Category: Player management

or how to invigorate and restore discipline to youth soccer coaching sessions

• Increasing the pace of your practice
• Increasing the work rate in your training
• Making everything competitive and publishing results regularly
• Teach through games instead of line drills wherever possible
• Tailoring the psychological profile of your training sessions
• Identifying and encouraging your true believers
• Reward good practice effort with more starts and more playing time
• Replace non-believers with harder working players at the next tryout

Details:

1) Get them moving immediately on arrival, each player with a football, give them a series of 60 second technical exercises. Keep them moving the whole time except for short breaks. Award push-ups and sit-ups for foot draggers who deliberately delay getting on to the next exercise. Do not allow this and clearly state that you will not accept this. Since you have realized that they are not your friends, send lectures home on paper to read later, and don’t let them waste time socializing once they step on the field on your time.

2) Break down exercises into greater numbers of groups with fewer players so that the action / rest ratio is increased. For each individual exercise, add extra physical work or skill work to add to the effort. For example, instead of having two players one touch passing at 5 yards, have each player check away 3 steps after each pass and come back hard to one touch the next pass. Instead of 6 v 6, play two 3v3’s if appropriate. While group one plays group two, group three can orbit the playing area completing plyometrics, stretching, jumping, skipping, backwards and side to side running, and other specialized physical work.

3) Juggling, relays with ball control and speed required, 1v1 to cones, penalty kicks, and all kinds of other competitions can be done on a regular basis as a productive part of practice, and you can easily keep records, publish them by keeping standings and sending these home on a regular basis. Sprints of various distances, and other measures of aerobic fitness are also appropriate. If you are alone and don’t have a helper to write down results, buy a hand held tape record at Office Depot and you can record your results without even losing sight of your training session. (Side note: hand held tape recording onto micro cassette is an excellent method for taking notes about team and player fixes needed during the match. Coaches who spend a lot of time writing paper notes are at a disadvantage because they are head down too much.) Nearly everything you do can be made competitive. For example, if you are teaching an elevator settle with the instep of the foot, start with partners with a ball, one partner providing an underhanded serve to the partner. Quickly move to a situation where the server will pursue down the line of play, and the settler must move the ball off the line of play quickly. Then perhaps play two in the middle and two servers on the ends, alternating server and receiver. Let the second player in the middle push and provide back pressure when it’s not her turn, make it a battle. Have winners and losers, and move winners to play winners.

4) For every technique or tactic you’d like to teach, try to find a game that works as well as the line drill that comes to mind at first. Line drills have the advantages that everyone gets the same number of tries, and, because there is only one person or pair going at a time, it is easy for the coach to organize and observe. However, you are better off if it’s less convenient for you and more people are in on the action at once. This means that you have to coach the team as they play, and freeze them to correct or compliment and reinforce. For example, we were working on shooting to the far post today. We started with some basic unpressured shooting, added a little time and angle pressure, added a defender. Getting more competitive, but still less than thrilling, I can see a lot of players at the back of the shooting line talking about the football game Friday night. Finally, we simply played 6 v 6 to full-size goal and goalie, team winning the ball to play it outside the 18 before shooting, goalie always covering near side, only shots to far post counting. We did not have the same number of shots for every player, but we had a lot of shots under pressure conditions, and we did get people shooting to the far post, and everybody was in the game.

5) Tailoring the psychological profile of a training session is overlooked by most coaches. It means working, monotonically, from low concentration to high concentration, low pulse rate to high pulse rate work, and from low competitiveness to high competitiveness activity. If you warm-up and go to playing 2v2 to small cone goals, the action is intense and competitive, and the physical demands are great. If you then followed this with some boring tactical walk-through for a new free kick play, you’ll have a lot of your players zoning out or wrestling behind your back. So, go through boring stuff after your warm-up, or skip the warm-up and do boring stuff as the warm-up, then stretch before your technical activities.

6) Reference William Warren’s Book “Coaching and Motivation”, he’s right on this subject. (Some nice coach already mentioned the Positive Coaching book. John Sheperd, an old friend from Pleasanton, sent me a copy recently, and it looks pretty interesting.) Warren says build a new team around the true believers who are willing to share their feelings with you and work hard to achieve their goals. He says you will convert some of the others over time.

