What I have read on that topic are H. A. Dorfman, Coaching the Mental Game, and DiCicco and Hacker, Catch Them Being Good. Harry Dorfman was a leading expert in the field. Some coaches don't care for the DiCicco and Hacker book, while I find it fascinating. DiCicco was the head coach and Hacker was the sports psychologist for the successful US WNT in 1999. The book discusses how to train girls specifically, giving exercises and the thought behind the exercise. I have also read "Wooden: A Lifetime of Reflections on and off the Court." John Wooden was a famous UCLA basketball coach, who was a highly respected motivational speaker and author before the phrase "sports psychology" became popular. He wrote many books, and I can't say the one above is his best. If I hadn't had a daughter, I would not have realized how different the situation is coaching girls than coaching boys. Even at U10 girls are surprising sophisticated socially. Unlike boys generally they also give a high priority to social interaction as an additional goal for playing team sports. I saw this as an advantage in team building and executing small group and team tactics. I was coaching girls in the early 1990's so Catch Them Being Good wasn't written yet. These books are in English. I don't know if they have been published in any other languages, but I suspect some of Wooden's books have been.
I can read English. It´s a bit slow but can do it Now reading few books at same time and that one of group dynamics in sports is written in English. So thanks for tips ! I do mental training on girls team right now, Born in 2002 so they are U12 (?) in your category. I have been working same age boys, mental training. They have different style to talk, and in boys culture talking ain´t so popular thing to do, talking of emotions.. -Sami
I'd like to bump this thread as it contains a fair bit of content. I think mental training has been defined here as using communication to control fears and other emotions to advance performance, performance measured through behaviour, not result. I dont think coaches really want to get involved in mental training. For one, where do you even get started. From my experience, I've not encountered a coach that goes out of their way to treat players as individuals, only as a group. We're talking U8 to U13 here, so young kids. I think that is understandable. Just thinking about this from a cultural standpoint, a child already receives mental training to some degree from the family unit just not aimed at sports. Perhaps, mental training for sports should be started in the home as well, the younger the better. Are there methods to follow? Pitfalls to avoid? As coaches who are parents, uncles/aunts, brothers/sisters, players, anyone care to share their experiences about what has worked or backfired for them.
Mentality is one of the four aspects of training. People I respect say that mentality is the most important aspect in respect to long term development. Kids imitate behavior. I like to say that emotions are contagious. Whether a coach intends to or not, a coach is teaching mentality by example. Mental training is better described in the US as mental skills training. What is desired is healthy behaviors rather than harmful behaviors. Something as obvious as how to deal with losing a game for example. Do you want your kid's youth coach to throw temper tantrums and scream at the players when the team loses? One of the basic purposes of youth sports is learning life lessons, which of course is not referring to perfecting dribbling moves. Failure is part of life and how we cope with failure is important to happiness and success. Let me give an example. Players should not think that losing a match says anything negative about them. Neither does winning say anything positive. The result is not the performance. The result is not the person. When I played high school football in 1968, our coach included a quiet period for mental preparation prior to a game. That occurred after leaving the locker room and prior to entering the stadium where the "not quiet" preparation occurred. Mental preparation and training was a part of every competitive sport I participated in, from tennis to soccer.
rca2, I enjoy reading your posts and have learned quite a bit from it browsing the forum the past few years. Good point about teaching mentality by example. I see that as training a group. When it comes to instructions, as individuals, one kid may interpret or behave completely different from the group. The group might be humming along, but the one kid may fall behind for lack of better words. I think this is where mental training can help build confidence or understanding. Besides high school, at what age did your youth coaches start incorporating mental preparation and training? Team versus individual sport?
My high school coaches were teachers. One of my coaches is in the Michigan hall of fame as a coach. They are still my coaching role models. I competed in both team and individual sports in high school. My high school tennis coaches were not trainers. Players trained themselves, so I think the mental aspect was even more important. The only organized sport I played before high school was little league baseball with parents for coaches. There was no identifiable mental skills training and no coaching education or information available. Like other kids, my dad taught me how to catch, throw, bat and pitch at home. Team practices were more about learning to play positions as a team. I played far more pickup games than little league games. Organized little league training was very similar to soccer today except rarely do soccer parents teach their kids the fundamentals of soccer and rarely do kids play pickup.