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. The coach can build a mentally tough team only when he has devised a plan that supports a positive attitude aimed at winning.
The coach plays an influential and a key authority figure in the player’s career. The body language, experiences, and attitude of the coach are key attributes that can shape, reinforce, or damage the player’s sense of worth and confidence.
When coaching youth soccer, mental strength is required to meet the challenges through a positive willpower. For this reason, in practice as well as in competition, the starting point should be the coach.
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. An experienced coach will apply ideas, chronicle, and descriptions, videos, etc to shape the collective approach of the team and prepare them to be mentally tough in their game.
A coach should display control in football coaching, when dealing with emotional setbacks notwithstanding personal feelings, with a view to create a mentally strong team.
As a result of the coach’s total belief in the ability of the team to reach their goals regardless of the barriers, the team gets a structure to build a mind-set on the same lines.
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. 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 failure can be used as substantiation of the player’s insufficiency and evidence that he cannot meet the prospects. This emotional 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.
Such an exercise is called 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. In order to explain, we can take the instance “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.
Hence, apply these methods 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