Now, reference me on the rest. First, every team will have perhaps a neighbourhood core that experienced some early success, and then you have a third of the team who drive more than 45 minutes to reach your training facility. Usually, the core is a clique and the outer perimeter kids are a separate group who bring a lot of skill, competitiveness, scoring, and earnest ambition to the team. If there is one pushy parent, it’s more likely to be with a perimeter kid, but, on the whole, they are a nice bunch and often easier to motivate than the neighbourhood clique, who have an club you will never join. Instead, you will be bringing some of these kids into your club. If your team has real stars, it’s often from the perimeter kids. You need to go visit their home, find out how they live, eat dinner at their home, and meet their brothers and sisters. Find out what ambitions these kids have, and work to help them plan and reach their goals. Keep them close and communicate with them, encourage them, and work to join more of the other kids into your circle of dedicated players. You can give a subtle benefit to the dedicated kids in your circle by thinking in terms of their needs first as you write and update your team development plan, including your training schedule (like scheduling training to allow perimeter kids time to arrive), your competitive schedule (make sure that your true believers have the day off from school for that big tournament), and your budget for development. Talk to all your players and families, just talk with your true believers first, and don’t make it a secret.

7) If your players are indeed gamers, than you have the biggest carrot. You decide who starts games, you decide who plays, and you decide how long they play, within the guidelines of your club, association, or state association. No matter how much you preach to the players that starting is not important, the kids believe starting is very important and filled with meaning. I would recommend that you keep a detailed training record for each training session, not only recording attendance, but location, times, topics, injuries, weather, and lot of other stuff. Advise your players that training attendance, attitude, and effort will are important and that they will control playing time. After practice, note in your training record performance for each player, and use this to assign starters and playing time in the next match. If you are pretty much trying for equal time for all, fine. Just take some match minutes aside, and make them bonus minutes for hustle. So, everyone gets 20 minutes in the 40 minute half, except a few players go an extra 10 minutes for excellent hustle at practice. Make sure your true believers and hustlers, and any new converts, get more starts. Tell the players why they are starting so there’s no confusion.

By Dave Simeone, NTSSA Director of Coaching, National Staff Coach – U.S. Soccer

My thanks to T&C Optimist Soccer Association for allowing reproduction of this article

Handling discipline problems presents a distinct challenge for youth soccer coaches. Many coaches are inexperienced in dealing with discipline or even identifying real problems versus child’s play. Many coaches mistake immature behaviour, which would be appropriate for youngsters, for behavioural problems.

A few factors influence the typical inexperienced parent /coach:

1. FALSE EXPECTATIONS: inexperienced youth soccer coaches begin with personal expectations of what goes on during games or practices. These expectations are, sometimes, inaccurate; these parent / coaches lack perspective. They forget that soccer is a child’s game. It is “play”. These coaches encounter reality in their first session with youngsters. They find out very quickly that working with youngsters does not meet their expectations of “coaching”. This, in turn, causes feelings of fear and anxiety. These inexperienced coaches may, at times, react abruptly and may not successfully handle these situations.
2. PERSONAL CONCERNS: New and inexperienced youth soccer coaches become concerned with “controlling” situations. They also are over – occupied with being well-liked. Many coaches see these two interests working in opposite directions: “If youngsters like me…I can’t control them,” or “l can control them, but they won’t like me.” Coaches either become over- ambitious to please players, or harsh.

Both of these approaches have grim consequences.

Coaches may feel betrayed if they are overly friendly and feel taken advantage of, while being too harsh causes youngsters to feel resentful or bitter. In the end, problems are unresolved and both the coach and youngster are angry or disappointed.

1. LACK OF RESPONSIBILITY: Many times, inexperienced coaches have difficulty coming to grips with their inability to “manage” these situations. These coaches tend to blame players, solely, for problems.

Some, on the other hand, allow serious problems to occur, repeatedly, but lack the insight which would allow them to prevent such situations from happening time and again.

After several experiences in attempting to “discipline” youngsters, coaches become increasingly frustrated. This results in the coach perceiving themselves poorly. For this reason, some youth coaches leave our ranks early. It is through coaching education programs that we should address their needs for appropriate player management.

