by Greg Bach
Conducting the Midseason Review
Reviewing the progress of the team at the midpoint of the season serves a number of valuable purposes. It can keep a season that’s moving along smoothly on track, as well as rescue one that’s showing signs of drifting off course. Think of the midseason review as the road map that helps you eliminate any wrong turns on the way to your desired destination.
Like adults, kids appreciate feedback — especially when they’re performing something really well. Think about starting a job and receiving a review from your boss after a few months. She gives you feedback on areas that you’re excelling in, sheds light on areas that you may not have been aware of, and offers suggestions on those areas in which you can make some additional strides. Sharing similar information with your players keeps them up to speed as the season moves along.
Recognizing improvement
Recognizing every youngster’s improvements, no matter how big or small they may be, is essential in the skill-building process. What may seem minor and insignificant to you often looms large and impressive in your players’ young eyes. Making a big deal out of the smallest things, particularly at the youngest age levels, can help forge a lifetime love of soccer and keep kids actively involved in the sport for years to come.
Closely monitor the progress of the children so that when they do reach new levels, you’re there to deliver a high-five, a pat on the back, or enthusiastic praise for what you’ve just seen. It may be something as subtle as using their nondominant foot to deliver a pass during a 3-on-2 drill, or it may be something as obvious as heading the ball into the goal during a scrimmage. Your ability to recognize these improvements can be the difference in the season. You can fuel their desire to continue learning and striving to add new skills to their repertoire or disappoint them by sending the message that their efforts weren’t worthy of your attention. Don’t leave them wondering what’s really in it for them to continue showing up at the field.
Don’t rely on the scoreboard as your gauge for whether your team is improving. Wins and losses aren’t a good barometer for measuring the development of your team. For example, even if your team surrenders a bunch of goals during a game, taking a closer look may actually reveal that the team turned in one of its better defensive outings of the season. Some unlikely bounces may have led to a couple of goals, or perhaps your goaltender let a couple of shots get by that he typically stops. If you take a closer look at the defensive area of the game that you worked on in practice during the week — such as getting back on defense quicker after a turnover is committed — and the players excelled in that area, you have to recognize that afterward. Think about it. These kids listened to your instructions during the week, responded to your wishes, and hustled back on defense, which is a great improvement. If you use the scoreboard as the determining factor in how well they played, the kids don’t get the recognition they deserve.
Chatting with the parents
A preseason parents meeting (which we discuss the importance of in Chapter 4) opens the lines of communication before the first soccer ball is ever kicked. After you’ve laid that foundation, don’t lose contact with the parents. Setting aside some time to talk to them about how their children are enjoying the season demonstrates how much you truly care. It’s comforting to parents, many of whom may be involved with their children in an organized sport for the first time. Most important, communicating with parents gives you some valuable insight into what their children are thinking and feeling about playing soccer for you.
As your season approaches the halfway point, let parents know that you want to set aside a few moments in the upcoming week to speak to them regarding their children and their thoughts on how the season has gone so far. A good time to make this announcement is following a game, when most parents are likely to be on hand. Find out a good time to call them during the week for a brief conversation, or, if it’s convenient, set aside some time after practice to chat in person.
Is Junior having fun?
One of the best ways to gauge whether the youngsters are enjoying the season is to solicit feedback from their parents. After all, parents can share with you whether their son is excited about games and is wearing his uniform around the house two hours before the game or whether he basically has to be coaxed to the car when it’s time to leave for the field.
Use your time with the parents to get them actively involved in setting goals for their child’s skill development (see the “Setting Goals for Your Players” section later in the chapter). Doing so helps steer the child down a successful path. Encourage the parents to be creative in working with their child. Goal setting should be a fun activity that allows a parent and child the chance to bond. For example, they can make colorful charts to put on the refrigerator or hang in their child’s bedroom so they can monitor the child’s progress in working toward whatever objectives you create for him.
What else can we do?
Sometimes, what you hear from the parents isn’t encouraging, and as a coach, you have to be prepared to deal with that. If something isn’t working as well as you had hoped with a youngster, and she’s rapidly losing interest in playing soccer, you have to explore all the options at your disposal.
It’s never too late to rescue a child’s season. After speaking with the parents and uncovering a problem, don’t allow it to linger. Act quickly, and determine the best course of action that addresses the situation and meets the child’s needs. Her parents may be able to provide a solution for you, or meeting with the child may be all it takes to determine what needs to be done. All problems are correctable, so don’t let a youngster’s season be sabotaged without doing everything possible to help her.
