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, 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. 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 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.
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.
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. A coach has got only two choices.
Utilizing failures as an opportunity to give feedback to the players and guiding them towards their improvement can be opted as the first choice. Convince them to recommit themselves to the endeavor with renewed enthusiasm.
Second, use failure as evidence of the player’s inadequacy and proof that they cannot meet expectations. This poignant overreaction will de-motivate the players.
Players can be made psychologically strong by accommodating the accountability for their judgment, stances, and actions and rejecting all probable excuses. The coaches can help the players by being quizzical and lending ears to them rather than pointing at their mistakes while soccer coaching. They should be encouraged to talk about what they could have done better.
This can be referred to as self-reference. The coach can encourage the players by 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. “How do you feel you played?” or “Why do you feel you behaved that way?” can be taken as references.
This way the players must think through and account for his or her reactions which are a vital 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