These coaches must be empowered to help themselves overcome these “problems” and feel effective.

Real discipline problems are best described as conflicts of interest between the youngster and the coach. Are some of these interests predicated on the differences between the needs of young players and the role adults perceive youth sport to take? The answer is yes!

One of the real predicaments is to deal with behaviour in a non- judgmental manner. Many times adults reprimand youngsters and embarrass them. The challenge for coaches is to address what is happening and modify their behaviour without being threatening. An adult’s actions should imply that they are dealing with the behaviour and not making the behaviour into a personal issue. This might be caused if children are compared against one another.

Undoubtedly, dealing with behaviour can be frustrating for rigid adults. It’s best to recognize that you, as the coach, are frustrated. There is a decided difference between anger and frustration. Adults need to differentiate between the two.

Again, differentiate between the behaviour that is disturbing and the individual child: the behaviour is what’s disturbing you.

You must also acknowledge that young players have feelings.

In fact, while we would like to see them develop and improve they must learn to enjoy the game. They have a genuine need for attention and inappropriate behaviour is their way of soliciting attention. If, in fact, you as an adult have difficulty acknowledging your own anger or frustration, how can you recognize and acknowledge these feelings in others? Most adults use methods that deal with behaviour and discipline that are reactive versus proactive. This causes coaches to sometimes overlook how a youngster feels about their comments on the youngster’s behaviour.

In identifying behavioural problems, parcelling out “punishment” is risky. Consequences must be meaningful to young players, but cannot be confused with punishment. The difference is the factor of respect for young players versus making them feel demeaned.

The real gift exhibited by competent youth coaches is to manage people / players effectively. There are several factors associated with effective management of players relating to behaviour:

1. Management of Time
2. Management of Environment
3. Effective Communication

The availability of time is limited when working with young players. Practices are usually scheduled twice weekly, anywhere from 50 minutes to an hour and a half in duration.

This places a high priority on effective teaching / coaching.

The time youngsters spend with the youth coach is minuscule in comparison with the time they spend away from soccer, with family, in school or in other activities.

The environment for youth players is a key ingredient.

Creating the appropriate games, activities and conditions directly influence management of players and acceptable behaviour. Typically, youth coaches attempt to arrange and manage players by over-organizing them. They place them in lines, with unrealistic absolutes, that do not allow them to move and play. It’s great for adults since it resembles the adult perspective of discipline and order. Soccer is a dynamic game; one that exhibits and includes movement of the ball and players. The organization of “play” has direct bearing on boredom versus stimulation as well as interest and learning.

It’s simple: there are no lines in “the game”, let there be no lines at practice. The advertisement for the Sega computerized game product which emulates NFL football says it best: if it’s in “the game” (The NFL), then it’s in “the game” (Sega). In one sense, those coaches who insist on over-organizing the environment are contributing to their own woes!

Effective communication has everything to do with all avenues to offer information. This includes body language, facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, eye contact and quality of content. Very simply, is the information useable in improving the player’s enjoyment, development or performance? Emotional outbursts, yelling and screaming either at parents, referees opposing coaches or PLAYERS is really unacceptable. It’s a tremendous sign of intolerance and a great indication of a lack of the necessary qualities to be an effective coach. The game, at all levels, must be the teacher and meet the needs of players. Youngsters learn more from their experiences in the game than from the coach. That’s why the role of the coach is to create the appropriate conditions and let youngsters play!

What youth coaches must ascertain is the distinction between a discipline problem, or poor behaviour as a result of unsuitable management. The nature of youngsters is to run, jump, be inattentive (from an adult’s perspective!), change their focus at a moments notice or gaze expertly off into the sky at a far away plane. If they are uninterested in the activities, it may be a problem of management. They come to soccer to be challenged and invigorated as well as to play, make mistakes and learn. A phenomenal aspect of “play” is that the problems, challenges disappointments or rewards resemble and parallel life experiences. Learning for youngsters between the ages of 5 and 12 is a leisure activity that is accomplished through play. Remember…PLAY is a key part of PLAYER DEVELOPMENT!

