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Tuesday, 17 February 2009

Coaching Kids' Soccer - How to Solve the Toughest Dilemma

Inspiration; it can be one of the hardest issues to deal with when you are coaching kids soccer. Youth soccer coaches find it especially challenging to inspire, motivate, and build drive into youth soccer players. Coaching kids soccer with the right tactics can create the internal inspiration that can put players over the top. Putting in place a system that pushes players to play harder, run faster, be more aggressive than the other team will be a significant contributor to a team's success.

Inspiration and motivation can come in many flavors. What works for one player likely will not work for the rest. Many of us have had new players that had goals of just touching the ball five times in each half, to the extreme goal for super players of scoring at least one or two goals in each half of every game. Inspiration can be a great source of breeding consistency in coaching kids soccer.

How to inspire a soccer team may be a challenge for new coaches. It really just gets down to leveraging the basic personality characteristics of each player. Does that player want to "show up" his/her older sibling? Is the motivating factor to earn points, or skipping out on an endurance drill, or being in the starting line-up or a designated captain for the next game? While coaching kids soccer, it becomes important to determine what inspires each player. This should be a group effort by the coaching staff. Some basic characteristics of youth soccer players generally involve some of the ones mentioned previously, along with receiving certificates of accomplishment to post in their school locker or bedroom, being named a team captain and leading game or practice activities, setting personal or team records, other youth-oriented fascinations with receiving snacks after games or practices, and being able to play a position they aspire to, but haven't had the chance yet. After you've been coaching kids soccer for a few years, you learn that there are many traits that consistently run through youth soccer players that can be leveraged as inspiration to aspire to new heights.

Maybe most importantly, as inspiration is developed by youth soccer coaches, more and more benefits will emerge. Inspiration can lead to confidence. Confidence can lead to developing a team leader on the field. Team leaders can set an example and urge other players to follow suit and extend the extra effort that can win games. And winning games is a great source on encouragement for continuing in soccer in the future.

By Mark Raymond

Newer coaches usually seek out information on the best ways to inspire, motivate, and get the most of young soccer players. There is one website that has great soccer resources for coaches, such as free articles, videos, soccer field diagrams, teaching aids, downloadable soccer coaching books, and other documents. The site is dedicated to helping youth soccer coaches, and it is called Coach Mark Soccer Club. The site has free soccer strategies and soccer positioning information, roster templates, practice agendas, coaching checklists, and nearly everything required for coaching kids soccer.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mark_Raymond

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi. I am the original author of this article, Could you please contact me at
Mark (at) CoachMarkSoccerClub.com as soon as possible.

Coach Mark

Youth Soccer Strategies

Unknown said...

This article was intended to have the orignal live links retained in it. In that absence, here is the link to my free soccer coaching resources website ...



Coach Mark Soccer Club

Coach Mark