A poster in another thread wrote “any ideas about how we can help our kids keep on having fun on the field are welcome….” Links Coaches have one big advantage over most educators--our subject is playing a game! If you read only one thing on this topic, read this article-- Remember Its Playtime, Mike Woitalla, Soccer America Magazine, February 2006 “Let's take the approach so many adults bring to youth soccer to other children's activities. Take a bunch of 6-year-olds to the playground, but don't let them scamper off to explore the different structures. Make them all line up and wait patiently to take turns on the monkey bars. If one of them wanders off toward the swings, scream at him. Be sure to tell them exactly how they should climb. Yell at the slow ones to go faster. While they're hanging from a bar, shout at them to ''grab the next bar!'' At the sandbox, don't just let them start digging around willy-nilly. No building mounds or castles until we teach them the proper way to hold the shovel. Line them up for the shovel drill and don't forget to yell, ''Dig, dig, dig!'' After 50 minutes of instructions on the various aspects of proper playground usage, give the kids 10 minutes to play….” http://www.youthsoccerfun.com/2007/03/remember_its_playtime.html Coaching the Mental Game, H.A. Dorfman (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2003). This is probably the best coaching book on sports psychology available. If you read only two things, read the Soccer America article and the first section of this book. You will get the equivalent of a college course (coaching 101) condensed to 90 pages. “Mentality” could easily have also been expressed as “Motivation.” The first 90 pages covers 1) the coaches role, 2) communication concepts, and 3) effective teaching. In contrast to the general nature of Coach Dorfman’s book, the Soccer America article specifically addresses coaching youth soccer. I have yet to find a coaching philosophy that I like better than Tony DiCicco’s: “Play hard, play fair, play to win, have fun.” US Youth Soccer Player Development Model, Jan 2012 ed. http://www.usyouthsoccer.org/coaches/Recommended_Reading/ I link to this a lot, but I expect most people won’t read it—it’s 117 pages long. So I have pulled out the points that I think are important to creating an enjoyable learning experience for the players and included my comments. “The key to modern youth player development can be found in the lessons of the free play era, where children took charge of games, learning and fun.” When I was a kid in the 50’s and 60’s children spent many hours daily in unorganized play—sports and physically active games and activities. Therefore training sessions focused on learning soccer specific skills through drills. Today most likely the majority of your players have never climbed a tree, and spend most of their time sitting down. Both your players and their parents will talk about learning to play soccer by playing soccer video games. They don’t realize that athletic development is about movement, which sitting is definitely not. “Development of soccer players is a continuum that overlaps age groups. The following are the top 10 objectives in the development of a soccer player: 1) Develop the child’s appreciation of the game. 2) Keep winning and losing in proper perspective. 3) Be sensitive to each player’s development needs. 4) Educate the players to the technical, tactical, physical and psychological (four components of soccer) demands of the game for their level of play. 5) Implement rules and equipment modifications according to the players’ age group. 6) Allow players to experience all positions. 7) Players need to have fun and receive positive feedback. 8) Training should be conducted in the spirit of enjoyment and learning. 9) Provide the appropriate number of training sessions and matches according to the player’s stage of development. 10) Strive to help each player reach their full potential and be prepared to move to the next stage of development.” “Ages 4 to 9 Childhood Mostly random technical repetitions, psychologically friendly and positive, simple combinations and decision-making activities. Individual basic skills with an emphasis on keeping ball possession. A lot of balance and coordination exercises. Free play – movement education – trial and error – discovery – experimentation!” “Ages 10 to 14 Puberty More combinations on attack and defense. Many decision-making environments. Psychologically positive with correction. Advanced competitive skills against match opponents. Tactically work on the roles of attack and defense and the basic principles of play. Exercises should focus on endurance, rhythmic movement, flexibility and running mechanics. Application of where it all fits into the game….Tryouts should not begin until the U-13 age group [U14 if using 2-year age groups]. Less emphasis on the match results and more emphasis on players’ performances.” Breaking out “elite” players prior to age 12 is a mistake and has a negative impact on player mentality and development. “A young player may be physiologically ready for the demands of competition but not psychologically ready. At age 5, children start to compare themselves to other children. Even so they still don’t understand competition. They tend to play when they are having fun or winning, but lose interest when the opposite occurs. Even at 8 years old, children may not be physically or emotionally ready or have the cognitive skills to understand and meet the expectations that parents and coaches have of them. They may not have the social skills to understand turn-taking or be emotionally ready to handle criticism. The benefits soccer offers can be lost if results-oriented competition is emphasized too soon. Overt competition involves more ego-oriented goals and tends to promote the attitude that winning is everything. It often discourages children from trying new tasks, but can encourage them to break the rules in order to win.” Coaching youth is not about managing a soccer team or about winning matches. Coaching youth is not at all like playing FIFA 14. It is about people and relationships. Coaching youth is about giving back to the community by passing on what you know--your knowledge and love of playing the game—to some of the children. Because I love playing soccer (I still play 50+ matches a year at age 62), it was easy for me to pass on my honest enthusiasm to the players I coached. The