The little boy dribbled and kept dribbling. He had taken the ball away from the midfield pack and zoomed toward his own goal. This surprised the other children and allowed him to keep the ball to himself for much longer than any player had managed during this U-8 game.

Having put some 15 yards between himself and the other players, he slowed down and seemed to marvel at all the territory he now had to himself. He started making a wide U-turn and flashed a big smile.

He moved down the sideline and back into the other team’s half, then put his foot on the ball and stopped. When a couple of his little opponents approached, he accelerated toward their goal and took a shot that nearly scored.

What creativity, improvisation and savvy! And in his smile was the joy of soccer.

So how did his coach react?

First with red-faced screams of ”You’re going the wrong way! You’re going the wrong way!” Then furious shouts of ”Pass it! Pass it!” — a chant that several parents took up — followed by head-shaking in frustration.

Of course, the coach was shouting instructions to all his players throughout the game. That’s the norm in youth soccer, in which misguided coaches — and the other adults on the sideline — believe they’re helping children become better soccer players by telling them where to run and when to pass.

But what really irked the coach about the clever boy’s manoeuvre was it was risky. A misstep and he could have provided a scoring chance for the other team.

And, absurd as it is, there are adults — lots and lots of them — who place great importance on whether their 7-year-olds beat another team of youngsters.

Youth coaches who want to rack up wins discourage their players from taking risks, such as dribbling the ball out of the back, by ordering them to boot it up-field or out of bounds. ”Clear it!” they shout.

”The emphasis on winning is a detriment to young players because it prevents us from developing technically proficient players,” says U.S. U-17 national team coach John Hackworth. ”And we’re not giving them the ability to make decisions. You can’t find a youth soccer game where the coaches aren’t screaming the whole time, telling kids what they should do and how they should do it.”

If players aren’t allowed to make mistakes and take chances when they’re exploring the sport — if they’re constantly being told what to do — how can we expect them to develop the soccer instincts they’ll need to make the split-second decisions that are so much a part of the game?

”They hear ‘Clear it … Get rid of it … Pass it … Kick it up line’ so often that by the time they’re 13 or 14, when they get the ball and they don’t hear the instructions, they don’t know what to do,” says Tab Ramos, the great U.S. midfielder who is now a New Jersey youth coach.

Telling young players what to do with the ball, bossing them around to stay in certain positions on the field and taking strategic advantage of the bigger, stronger kids are ways of increasing a team’s chances of winning.
But at what cost?

”If you want your 8-year-olds to win tomorrow, you’re going to address that group differently than if you say, ‘I want my 8-year-old to win when he’s 18 years old,”’ says Bob Jenkins, U.S. Soccer’s Director of Coaching Education.

It’s not just that the coaches are obsessed with winning — there are the parents. A coach of a U-9 team told me that if his team compiled a 12-1 win-loss record, his parents would want to move their children to the team that went 13-0.

Ramos encourages his younger players, the 9- and 10-year-olds, not to kick the ball out of bounds when they’re under pressure in their own half.

”We want him to find a way out of it,” Ramos says. ”Half the time, he’s not going to come out of it and very often he’s going make a mistake that’s going to cost a goal. But this is when players should be allowed to take the risk so they develop their skills.”

Too few coaches are willing to provide such learning experiences because they can lead to losses.
”A lot of parents are living through their children,” Ramos says, ”and for them it becomes a matter of them beating the other coach because that’s the guy who beat them three years ago when their older child played.”
Hackworth, who doesn’t believe in assigning positions to players under age 10, proposes eliminating the ”ultra-competitive premier flight” until at least U-12. And even then coaches should still resist becoming results oriented.

”We want competition,” he says. ”They’ll always be competition and it’s not bad. The bad part is the emphasis on winning.”

That emphasis often results in coaches putting the physically advanced kids in particular spots. For example, a big guy in back who’s instructed to boot the ball to the speedy guy up front. This denies smaller players opportunities to play significant roles while bigger players can rely on their athleticism instead of developing their skills.

Aime Jacquet, who coached France to the 1998 World Cup title and has also been in charge of France’s renowned youth development program, said he investigates youth teams with winning records and if he discovers they won by relying on big players, he fires them.

