With the fall season fast approaching, it is important to begin planning your upcoming soccer practices.  The following pointers are by no means comprehensive but should help you in the season ahead.  More training games, videos, drills and ideas cal also be researched out.

Be safe

The safety of you and your players is always the number one factor in your preparation.  Plan ahead by knowing the weather, and be sure to have all your players contact details (and a way to call for help) in case of emergency.  Once on site, make sure that the area is safe (free of glass, metal, holes, etc) and that any goals are anchored securely.  In the even of bad weather (thunder/lightening), always err on the side of caution and take the children to safety.

Be prepared/organized

As mentioned above, be sure to have accurate paperwork for all of your players.  Once on field have a lesson plan that is age appropriate, and makes good developmental sense.  In addition, have appropriate equipment for the practice (balls, cones, pinnies, etc) and check that it is in safe working order.  Being prepared will mean you are less likely to get flustered during practice.

The following clip is a drill we use at Complete Soccer Coach to teach players to head the ball while having some fun!

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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. (more…)

Where have all the coaches gone?

Finding volunteer coaches is like trying to find a teenager at a Rolling Stones concert these days; we know they’re out there but often few and far between.  Whether it’s due to busier schedules, lessened sense of community or an increased commitment required from teams, parents seem less inclined to help out with their kids’ sports team today.  What is needed in this case is a little creativity on our end to find other ways to recruit new coaches.  Below I’ve listed some successful tactics used by some of the club administrators on TeamPages.

1. Mandatory in-person registration: if feasible, this method gives you some face time with each parent.  This is a great time to build rapport, get to know their background and find out whether they’re a candidate for one of your vacant positions.
2. Recruit from your senior leagues: Many of you are going to either belong to or have a connection to an adult league with young men and women athletes.  These leagues are ripe for the picking when it comes to potential coaches.  Today’s generation of 20-somethings are always looking for ways to give back to the communities that raised them while also sharing their knowledge and love for the game.  Just make sure you approach them correctly, ensuring them the schedule and their commitment level are flexible.
3. Volunteer opt-out check boxes: psychology at its finest.  By making volunteering (whether it be coaching, field maintenance, fund raising, etc.) an opt out duty, you’re sending the message that it is expected of them.  This leaves parents feeling personally accountable and will increase participation across the board.
4. Never turn people away: One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen organizations do is turn away enthusiastic parents who are keen to give their time.  This often happens because a particular parent does not possess the skills yet to coach a team.  In this case, get creative , find something they’re interested in and let them help out any way they can.  Who knows, give them a couple of years around the game and some added training and they could be one of your best coaches in no time.
5. Treat your people like the rock stars they are: Let’s face it, volunteers are what make the amateur sports world go ’round.  Without them no one would play anything other than pickup basketball (assuming the courts were maintained without volunteers).  So why don’t we openly show our appreciation more often? Is it so difficult to recognize a person’s contribution either publicly or in private?  An example of a small yet power gesture is a personalized thank you card, hand written by the president of a club to each coach who graciously volunteered their time all year.

These are just a few approachesI’ve seen work over the years (many of them used directly on me).  I know our community of coaches are organizers are always looking for new ways to fill those vacant positions, so how are you doing it?  Any creative ideas? Please let us know either by commenting below, posting in our forums or emailing talk-to-us@teampages.com.

Like many other aspects of our lives, the Internet is playing more of a predominant role in sport, specifically in the spreading of information.  With the collective knowledge of the entire coaching world at our finger tips, any person equipped with enough time, a keen interest and an internet connection can learn the intricacies of any sport with just a few clicks of a mouse.

With this enormous resource readily available, why is it that we have so many ill-prepared volunteer coaches teaching our youth the fundamentals of the sports we love?  And is it the responsibility of the moms and dads who are already balancing full-time jobs and families to properly train and prepare themselves?  Or should it be the associations’ responsibility to provide the necessary training and coaching (yes, our coaches need coaching as well) they need to effectively manage their teams?

This debate is one I’ve seen come up time and time again, with the conclusion unfortunately being determined by lack of time and budget.  Making sacrifices and trade-offs seem to be the name of the game in many amateur sports; but fortunately with the mass adoption of the Internet, much of this needed training is both easily accessible and CHEAP!

There are a multitude of services and tools out there designed specifically for the rookie coach and I have done my homework to compile a short list of my favorite tools out there for coaches.  Keep in mind that most of these are soccer specific, but with a little time spent on a search engine you can find similar websites for any sport.

http://www.saysoccer.org/pages - This useful website has many practice plan to browse and also plenty of skills and drills covering dribbling, passing, shooting and warm-up.  There is an interesting section with an interactive tactical quiz.

http://www.worldofsoccer.com - Is a site full of excellent soccer resources.  One very convenient feature of this website is the great section of free youth soccer books that you can order directly from them.

http://www.bettersoccercoaching.com - A free archive of coaching tips and advice.  You can also sign up for their weekly coaching tips newsletter.

http://www.completesoccercoach.com - Fairly new to the game, this website offers a plethora of drills, all explained through video demonstration.  They have also recently announced a coaching certificate program that will be available for the upcoming fall season.

http://www.websitetoolbox.com/tool/mb/andagain?forum=1 - This is an example of one of the many coaching forums out there; it’s amazing how many golden nuggets you can pull from an online discussion of coaches who may be a little more experienced than yourself.

If you have any favorites or find any more sites out there worth mentioning, I’m always on the lookout for something to share with our users, so please comment below and include links.

Happy coaching.

As Mike Tan (right), CEO of TeamPages and Derek Story (left), Business Development Manager, prepared for their first soccer conference, they had no idea how much of an impact the T-shirts would make. For those of you who do not receive our newsletter I will attach the original story below, for those of you who do, I thought I would link to this post so you could see the T-shirts we were referring to.

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