The following are relatively common situations that arise, particularly with younger children, and a few suggestions that can help:
Lack of time at a desired position. The solution may be something as simple as penciling in the youngster at a different position. Ideally, you’ve been rotating all the kids around so that they get the chance to play a variety of positions. Maybe at the halfway point of the season, a couple of kids haven’t gotten the opportunity to play a position they’ve had their eyes on all season. That’s easily correctable.
Embarrassment about something that happened during practice or a game. Some memories tend to sting and reside in a child’s consciousness long enough that they actually impact the youngster’s enjoyment of the game. If a kicked ball struck a child in the face, or she tripped over the ball while racing in on a breakaway, she may still be upset. Any time you recognize that a child may have been embarrassed by something that happened on the field, exercise your best judgment and decide whether speaking with the child is warranted or would help ease any feelings of humiliation.
Sometimes for the child’s sake, you’re better off not saying anything about an embarrassing situation. The less attention you direct toward the event, the less likely the child may be to worry about it. If you do feel the need to soothe the child’s bruised feelings, try sharing something humiliating that happened to you during the course of your youth-sports career. When children get a sense that everyone endures humorous moments and that these moments are part of participating in sports such as soccer, they’re free to put the moment in the past and move forward.
Struggle with making friends. Maybe the youngster was hoping she’d be placed on a team with some of her friends, but she doesn’t know any of the other kids and has struggled to forge friendships. If that’s the case, you may consider incorporating more team-bonding drills into your practices to allow the kids to get to know one another better. That helps the child in question and gives the players on your team the chance to form tighter bonds, which pays bigger dividends in the quality of their play.
Too much contact. Youngsters often enroll in a sport like soccer without realizing that so much contact is involved. After a few games of getting kicked in the shins or taking the occasional tumble when they’re tripped by an opposing player,
the game suddenly isn’t quite as much fun as they thought it would be. Unfortunately, if that’s the primary culprit for their antisoccer feelings, you can’t do a whole lot to help. No positions on the field reduce a child’s chances of being in contact with opposing players.
Although you never want to encourage a child to quit a sport, in cases like this one, speak with the parents; share your concern that you don’t want to make the child any more miserable than she already is; and perhaps suggest some other sports that you think would best suit the child if you feel comfortable making those types of recommendations.
Setting Goals for Your Players
Goal setting is as popular a coaching tool as motivational halftime talks — and it can be one of the most effective means for getting the most out of your players when employed correctly. As we explain in Chapter 5, choosing goals for each of your players to strive for builds confidence; promotes self-esteem; and, over the course of a season, enhances performance. Goals also help keep kids focused and interested and provide a real sense of accomplishment when they’re able to reach those goals.
Establish personal-improvement goals for each player that tie into trying to win the game but that aren’t strictly dependent on achieving wins. Individual goals that each child can realistically reach allow the players to have much more control over their success. Winning games doesn’t always correlate with which team played the best. Teaching your young athletes the ability to compare their current performances with their performances from earlier in the season — instead of evaluating their performances based on which team won the game — gives them a true sense of their progress.
For goal setting to be at its most effective, you need a good handle on the skills and abilities of your players. After half a season of practices and games, you should be ready to sit down with each of the players and map out a plan for the remainder of the season.
If you’re coaching a team of 6-year-olds in a beginning soccer program, simply selecting basic goals for each youngster to work on that benefit the entire team, such as making accurate passes to teammates, is sufficient. But with older and more advanced players, you want to choose specific goals for them to strive for that are vastly different from their teammates’.
To make your goal setting successful, keep these points in mind:
Encourage practice: Encourage players to practice skills at home with their parents. Just a few minutes in the backyard a couple of times a week can pay big dividends in a child’s development. Don’t force it or make practicing seem like dreaded homework; gently encourage five minutes of passing the ball back and forth with a parent, for example.
Stay balanced: Come up with goals that are neither too difficult for the youngster to achieve nor so easy that the child meets them right away and has no further challenges.
Be realistic: Set goals that work within the framework of the team setting. A goal of scoring 10 goals during the season is unrealistic for several reasons: The outcome is largely out of the child’s control, and the youngster may become so consumed by reaching the 10-goal plateau that she begins taking shots that aren’t beneficial to the team and stops passing the ball to her teammates.
Use short-term goals: The younger the child, the shorter the attention span, so working with a series of short-term goals leads to greater improvements and increased confidence in a quicker period of time.
Create backup goals: Create several goal levels so that if the player doesn’t reach the top goal but manages to reach the second out of the list of five, she still gains a sense of accomplishment. Having just one goal to strive for turns it into an all-or-nothing proposition that risks leaving the youngster disappointed in her performance.