If a coach isn’t obsessed with results, he’s more likely, when they’re at the age level in which assigning positions is appropriate, to expose players to different roles. Keeping a player in the same position all the time won’t help him adjust to new challenges when he moves to higher levels.

”Worrying too much about winning and losing gets in the way of development,” says Manfred Schellscheidt, head of U.S. Soccer’s U-14 program. ”There are always shortcuts that you can find to win the next game. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be winning five, six years from now.

”The kids all try to win anyhow, so I don’t think we need to add to this.

No kid ever steps on the field and says, ‘Today I’m going to lose.’ They’re naturally competitive. We should be concerned about the players’ performance, not the final score.”

Coaching soccer really isn’t that complicated. When children first become involved in organized soccer, the coach’s job is simply to create an environment that gives the children a chance to enjoy the sport. It’s such a wonderful sport that setting up goals and letting them play usually does the trick.

It should also be an environment that allows them to be creative, to express themselves and to bring their own personalities to the sport.

No doubt, the USA has produced legions of good players. But how many great players have come out of our youth ranks?

How many excellent American dribblers are there? How many American players can dazzle fans? How many defenders do we have who can play their way out of trouble, who can consistently contribute to the attack? How many American players can dictate the rhythm of a game?

Far, far too few.

And one wonders how many players with the capacity to bring individual brilliance to the field have had that hammered out of them by their screaming coaches.

by Mary Healy Jonas, Melpomene Research Director

Over the years, the Melpomene Institute has frequently received questions from coaches, parents, the media and others about boys and girls and how/if they participate in sports differently. As we searched for answers to their questions, we came to discover that there wasn’t much out there in the way of research about this topic. Therefore, early in 2000, we decided to explore this question ourselves, to develop a questionnaire that would give us an overview of where young male and female athletes fell along the spectrum of attitudes and behaviours towards competition and to find out if they were different from each other. The following is an abbreviated report highlighting some telling results.

METHODS

• Questionnaire developed (Summer, 2000) and piloted at the Minnesota Lynx/Minnesota Timberwolves youth basketball camps. Three hundred ninety-nine young athletes completed the questionnaire.
• Questionnaire revised based on lessons learned during the pilot.
• Revised questionnaire distributed to over 1,000 young athletes from across the United States between 11 and 18 years of age at the USA Soccer Cup Tournament in Blaine, MN in July of 2001.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Sample demographics (N = 879)

Gender

Female 557 (63%)

Male 320 (37%)

Racial Background

White 85%

Asian 1.5%

Other 2.5%

Chose not to identify 11%

Age

12 – 13 years 40%

14 – 15 years 31%

16 – 17 years 29%

School district

Suburban 56%

Urban 33%

Rural 7%

Academics

All A’s 40%

A’s & B’s 41%

B’s & C’s 10%

C’s & D’s 2%

Chose not to answer 7%

ANALYSIS

• Cross tabulations were conducted to provide simple descriptive statistics on how boys and girls answered questions differently.
• Nine variables (questions) were identified as “indicating an unhealthy attitude or behavior” towards competition and were combined to create a new variable (see table at right).
• This same procedure was completed to create a new variable focused on “winning” (see table). Ø Correlational analysis was performed on these variables to determine if any relationships existed between them and other key variables in the questionnaire.
• One-sample and independent sample t-tests were run on the two new variables to determine where boys and girls fell compared to the overall sample mean and how boys and girls compared to each other.

Variables included in the “unhealthy” variable

1. I would do anything to win
2. The main goal of playing sports is to win
3. It is more important for key players to play in order to win than for everyone to get equal playing time
4. I dislike my opponents
5. I get very upset when my team loses
6. Winning makes me feel powerful as a person
7. I have a hard time forgetting a loss

How important is:

8. winning
9. scoring a goal

Variables included in the “winning” variable

1. I would do anything to win
2. The main goal of playing sports is to win
3. It is more important for key players to play in order to win than for everyone to get equal playing time

How important is:

4. winning

RESULTS

Descriptive Results

As the chart below shows, the reasons that boys and girls gave for why they play soccer are virtually identical:

“I play soccer because I want to…”

	Girls	Boys
have fun	99%	94%
improve at my sport	98%	94%
learn new skills	95%	89%
be competitive	94%	94%
be in shape	92%	88%
be with friends	92%	87%
keep busy	73%	63%
get into a good college	57%	69%

Even as the motivation to play was the same, some notable differences were found in the attitudes and behaviors of boys and girls.

