Just
about right now, soccer organizations across the country are happily
organizing a record number of youth soccer teams. With this record
growth comes the need for more and more coaches to take teams of
younger, less experienced players and train them to succeed in the
sport while creating a positive sports experience for them. It would
be really nice if each of these teams of aspiring athletes had a paid,
professional coach to guide them along the path to success. However,
with cost and availability constraints this is just not possible. What
this means is that soccer clubs are relying more and more on parent
coaches to prepare tomorrow’s soccer stars to meet their destinies.
This is a hefty challenge for many of us who didn’t even get to play
the sport in high school, but it is one we can, and should, take on.
You CAN do it Better
How many times have you listened to other parents complain that
their kids’ coach didn’t have a clue, or that he/she didn’t know
how to motivate the kids, or was downright abusive to the little
darlings? How many times have you felt that way yourself? While we
have all had experiences with less-than-perfect coaching, as parents
who weren’t stepping up to the coaching plate, we really didn’t
have the right to complain. To be fair, most bad coaches really mean
well, they just don’t have the knowledge they need to perform good
skills transfer and motivate their teams to succeed. But knowledge can
be gained, and motivation can be attained if you apply a simple, basic
coaching philosophy that accomplishes the following:
- Enforces personal responsibility and commitment
- Teaches a team perspective rather than a me perspective
- Allows athletes to be active participants in their season
- Uses positive reinforcement along with constructive criticism to
change unwanted behavior
Sound like a familiar strategy? It should, it’s called good
parenting. Good coaching and good parenting are really based on the
same things. It’s when we think they’re different that we get into
trouble as coaches.
Stepping Up to the Plate
Once you’ve made up your mind to volunteer to coach your
son’s/daughter’s soccer team, you’ll need to get yourself a
plan. Nothing calms the jitters of uncertainty better than a good,
solid, doable plan. Here is what your plan should include:
- Learn About the Game of Soccer
- Learn How to Coach Soccer
- Organize Your Season
Learn About the Game of Soccer
To learn as much as you can about the game, you should buy yourself
a great book on the basics of soccer. There are a lot of good books
out there and many of them have been written at your level. Find one
that speaks to you when you open it, and doesn’t make your palms
sweat when you start to read it. For relatively young, beginning
players, the game you will be teaching them is pretty simple. As your
little athletes get older and more skillful, their game will become
more complex. As your task becomes more complex, you will also grow as
a coach. However, you will be creating unnecessary stress for yourself
if you try to understand professional level soccer when you will be
coaching 5-year-olds.
Learn How to Coach Soccer
Again, the key at this stage is to understand your coaching target.
If you will be coaching 5-year-olds, don’t look at coaching
instruction that tells you how to teach your team to hold its
defensive shape when going from defense to offense. At age 5, players
tend to want to follow the ball around the field in a giant wad, like
a rugby scrum. Obviously, your issues, as the coach of a team of
5-year-olds, will be very different and far less intense than the
issues of the coach who has a team of 19-year-olds.
The best thing you can teach your little athletes as they start out
on their soccer careers is the very basic elements of the sport.
Don’t even try to teach them anything fancy at this stage. Their
bodies will eventually grow into the skills as they develop the size
and coordination to accomplish them more easily. What you want to
focus on with the beginning player is the following:
- Simple touches on the ball. Warm them up each practice by having
them move the ball around with both feet, developing a feel for
how the ball moves when they touch it with the insides of their
feet, the outsides of their feet, their laces, etc.
- Simple passing, both short and long, adding movement as they
progress.
- Dribbling through cones. Start with the cones spaced widely
apart and move them closer as they progress. Add relays for fun
and an additional challenge.
- Trapping. Kids love to trap the ball. Pair them up and have them
serve the ball to each other for foot traps, thigh traps, and
chest traps. You can introduce softly served headers too. After
they’ve gotten pretty good at static traps, have them move
across a space while serving and trapping the ball.
You will also want to teach them the rules of the game, and basic
positional soccer. At the younger, beginning stage, you should
encourage your players to try out many different positions on the
field. The earlier they get a feel for the different needs and
pressures of these various positions the better. You will be rounding
them out as players.
Teach Them about SPACE
Your biggest challenge as the coach of younger, beginning players is
to teach them to move away from the ball and into space, because they
will be drawn to that ball like goats to a rodeo. It is never too
early to teach the concept of space, but the way you teach it can be
too complex. I once watched a well-meaning coach try to teach a group
of adorable 7-year-old girls how to move to space by outlining a drill
that they would have struggled with if they had graduated Summa Cum
Laude from MIS. This very bright guy knew what he wanted to teach
them, but he wasn’t quite able to bring the information down to
their level and feed it to them in digestible chunks. It was really
pretty entertaining to watch the results!
This is how I explained the concept of space in my book, Starting
Out Strong…Your Step by Step Guide to Becoming an EXCELLENT Parent
Coach:
If you and your neighbor and the milkperson all stood in a
straight line, with the milkperson in the middle, could you pass a
soccer ball to the feet of your neighbor on the other side of the
milkperson? Of course not, because that nasty milkperson would be in
the way. As my husband, Bob, was always fond of telling the kids,
“You’d need to put a stamp on it and send it by mail to get it
through.”
However, if you took about 4 giant steps to the left or right,
creating a triangle instead of a straight line, could you now pass
the ball to your neighbor? Of course you could (if you used the
inside of your foot and paced it right!). This is a very simple
illustration of the concept of “creating and using space”. The
sooner your little kidlets learn to use their space the better, so
you should do a lot of small grid work in your training sessions.
The small grid work I talked about in this chapter of my book
involves putting 2 teams of 2 or 3 players each into a small grid and
giving the teams points for a certain number of uninterrupted passes.
You can start by expecting 3 successive passes in a team to win a
point, and progress to 5 as they improve.
The size of the grid will vary according to your athletes’ skill
level. Generally, the smaller the grid, the more pressure there is on
the players. You should start out with a grid that is big enough to
allow the players to create space and make good, solid passes without
excessive pressure. As they progress in skill you can tighten up the
grid.
Organize Your Season
Before we talk about how you will get organized for your season as
a coach, let me first say this: GET A TEAM MANAGER! I’m sorry
to yell at you that way, but I really mean it. It is certainly
possible for you to coach and do the administrative things that will
need to get done during the season, but why would you want to? You can
usually strong-arm some poor, unsuspecting parent into becoming the
team manager, and it will make your life much simpler.
I go into much greater detail on setting up your season
administratively in my book, but basically this is what you'll want to
do as soon as you know who your team will be:
- Set up some kind of communication plan for the team. I always
create a database with names, addresses, emails, phone numbers,
parents names, etc. This comes in really handy when we have to
send out information or make phone calls to announce practice
cancellations.
- Make copies of the schedule for the season, tournament
information, maps to games, and anything else your little
munchkins will need for the season, and send these documents out
with an introductory letter (described below).
- Send out an introductory letter with information about yourself
and your first practice. In this letter you should also set up a
time to meet with players and their parents to give them your
coaching philosophy and your expectations of the team for the
season.
- Create your practice plan, including a wide variety of games and
drills that will teach them the basics without boring the snot out
of them.
Now put a smile on your face and get out there and make yourself
proud. It’s a GREAT day for soccer!