Get player feedback: The process is more effective if you have a short discussion with each of your players to gain some insight into which areas of the game each wants to improve on. For example, a youngster may have her heart set on learning how to deliver a header, but if you choose trapping the ball with her chest as the goal, you’re probably not getting quite as enthusiastic an effort from her. Helping players select realistic goals that they have an interest in achieving helps drive their development.
Applaud progress and effort: Regardless of the outcome of the game, take the time to applaud and acknowledge players who are reaching their individual goals. For example, if one of the goals for a youngster on your team is to become comfortable taking shots on goal with his less-dominant foot, and during the course of the game a situation called for him to use that foot, and he got off a quality shot, recognize him for that. Failing to acknowledge that type of progress, which can be easy to overlook if your team happens to get beat 8-0 that day, sends the message that goal setting and working to achieve and improve performances really aren’t that important to you after all. And even if the child fails to reach the primary goal you set, pile on the praise for his effort and hard work.
Factor in injury: If a youngster is returning from an injury, take that into account before setting goals for that individual. Even if the youngster is quite talented, you may have to lower the goals until she has a few practices and games under her belt and is back up to normal speed. At that time, you can revisit and adjust the goals to coincide with the health of the player.
Setting team goals may seem like a good idea, but these goals can lead to all sorts of problems. For example, if one of your team goals is to win four of your last five games of the season, and the team drops two games in a row, suddenly the goal is unreachable with three games left to play. Chances are the team played two of its best games of the season, yet your players are disappointed in their performance because they lost. Team goals represent the proverbial double-edged sword. When the team is winning and meeting goals, confidence is soaring and everyone is pleased with the outcome. But when games don’t end in victories, the team becomes blanketed in disappointment and self-doubt.
Revising Your Practice Plan
As a youth soccer coach, nothing brings a smile to your face quicker than seeing your players learning, developing, and progressing. After all, that means the drills you choose are making a difference in the skill development of your players, the practice plans you put together are producing the desired results, and the instruction and feedback you dispense are really sinking in with the youngsters. Yet, you can’t be satisfied with these improvements. You have to push the players to excel and get even better during the remaining time you have them under your care.
Conversely, because coaching soccer can be such tricky business, the team may not be performing as well as you had hoped or may be struggling to master a particular skill. To ensure that feelings of frustration don’t wash over the team and sink the season in disappointment, you want to make alterations in your practice plan to fend off these problems. Begin by taking a close look at your drills. Perhaps they’re too difficult or aren’t really tailored to the skill you want to focus on. Second, watch the players’ faces. Are they smiling and energetic? If not, they probably aren’t learning a whole lot. Figure out ways to inject more fun into the drills, and increase the tempo of your practices, which can spark more enthusiasm and lead to more excitement and learning.
For youngsters to gain the most from their participation with you, you have to continually challenge yourself to devise drills that bring out the best in your players and challenge them to continue their development in the sport. You can’t simply rely on using the same core drills all season long, because that brings learning and development to a halt and buries fun in the process. The need to alter your approach to practices and games is one of the best problems that you can have as a youth soccer coach!
Making changes to your practice plans as you maneuver through the season isn’t as difficult as you may think. Although incorporating several new drills into your practices is always a good idea, you can also rely on tweaking basic drills that you’ve been using the first few weeks of the season. Simply make some minor adjustments to increase the difficulty level and
meet the needs of your developing players. For example, even the most basic drill that many coaches run, like the 2-on-1 drill, can be easily revamped to incorporate a new challenge for your players. For instance:
Have the kids use only their nondominant feet during the drill to help challenge them and promote that area of their game.
For kids who are more fully developed, require that the shots on goal be headers. This requirement forces the passer to deliver a chip pass into the air that allows her partner to make contact with his head.
Part III
Beginning and Intermediate Soccer
In this part …
A coach who doesn’t have the ability to teach fundamental techniques and provide good drills to share with his team is about as effective as a repairman who owns no tools. In the following chapters, we serve up an array of offensive and defensive techniques, skills, and drills that promote learning and leave the kids begging for more.
Chapter 9
Teaching the Fundamentals
In This Chapter
Teaching beginners
Teaching basic soccer skills
Fixing potential problems
One of the most important characteristics of being a good soccer coach is being able to teach. Even if you’re knowledgeable in the sport, played it growing up, or enjoyed a high level of success playing competitively in high school or college, you can’t help your players unless you can pass along information that helps them learn and develop skills.
Being a top-quality soccer coach means presenting information correctly and clearly while providing useful and positive feedback. It means acknowledging and applauding skills performed properly and recognizing when players use improper mechanics, as well as being able to correct them. It also means employing a coaching style that promotes learning, rewards effort, stresses safety, and focuses on fun.