The following are a few of the differences between the way boys and girls answered specific questions probing attitudes towards winning.

The far right column gives the total percentage of boys and girls answering “frequently” or “almost always.”

“I would do almost anything to win”

	Almost never	Occasionally	Sometimes	Frequently	Almost always	Frequently + Almost Always
Female	20%	23%	27%	15%	14%	29%
Male	11%	15%	26%	20%	29%	49%

“It is more important for key players to play in order to win than for everyone to get equal playing time”

	Almost never	Occasionally	Sometimes	Frequently	Almost always	Frequently + Almost Always
Female	25%	21%	30%	14%	10%	24%
Male	11%	12%	36%	21%	21%	42%

“I get very upset when my team loses”

	Almost never	Occasionally	Sometimes	Frequently	Almost always	Frequently + Almost Always
Female	21%	28%	33%	10%	8%	18%
Male	10%	23%	26%	21%	21%	42%

Unhealthy attitudes towards competition

The difference noted in the above section compelled us to ask ourselves: “so what?” What does it mean that boys and girls differed in these areas? We decided to look at the numbers from the vantage point of competition as being made up of a range of behaviors and attitudes, some of which are healthy and some that are unhealthy.

• A scale measurement was created for the new “unhealthy” variable, with 36 representing the threshold over which an athlete would be considered unhealthy (for a more in depth explanation of this process consult the final report in the upcoming Summer 2002 Melpomene Journal).
• One-sample t-tests were conducted to compare the overall sample of kids with this unhealthy threshold of 36.
• The sample mean score on unhealthy is 27.85, which is significantly lower than the unhealthy threshold of 36 (P<.001), indicating that the sample as a whole is not particularly unhealthy. One hundred three cases fall above 36, thus in the unhealthy range. Thirty of these are female (29%) and 73 are male (71%).
• As with the unhealthy variable, variables from the survey indicating a strong focus on winning were combined to create a new “winning” variable. The sample mean score for winning is 12.77.

The age factor

In addition to gender differences, we anticipated that differences might be evident between the younger and older participants. The following few statistics show the differences in answers between the younger and older participants on a few key variables*.

	12-13 years	16-17 years
“I would do almost anything to win”	33%	45%
“The main goal of playing sports is to win”	19%	34%
“Is important that everyone gets a chance to play”	66%	25%

* the percentage reflect those answering “frequently” or “almost always” to the questions.

Pressure towards competition When asked if they felt pressure to be competitive, 43% of the athletes responded affirmatively (42% of the girls and 46% of the boys). Of those who listed sources for the pressure, the following is the breakdown of where these kids feel the pressure is coming from:

• 26% coaches
• 18% teammates
• 25% parents
• 8% peers
• 20% myself
• 2% fans

Of the 125 athletes who fall into the unhealthy range of the sample, 58% respond affirmatively to the pressure question (73% of the girls and 52% of the boys), however, the breakdown of the sources of that pressure is almost identical to the whole sample.

DISCUSSION

The findings from the study offer compelling insights into kids who play sports — their motivations and their feelings towards competition. Further, it raises more questions about these very same topics. The final report in the Melpomene Journal will address the following questions raised by the findings:

• What might it mean that kids seem to adopt more unhealthy attitudes and behaviors as they age? Further, why does this coincide with the decline in healthier attitudes such as “fair play?”
• The findings show kids who appear to be quite healthy in their approach to competition. If this is the case, why do we seem to read/hear so much negative press regarding violence and verbal improprieties among youth in sports?
• Are there any correlation between the kids’ attitudes and behaviors and that of their coaches?
• Are there any differences between the coaching styles of men and women coaches?

Being a youth soccer coach involves a lot more than taking a bag of balls and cones to your soccer coaching sessions and teaching children how to pass, shoot and tackle.

You are also a counsellor, psychologist, first-aider, secretary and diplomat. You also need to have eyes in the back of your head, be a superb organiser and be an expert at tying laces that are only two inches long and coated with mud. Additionally you have to be able to read minds.

