Coaching High School Soccer: Learn To Boost Confidence
If you are like me, you probably know that in coaching high school soccer, the journey to becoming a complete player begins by building confidence. When you declare that the players are under immense pressure, you as a coach are hinting to the fact that your players lack confidence to face a situation. I say this because only confident players expect to win and get successful.
The players must promise themselves and accept confidence as an attribute to develop. When coaching youth soccer, illustrate this point by telling them the behaviors of two parrots sitting on either shoulder.
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 it’s their choice to select which player to pay attention to.
After they’ve made a choice, train them to take the accountability for their acts. 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.
Teach your players during soccer coaching that holding someone or something else responsible is a symbol of insecurity. In fact they should be taught to see setbacks as a part of the learning curve and not let it shake their confidence.
When coaching high school soccer, condition the players to see every lost opportunity as a lesson and they should keep telling themselves “I’ll get the next one.”
Automatically, the confidence for the next strike overshadows the distress of the miss.
Accurate and quick judgments regarding a player’s caliber and talent is a key to manage a successful team. In football coaching, there is always a close call between judging physical and mental readiness, but in the end, physical readiness wins the battle.
Understandable and apparent messages are required to make such judgments possible. To check player’s capability to thrive in the game, it is necessary to browse their verbal and non verbal messages.
Confidence is the fruit of success. Self-belief, hard work done and the mental preparation to face tough situations, hold the key to success in soccer. 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. To build a strong base of the much needed experience, the players must be trained to cope up with their mistakes, defeats and criticism and fears, calmly. The feeling that he or she has the knowledge has some experience and knows how to handle the situations, always prevails.
Don’t take it for granted. Building of confidence in coaching high school soccer is an everyday task, so players should reflect on certain key steps to discover what works for them.
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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.