game is inherently fun. The simple act of running up and kicking the ball brings enjoyment and excitement whether the ball goes in the goal or not. But what if the coach does not play soccer? If the coach has not played, then the coach certainly does not have a love for playing soccer. So such a coach is going to have to connect with the players on some other basis. The best solution would be for the coach to start playing soccer. If the coach is an athlete passionate about playing another sport or playing competitive sports in general, the coach could make that work, especially in the U-Little phase where the focus is on fundamental athletic skills. I did not play soccer with the kids while coaching them. My enjoyment came from the kids playing the game. I love watching kids spontaneously expressing their joy--celebrating, yelling, cheering, jumping, doing cart wheels, and grinning. So it was easy for me to leave work issues and other worries behind during my contact time with the kids. Even if it is not easy, a coach has to mentally prepare himself for the coaching sessions just as an athlete prepares for a match, an actor prepares for a performance, and a teacher prepares for the classroom. You don’t have to play soccer to be enthusiastic about kids playing soccer. Finally if a coach is not passionate about soccer at all, the coach can still focus on not interfering with the kids’ enjoyment of playing. Let playing the game be the teacher with a little bit of instruction from the coach. “As a sports nation, we suffer from the too much too soon syndrome. Many adults involved in youth soccer want so badly to achieve success, superficially measured by the win/loss record and the number of trophies collected, that they treat children as miniature adults. Unfortunately, it is the adults who lack the patience to let the game grow within the child naturally. In the National Youth License coaching course, the idea of street soccer is presented. This is a way for the club to begin giving the game back to its rightful owners, the players. The club provides the fields and supervision for safety, but no coaching, allowing players to show up and play pickup games. Granted, it's not as spontaneous as a neighborhood game, but it does provide a chance to play without referees, coaches and spectators. This means the children are free to learn how to organize themselves, solve disputes, become leaders, rule their own game, experiment with new skills, make new friends and play without the burden of results. If the club wants to provide an even more productive fun-filled environment, then it can put out different types of balls to use in some of the games, encourage them to set up fields of different sizes, allow mixed age groups to play together and even have coed games.”
Great stuff. You had me, right up until the part where it said that if a coach didn't play soccer then the coach doesn't have a love for playing soccer. I don't agree with that. I never even thought I'd enjoy soccer, but while helping with my daughter's team for a season, I fell in love with the sport. I'm now a little past middle age, but once in a while my team needs an extra player during a scrimmage, so I play. I'm terrible, and my "girls" laugh at me because most are far better than me, but they can see that I enjoy it. They accept that I'm a hypocrite when I ask them to do things that I personally can't do. But the concept of making it fun isn't lost on me. I have a girl on my team who is an outstanding player, but when she came to me, she played below her true ability because her parents pushed her to play too hard. I helped her love the game again. What even the most advanced coaches sometimes don't understand is that a love for the game can make a kid develop faster than the best training. And a disenchantment of the game can ruin the "career" of even the most talented kid. I think maybe the next time we train, I'll introduce a free period.
I distinguish being passionate about the sport from being passionate about playing the sport. I am not much of a sports fan, but I am passionate about playing.
Your last few thread have had some great information. Do you have anything for coaches to keep themselves sane during and after the season? I love coaching and a put a lot of effort into making sure my team is getting a good soccer experience and that they are growing as players. But - damn the parents. I've heard rumors of players thinking about moving teams and it makes me second guess what I am doing. I guess like most things, the only constant is change.
I have a few brews I could recommend. Truthfully though, that's usually what I do. I will go hang out with friends who coach and we can vent (in general terms about players and parents) and offer congrats for the good things. I've tried completely stepping away but it always creeps back in. This at least keeps it casual. Parents will be parents and friends help you focus on the good parts.
I think part of my "issue" is that I have stuck with the team as they have "aged up". We will be u10 in the Fall and I've coached many of the girls at one time or another since u5. I guess if I was a U8 coach "forever" I would just see the kids come and go each year and wish them well as they get older. But since I'm moving up with them - the movement is more of a shock.
rca2 knows my travails with my current crop of U11s . . the team and I worked and worked on technical stuff over several months, tried and true drills and coaching but nothing was moving the needle. Not until I de-emphasized skill training in favor of working with their "heads"—abstract things like max effort, confidence, team unity, etc, writing assignments, short video homework assignment—did they start to make progress by leaps and bounds. Once they got their minds right, all the training we had worked on started to show up. In a way, it was buried under a ****load of negative thinking and team destructive behaviors. It's a different path to "fun" but, inarguably, the players are having more fun—there is something enjoyable about seeking excellence. The quality of play is up, moved in a matter of a month from chaos ball/jungle ball to good spacing, two-touch passing, movement off the ball, chatter is up, kids want to hang out outside of practice. The fun is built in because it's a fun sport and that's why some of us play for decades (or are involved in it) just don't let it get buried by some type of BS.