It’s not sufficient to prepare your players technically and tactically to play in matches. You need to understand that their performance on the field is determined, to a surprisingly large extent, by what is going on inside their heads.

Are they feeling confident? Do they really believe they can perform well? Do they feel that they have to win? That losing would let down their significant others – you and their parents?

No matter how skilled a player is, if he is thinking about how other people are reacting to how he plays, he won’t be able to perform to his potential. It’s similar to stage fright and it affects thousands of youngsters every week.

A clear sign that this is a problem for your players is the difference between how they play in coaching sessions and how they play in matches. If you have players who shoot on sight and tackle without fear during training yet when match day comes, they are quiet and won’t take the slightest risk, they are being adversely affected by pressure. And you have to do something about it.

Pressure on young football players comes from two directions – parents and coaches – but most of it comes from parents.

Pressure from parents

Parents are, on the whole, well meaning. Unfortunately they often don’t realise what effect the little chats in the car on the way to matches that they have with their children have on their performance.

Comments like: “Score five goals for me today, John” (to a striker). “Let’s keep a clean sheet” (to a goalie). “No mistakes today!” (to a defender) and “it’s an important game today… let’s make sure we win” (to any player), won’t motivate their children to do well.

Instead, the parents’ words will be rattling around in your players’ heads while they’re playing and if they don’t look like meeting expectations, they will become frustrated and scared to take risks.

What can you do about it? Well, you can’t be in the car with them on the way to the match. But you can take the time to meet with your parents and explain how they can best prepare their children for match days.

Instead of putting pressure on their child to do well (the “or else” is unspoken) it would be better to talk about school, what they’re doing on Sunday, where they’re going for lunch after the game… anything except what they want their child to do on the pitch.

If parents feel they must talk about the game, they need to remind their child the result is not as important as playing their best for the team. That everyone makes mistakes and they will be their most loyal supporter no matter what happens. Exhortations to score goals, avoid mistakes or win the match almost always backfire and must be avoided.

All this might seem pretty obvious to you and me. But, sadly, it isn’t to most parents. So you need to tell them how to talk to their child before matches.

Pressure from coaches

Criticism is an essential part of coaching but it needs to be done in the right way. If you constantly nag at a player: “Joe, I’ve told you loads of times, aim at the corners of the goal when you shoot” or are harsh with them: “Lucy, that’s a terrible pass”, they will carry your words like a millstone around their neck on match days.

Joe will be too scared to shoot at all and Lucy will be tempted to kick the ball anywhere rather than attempt – and fail again – to make a decent pass.

You should always:

a) Focus on what a player does well rather than what they are not so good at. b) Help them to get better by teaching, not criticising. In Joe’s case, that would mean watching him shoot straight at the goalkeeper for the umpteenth time then taking him aside, praising him for getting into a shooting position then showing him how to strike the ball accurately.

Lucy needs to be praised for spotting passing opportunities then shown how to strike the ball more effectively. But even if you consciously avoid unhelpful criticism of your players, there are other ways you can put them under pressure.

• If your players feel that you want them to win matches rather than try to win them, they will feel as though they are letting you down if the other team scores more goals than they do.

• If your pre-match talk consists of dire warnings not to make mistakes, that they MUST WIN TODAY or includes the words: “Don’t let me down boys… “.

• If you prowl the touchline during matches, kicking the ground in disgust every time a player makes the “wrong” choice.

• If you substitute a player immediately after they make a mistake.

If you do any of these things your players will be too scared to shoot on sight, go for a tackle or try a long pass.

So make sure your players know that you value effort more than achievement, that the way they play is more important than the final score and you like players who take calculated risks. Impress on your players that the worst shot is the one that isn’t taken and they won’t get better unless they make some mistakes.

Take the pressure off and you’ll free your players to be the best they can be. And that’s what youth football coaching is all about.

Do you manage a team of U7s and use a policy of rotating players through every position on match days but find that some of the players will always automatically revert to their favoured position of attacker or defender, regardless of where they are asked to play?

This is a typical coaching problem with this age group and parents often like to add an extra complication by requesting that their child should play in their favoured position.

