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| The Big Picture - your role as a soccer coach Of course every kid is different, but almost all kids are in soccer for one reason, FUN! Fun - The best way to judge the quality of a grasshopper coach is to look at their kids during practice. If the kids are smiling, laughing and kicking, they have a good coach. If your kids aren’t enjoying themselves, you’re doing something wrong. Your job as a coach is to help them have fun and teach them a little soccer too. Balancing the fun / skill training ration is the most difficult aspect of coaching. When in doubt, always err on the side of fun. The key, of course is to combine both skill training and fun into the same activity. That’s your big challenge. Skill Training – This is probably the part you’re a little uncomfortable with. Don’t worry, five and six-year-old kids only need a little direction from you and they’ll be off and running. The key is to keep them running (dribbling). If there is one great truth about soccer skill development, it is that the more "touches" a kid has, the better that player will become. I guarantee you that if your players touch the ball more often than the other coach’s kids, your team will improve more than his. Avoid having the kids standing around in lines. If they’re standing in lines, they’re not touching the ball. Competition – The fact that we don’t keep score in our Grasshopper soccer program seems to drive some parents and coaches a little crazy. As a matter of fact, it bothered me at one time too. I thought that it was attempt of the far left wing to impose their politically correct agenda on the game of soccer. I thought it was a communist socialist conspiracy! I’ve come to realize that we don’t keep score for a few reasons. 1.Keeping score at this age emphasizes the wrong thing. The fact that you win or lose has little to do you’re your coaching and more to do with random distribution of talented players. If you’re a winner it’s because you were lucky enough to get a few good kids. You could have just as easily been given a bunch of uncoordinated geeks. Personally, I judged a coach not by his win loss record but by the improvement of his team and his reenlistment record. 2. Another reason we don’t emphasize the score is because that in a close game, an overly competitive coach may be tempted to give more playing time to his more talented players and bench the geeks. At this age, that’s a bad thing. They all paid the same money to join the team and they should all play the same amount of time. To quote a five-year-old that I know, "That ain’t fair"! 3. If you don’t emphasize the score, losing is a lot easier to take. Let’s say you’re a kid of average ability and you get on a team with a bunch of lesser talented players and you lose every single game by 10 goals. Many people think that if you lose, you’re a loser and if you loose all the time, you suck. I don’t know about you, but I tend not to enjoy things that I suck at… How about you? The result may be that a talented player will never gets to play another season. 4. Most of the kids couldn’t care less. If you don’t believe me just wait and be observant throughout the season. You’ll find that there are only a couple of parents and yourself that really care about the score. The main reason that you care about the score is because you think that the team’s success or failure reflects on your ability to coach. Trust me, it doesn’t You’re main objective should be to help the kids have fun and try to teach them a little soccer too. Repeat after me… “My job as coach is to help the kids have fun, teach them a little soccer, and help them to have even more fun”. Believe me, you’ll have fun too. |
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| © Michael Ray 2005
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