Here at TeamPages, we’re always looking for more ways to give back to our members which is why we’re so excited about our newest guest blogger, Coach Robert Wright from Complete Soccer Coach (who we featured in our Resources for Soccer Coaches post).  With the fall season approaching, Coach Wright will be posting a series of articles chalked full of tips and drills for youth soccer teams.

An experienced soccer administrator/coach, with a seventeen-year background in coaching soccer at the professional youth, college and recreational levels; Coach Wright’s credentials are only matched by his passion for the game.  For more information about Coach Wright’s background, I encourage you to check out his qualifications: http://completesoccercoach.com/coach.

Team Preparation and Goal Setting

by Robert Wright

For many of us, August signals the imminent arrival of the fall soccer season with lots of soccer practices and games in a short space of time.  Withe everything else that happens at this time of year, it is easy for coaches to feel overwhelmed and under prepared for working with their children.  Some easy tips to help alleviate this are:

Decide on your goals for the season

This may not be as simple as it sounds.  Your Long term goals for the team are important but there are other people who will also have opinions that are crucial, and that must be factored in.  These include your soccer organization, your players , and the parents of your players.  Only by taking all these stakeholders into consideration, will you develop a plan that everyone will support and buy into.

Once you have long term goals in mind, ask yourself if they are realistic and attainable.  Also, while it is easy to set goals that are outcome oriented (for example, win 4 more matches than last year) it is more appropriate for the development of your players to choose goals that are task oriented and not measured by winning (learn new moves, improve as a team, etc).

Make a plan to achieve these goals

The key to achieving your long term goals is to plan well.  Goals are more easily attained if you set smaller (short term) goals that act as benchmarks along the pathway from your starting point to your long term goal.  For example, if you have first time soccer players, your goal might be to teach them to dribble the soccer ball at speed, against opponents.  Over the course of the season, you might start by teaching them some basic dribbling during every session (say with the inside of the foot( and gradually increase the speed at which the players dribble, the length of time that they dribble for, and the level of difficulty in which they have to dribble; this can be manipulated by imposing time constraints (dribble from A to B in a set time), by decreasing the space available for an exercise (the small/more crowded the area the tougher it is to perform), by adding obstacles (dribble around cones), or by adding opponents (can limit opponents at first - opponents are seated, as an example).  I’ve provided a clip from the Complete Soccer Coach video library that demonstrates some of these dribbling exercises:

Once your plans are in place, it is important to understand that things may change or not work out as hoped.  Because of this, it is important to be flexible…on a large level, this could mean that after a few practices you realize that maybe your long term goals are unrealistic and need to be adjusted.  On a smaller level, maybe the children are not responding well to a certain exercise on a certain day and you need to try something different (go back to an activity they enjoyed from a previous practice).  Changing or adjusting your short and long term goals does not mean you have failed as a coach in any way; in some respects, this ability to adjust is one of the key skills you need to develop as a coach.  Always remember that our children are not robots, and as such it is always tough to predict how their skills and motivation will develop throughout the course of a season.

Parents Meeting

Finally, be sure to hold a parents and team meeting prior to the season.  This may be mandated by your soccer association, but even if it is not, it is an essential way for you to connect with everyone, share your vision, and make sure that everyone is on the same page.

No matter what the age of the children always remember that your number one aim should be to have fun, and for the children to want to come back the following season to continue their soccer development.

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Tags: Complete Soccer Coach, Soccer Coaches, Youth Soccer Teams

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 1:05 pm and is filed under News and Announcements, Tips and Drills. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.