However, the policy of rotating players through all positions is good practice and definitely appropriate for six and seven-year-old players.

It is also a good policy to include the goalkeeper in this rotation. Many coaches keep the same “volunteer” in goal all season and at U7 level it’s really a job that should be shared out equally among the team.

If you have a couple of players who seem to like playing in a particular position, by all means let them play most games in that position. But at such a young age it’s impossible to know which players are going to be your strikers, goalkeepers, midfielders or defenders of the future. So it’s wrong to put a label on them just yet.

It’s also not a good idea to bow to parental pressure when you’re drawing up the team. You are the coach, not the parents.

You understand that all your players need to be exposed to all positions (how else can they know what it’s like to score goals or make great goal-saving tackles?) and that it doesn’t matter a jot if you lose a few matches at U7 level.

Explain to your parents that you’re building a team for the future, not the next match!

What is visualisation?

Visualisation is an established psychological technique. It has been used for many years to help people achieve their goals in life, overcome fears and reduce anxiety and stress.

Seeing yourself achieving your goal makes your brain believe that attaining that goal is possible, regardless of how difficult it may be.

Visualisation will not give a player technical skills that he or she didn’t have before but it will make them believe that they can play well, impress their team-mates, score the winning goal or make a great last-minute tackle. And if they believe they can do these things, then the chances of them actually doing them are greatly increased.

How can I use this technique with my players?

Children are experts at visualisation. They spend a lot of time in an imaginary world where they explore the possible consequences of their worst fears and brightest hopes. So all we have to do as soccer coaches is to guide our players to imagine (visualise) what they can achieve instead of what they fear might happen.

There are three ways to do this. We can either use internal visualisation (where a player imagines doing something themselves), external visualisation (where a player watches themselves do something as though they were standing on the touchline) or we can mix the two.

An example:

Before a match, in the changing rooms or a quiet corner of the field, I tell my players to spread out a little and make themselves comfortable.

First, I calm their minds. They close their eyes, take a deep breath and hold it for ten seconds before exhaling. We count together.

Then I ask them to remember the best game they ever played as a team. To help, I remind them when it was. Note: it doesn’t have to be a game that the team won, although it helps if they did.

I ask them to visualise (imagine) how they felt that day, how much effort they put in and how they played.

After a few seconds I ask each player to share something that they remembered about the game. A defender might remember a great tackle, an attacker the goal they scored, a midfielder a good pass or run.

They might remember how it felt to be congratulated by their parents on the way home or even what they had for tea that day!

Sharing these thoughts is an important step. It helps the team bond well and builds trust between your players.

Next, I ask them to visualise playing today’s game in the same way and with the same outcomes.

I give them a few seconds to do this then ask each player to tell the team what they are going to do to help the team today.

Again, sharing is important. If a player just keeps this thought in their heads it is easy to ‘forget’ the part they are going to play if the going gets tough. Vocalising makes the players more accountable.

The whole process takes five or ten minutes.

Summary

Visualisation can help your players overcome match day nerves. It can reduce fear, boost self confidence and will make soccer more fun for your players.

If your team consistently performs better in training sessions than in matches, loses to weaker opponents or has a problem with negative self image (‘we always lose to this team!’) visualising success will help them.

It’s always difficult catering for players of widely differing abilities.

One solution if you’re coaching a group with some children who have been playing for a few years and others who have only played football for a short while, is to separate the players into groups and get an assistant coach to work on the basics with the inexperienced girls or boys.

But if you don’t have the luxury of having assistants you might have to run extra ‘catch up’ sessions for the new youngsters.

There is, however, no reason why a mixed ability group shouldn’t work on the basics together. They all need to improve, even the children who have been playing for years.

For example: I work on first touch with simple games, such as Pass through the gate.

In this game (and others like it) pair up players so that the more experienced girls are playing with the less experienced. Then make the games competitive; who can play the longest without making a mistake?

It helps in this situation with a mixed ability group to take a more games-based approach to training. All your players will enjoy playing SSGs (small sided games) like the 1-0 Game.

Regarding tactics, all players can learn to defend, how to attack and the way different formations work. It shouldn’t matter how skilled they are.