Elessar, Could you expand on what approach you took in working with the mental/team aspect of the game? I am starting to feel that my girls are in a rut, not playing the type of soccer that we train for and emphasize. I know it is largely mental, because some girls play smart, patient soccer on one team but on a different team they force everything and fail to connect well with teammates. Thanks
I once had high school kids watch certain games on tv and then write up short papers on what saw. Not just lineups, but analysis. It was pre-season with a new team so it gave me an idea of where they were in reading the game and how much they actually paid attention and understood the dynamics of it all. I'd love to hear more ideas especially for younger players. I'm about to enter my second outdoor season with this team and I feel we are already getting into a rut simply because some players don't care and others really do. It's causing frustration for the really gungho players which causes them to not try.
Everyone has stress. It is unavoidable. Coaches (and others) manage stress through different types of coping strategies. The first three listed are obviously important also to good health as well. The last three listed are undesirable and have negative consequences. - adequate sleep and rest - healthy diet - regular exercise - planning - communication - time management - "Me Time" - rationalization - pep talk - proactive behavior - relaxation techniques - support from others - flexibility - confrontation - anger and other emotions - avoidance - inflexibility See section on "Tips to Avoid Stress" http://www.brianmac.co.uk/stress.htm Table of coping strategies from a study of 12 UK coaches http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showPopup?citid=citart1&id=F0002&doi=10.1080/10413201003760968 Coping mechanisms that I routinely use: - planning - communication - rehersal - visulization - go for a run - play a game of soccer - practice on my drum set - read a book - listen to music - hot tub - herbal tea, beer or wine Coping mechanisms I use to deal with the unexpected: -martial arts breathing exercises -meditation -count to ten before replying
In an interview last fall Claudio Reyna said that the most important development objective for the 6-12 age group was not to develop ball skills, but rather to develop mentality--specifically a love for playing the game. Developing skilled players who do not like to play imo should be thought of as a coaching failure. at 6:45--11:45 http://positivecoach.org/our-story/pca-in-the-news/news-detail/306/pca-1-on-1-interviews->>
Maybe the 4-8 age group. I can't imagine grouping 6 year olds with 12 year olds in an "age group." They're not the least bit similar. If you love soccer and have no ball skills at age 12, you're going to make an excellent soccer fan.
My sig is a line from the TV show Breaking Bad. One of the characters says he took a half measure, when he should've taken a full measure. This is my version of taking full measures. And I'm giving the back story because I don't know if coaches should take the nuclear option when it doesn't call for it. But maybe this is the approach I should take with all my teams? About half the team came into the fall new to highly competitive club soccer. We're a Coerver-based club so most of these kids had never had the benefit of a grounding in the ball control we teach from U6 to U13 and they were coming in at U11. So there was a lot of losses in the fall. A lot of which were exacerbated by the fact that I was forcing them to play out of the back (well what do you expect will happen when you get low-skill players, players new to each other, playing against good teams?). Anyway, winter comes along and morale was pretty low (despite ending the season on some positives) and there was lots of in-fighting and divisions from players and parents. So the culture had to change. IMO, if you're trying to change the culture of an organization or a team, you can't just keep doing the same things and expecting different results. So I was going to do "weird" things to bust through this log jam. No more half measures. My take on the learning process is it takes multiple forms—visual, kinesthetic (doing), and auditory. In practice it's mostly doing and listening. Yes, we see what's going on but probably not learning from it as much as we should. Then there's physical learning and mental (pyschological and "academic" (lack of a better word)). We were doing the physical and auditory learning in practice in our 2-3 hours a week of practice but that wasn't enough. So we did homework assignments different than usual ball work: writing assignments and analyzing YouTube videos of pro soccer or video that I took of them during training, or study diagrams I send out. The writing assignments were about things like: giving maximum effort, attention to detail, work ethic, being a good teammate, leadership, communication on the field—basically anything to get them to think about soccer and about the team in a different way. In the grand scheme, these players can go anywhere to other clubs, I figured we had six months until tryouts. What was I going to do to make them want to stay? I wanted to create a situation, an environment, where at the end of six months it would not be said that we did not try (close to) everything to create a winning team (not just wins and losses but have the attitude and characteristics of winning teams—which isn't always just skill, ability, and talent). We'd been doing that on the practice field, so it was time to look beyond.
