As a coach, I would consider myself pretty old school. When I say old school, what I mean is an environment where the player shows up for practices and games with a proper attitude and prepared to work hard. This includes respecting coaches decisions, and not talking back to the coach. When there is a dissagreement between a player and a coach, there should be a discussion. However, all players need to respect that the coach's decision is final whether they agree with it or not. Even more frustrating is when players use their parents to try and put pressure on the coach to change the coach's decision.
I played multiple sports in my youth, and had a lot of good coaches and coaches that were not as good. When I played sports, it was an environment where coaches ruled with an iron fist, and when there was a disagreement, the parent sided with the coach. I will be the first to admit that this wasn't always the healthiest environment. In some cases, my coaches were verbally or physically abusive, and I was always told by my parents that I was on the team, and basically had to put up with it. This was wrong. First, the coaches should have never been allowed to behave that way, and by today's standards, things are much better. Second, it was wrong for the parents to side with a coach in that situation. However, there was never a situation where a player yelled at a coach, intentionally stopped working hard during practice, or other behavior like that.
In my view, we've swung the other way too far in the pendelum.
There has been so much emphasis on raising kids with a healthy self-esteem through proper parenting, and coaching. Overall, that's the right direction. However, this has been carried way too far. As a coach, I run into kids that have a healthy self-esteem, but have developed an attitude that they can do what they want when they want. They haven't developed a sense of respect for adults and respect for authority. Parents have spent more time trying to be the friend of their child rather than having the child develop a healthy respect for the parent-child relationship. Everyone wants to be liked by their kids, but when this is carried to far, kids develop a sense of entitlement and privilege, and does not serve them well later in life.
I do coach and have coached some great kids, but there are always some challenges. You have kids that know the proper meaning of working hard at everything you do, and they show up with the proper attitude and respect at each practice and game. You also have some that will try to push the limits, but can be managed in a way that they will participate in practices and games the way that you would expect. Unfortunately, you also have the kids that are convinced they can do what they want, and while you can get them to work hard some of the time, the amount of effort you put into getting them to do the right thing isn't the same as what you get from them in a practice or game.
As a coach, I find far too many players in the second and third category where you spend just as much time motivating them to be at practices and games to work hard as you do actually trying to make them better soccer players. There is an emphasis on having fun, but no one has taught these kids how to have fun while working hard at their game. To them, having fun is going to practices or games where they can be with their friends. Participating in a sport they enjoy is secondary. Don't get me wrong. Players should not only enjoy the sport, but they should also enjoy the players they are playing with. However, when enjoying being with the friends is more important than playing the sport, it's time to reconsider why they're participating.
Some of my best players were not the ones that were most talented at their game, but rather the ones that came to practice, and worked hard at everything we asked them to do. At one point, I coached a girls team that was the third team at our age group. We had some players with talent that didn't know how to work hard at their game, and we had others that didn't have as much talent, but did everything you asked as best as they possibly could. I worked with some of these players anywhere from 1-3 years (new teams are selected each year). However, I am happy to report that quite a few of those players actually made varsity or the first JV team as freshmen at their high school. Even better was that through the conditioning program that I ran, one of the players made the varsity cross country team at her high school and found her niche in running. What was the key?
Probably the first thing I had to do as a coach was to create a definition for them of what it meant to work hard at their game. They were willing to do what needed to be done to get better, but they just didn't know how to go about it. One of the keys was to help each player set individual goals. We sat down and they shared what they thought they needed to work on, I shared what I thought they needed to work on, and then based on that, created goals for them to achieve. The goals were not long term goals, but rather goals with weekly targets where they could see their achievement. I think that was the biggest key. There were regular progress reports as I kept stats on everything I asked them to do. Also, I made sure that each player only compared their progress to their own goals. They were not to compare themself to each other. It would be unrealistic to believe that the players would not compare themselves to one another. That happened, and I didn't stop it. However, I always emphasized where they should focus, which was on their own goals.
Here are some examples of the goals I established with this group.
1. Juggling - goals for each foot, each thigh, headers, and everyrthing
2. Ball Taps - Within a two minute window, how many times could the touch the top of the ball with each foot
3. Side to side - Within a two minute window, how many times could the touch the ball with each foot between their legs.
4. Distance running - How far could they run within 12 minutes with a goal of running 2 miles
5. Distance kicking accuracy - From 18 yards out, how often could they hit the cross bar or each post of the goal
There are many others that you can establish, but the key is that it always has to be measurable. Also, we allocated time at the beginning of each practice that they worked on specific goals. From there, we could evolve into working on other parts of the game. By doing this at the beginning, we started to establish a work ethic from the time they arrived at practice, which would usually carry through to the end. We did not start with goals at the beginning of warmups for the game, but after establishing a work ethic for practices, we found that it carried over to games.
One natural consequence is that each player got better individually, which made us a stronger team overall. Also, the work ethic that we established was consistent for each player on the team, so each player knew what they could expect from their teammate. That's not to say that there weren't talent gaps between individual players, but each one knew what they would get from others on the team. I believe that also facilitated bonding between members of the team. We still had our problems between players here and there, but I feel those problems were easier to deal with as a result of the standards that we had set.
Above, I talked about the tactical aspects of working hard at their game. However, the other key component was developing a proper attitude. I often tell players that the difference between a good player and a great player was their attitude towards how they played the game. Players with bad attitudes would be good, but they would never get better because their attitude prevented it. Players with good attitudes and good ability had the chance to become great. For players with good attitude, motivating them was easy. Players with a mix of good and bad attitude could be motivated, but you usually have to pay close attention to them to figure out what causes a change in their attitude. Players with a bad attitude, as expected, are the most difficult. In some cases, there is a personal or family situation that caused the attitude problem. In other cases, there wasn't anything in particular causing the attitude problem. I found that one of the keys to helping a player to develop a proper attitude was to get them to forget everything else in their life when they stepped on the field. Soccer could be their outlet, the one place that they could get away from everything else. That also seemed to work pretty consistently. However, I would be lieing if I told you that there were some players I just couldn't reach. As much as I wish I could have, it just wasn't going to happen. That doesn't mean that you write the player off. You still try, but you can't look at it as a failure if you can't reach them.
To wrap up this blog entry, there are a couple of key things to remember. Most kids these days don't know what it means to work hard at their game. They understand the words, but have trouble translating that to actions at practices and games. You have to teach them what it means through actions and what they can do. That involves things for both the physical AND mental aspects of the game to maximize what the player can achieve. The key is to start from the very first day of practice. Trying to start later on is much more difficult as you have to break habits rather than establishing habits from the start.
More later...
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