication by a coach is when he fails to use a player’s name while giving instructions which produces uncertainty.

There are certain guiding principles in football coaching which are as follows:

• All messages that come from the coach are very important. So make sure that they are interpreted correctly.

• Your messages should have a positive impact on the players to put their best foot forward. Challenge them to be better rather than punishing them for being poor.

• Pay equal attention to each player in the team. Studies indicate that coaches spend relatively more time with star players in team (up to seven times more!).

• Communicate the potential issues that could arise and have a solution ready.

• Reinforce the player’s self esteem by balancing praise with criticism. When it comes to coaching high school soccer, tilt the balance slightly more towards praise.

Believe me. Once you start to apply this in your training programs, the benefits will far exceed your expectations.

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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.