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. A coach should prepare a course that stresses the development of a positive winning attitude with a view to have a mentally tough team.
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.
With respect to coaching youth soccer, mental toughness is all about meeting challenges with a positive outlook. Thus, in both practice and competition, the coach should be the starting point.
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.
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.
Only when the coach shows a firm belief in the team’s capability to accomplish in spite of the problems, the team will have an outline for developing the same mind-set and feel motivated.
In coaching high school soccer, another critical area for which the coach is responsible is handling mistakes and failure. How coaches react to failure decides the player’s motivation and his desire to towards correcting the mistakes. There are two choices available to the coach.
One of the choices can be employing the failure as a prospect to provide advice and guiding the players towards their improvement. Persuade them to recommit themselves to the effort with renewed motivation.
The failure can be used as substantiation of the player’s insufficiency and evidence that he cannot meet the prospects. Such a heartbreaking overreaction might de-motivate the players.
By making the players to accept the responsibility for their judgments, outlooks, and dealings and rejecting all possible excuses, players can be made mentally tough. The coaches can help the players by being quizzical and lending ears to them rather than pointing at their mistakes while soccer coaching. By discussing about their better performance which they could’ve delivered, the players can be encouraged.
We call it self-reference. The coach can encourage the players by encouraging the players to self reference. The coach can discuss the situation by asking the players their reaction rather than giving them a definition of the situation. “How do you feel you played?” or “Why do you feel you behaved that way?” can be taken as references.
The players should think all the way through and account for his or her version of reactions which are a fundamental 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.
Tags: Coaching high school soccer, coaching youth soccer, football coaching, soccer coaching