Here is a Vince Gambetta quote to consider: "Physical preparation yields mental toughness....sports psychology is really, really important, but if you are supremely confident in your physical conditioning then you can take on anybody." Understand that by physical conditioning he means overall fitness including SAQ, not just strength and endurance. While youth coaches are properly, heavily focused on skills on the ball, 95% of the game is spent off the ball. (In 3v3 players still spend 83% of the game off the ball). The four aspects, physical, technical, tactical, and mental, are inherent in playing, whether they are the coaching objective or not. They are also synergistically related. From my personal experience, I believe you can inspire a desire to win through confidence in superior team tactics and technical skills, but confidence in physical abilities is critical to aggressive play. I think this is one reason Ajax encourages their pre-teen players to also take martial arts, but, also, after martial arts, the contact in soccer is comparatively tame.
One of our U9 academy teams played in a futsal tournament last week. No other academy-aged teams entered, so they were placed in a U11 division. I purposely didn't coach this day and had someone else do it because I wanted to just observe them without all the typical coaching things flying through my head. The team knew going in they were in for it, but that didn't deter them. They played four and lost four, but in short bursts in each game they had some successes and scored a few goals. One thing I noticed throughout the day was even though they were frustrated during the games, in between games they were playing silly games with their teammates and other kids in the gym, laughing and having a good time. In their last game, one of the players was fighting hard for a ball, got fouled and laid flat on his back in frustration on the court. One of his teammates came over and helped pick him up and patted him on the back. There were other moments like that scattered throughout the day. That was the first time I'd seen that out of our "individuals." That taught me more about that team than the good things they did on the court.
Article about the riole of failure in developing resilient individuals. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/...g_teenagers_how_do_you_do_it.html?tid=HP_more
I wrote the reply in here about "how do keep sane as a coach". You all have inspired me and I maybe even inspired myself a little. My U9 (fall age) team is ramping up for the Spring season. We've had 4 practices and 2 friendlies (one against a younger but pretty skilled team and one against an older and very skilled team). We took a little bit of a break in December and January (we're in So Cal and can play year round). For some reason - the girls have taken the skills they have learned in the past 18 months and are now applying them in game situations. Step overs / scissors moves are being done by every girl on the field now. 3 months ago there was only 1 girl that had the confidence to try these skills in a game situation. We have also started moving the ball side to side and backwards like never before. Girls that were usually pretty quiet on the field are screaming "SWITCH IT" or "You've GOT HELP BEHIND!!!!!. I've done a few things different since we started practice. 1. I did assign some simple homework. First assignment "Write 3 sentences on why you like to play soccer". "Write down 3 things that you want to improve on this Spring" Second Assignment - "What is soccer's nickname? Why?" " What was David Beckham best known for on the soccer field?" (I used this in conjunction with "what do I want to improve upon" to explain to them that if they want to get good at something that they need to own it and work on their own. 2. I introduced the team concept of REACH R - Respect and Responsibility E - Effort A - Attitude C -Cooperate H - Have Fun 3. We brought 2 new girls onto the team. I am not going to cut anybody at this age - But I think the girls now realize they need to work harder to keep playing the position they want. And that there were 10 other girls that wanted to be on our team. 4. I had a personal epiphany. The last few seasons I was worried about "balance and burnout." I still worry about that and I encourage the kids and parents to play any sport they can to find out what they really want to do. BUT- My epiphany was "I am a soccer coach. I am going to give you all of the soccer that you can handle. We are going to practice hard twice a week. I am going to give you options (not me) for private coaching. We are going to have friendlies at least twice a month. I am going to set up some speed and agility sessions. If you need a break - please take one. But we are going to charge it hard." (If these parents are going to look at other options for their kid - they certainly won't be leaving because they think their daughter needs more soccer in her life. 5. I've taken the ball out of my "stars" hands in a lot of situation. Last year my PKs were all taken by a girl who is an amazing player. Not anymore. Everyone gets a shot now. I have a girl with a rocket for a thrown in. She was running all over the field taking throw ins last season. She was exhausted because of it and it while she can whip it nearly the width of a small sided field- i want the girl nearest to the ball to get it back into play quickly. 6. At random intervals during a game- I'll instruct them to play "pretty" soccer. This means that the entire team has to touch the ball before they can shoot. At some point it will come back to bite us. But it will help us in our long term development for the season. The girls don't quite realize yet how much possession will help them. They want to shoot and score at will. But in our last game they were connecting passes in the box and waiting for the right time to fire a shot.
Found a nice resource. Doug Lemov has a blog for teachers, including coaches. This one is specifically about motivating and inspiring youth soccer players. What is different about this article is that he uses clips and transcripts of an actual practice session at the FC Dallas youth academy for examples. http://teachlikeachampion.com/blog/...ritical-feedback-that-motivates-and-inspires/ This is a "Toofer" (two for one). You get to watch an excellent coach work and get commentary on the coaching by a teaching expert. He trains teachers and USSF has hired him as a consultant on how to improve coaching. His publications include "Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better," a book on the importance of practice.