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. The coach can build a mentally tough team only when he has devised a plan that supports a positive attitude aimed at winning.
In a player’s career, the coach is an important and a prominent authority figure. The coach’s body language, mind-set, and expressions can shape, strengthen, or harm the player’s confidence.
In coaching youth soccer, mental toughness is about meeting challenges with positive self control. 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.
In football coaching, the coach who wants a mentally tough team must demonstrate a controlled way to deal with emotional setbacks despite personal feelings.
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, handling mistakes and failure is another important area of responsibility for the coach. 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.
One is to use failure as an opportunity to give the players feedback on how to improve. 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.
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. Self reference can be encouraged in the players by the coach to motivate them to perform better. The coach can discuss the situation by asking the players their reaction rather than giving them a definition of 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?”
This way the players must think through and account for his or her reactions which are a vital 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