Stepping up

Stepping Up to the Plate
Once you’ve made up your mind to volunteer to coach your son’s/daughter’s soccer team, you’ll need to get yourself a plan. Nothing calms the jitters of uncertainty better than a good, solid, doable plan. Here is what your plan should include:

*Learn About the Game of Soccer
*Learn How to Coach Soccer
*Organize Your Season
*Learn About the Game of Soccer

To learn as much as you can about the game, you should buy yourself a great ebook on the basics of soccer. The ultimate guide to soccer positions! is a great start for any coach and it comes with some valuable free bonuses too! There are a lot of good books out there and many of them have been written at your level. Find one that speaks to you when you open it, and doesn’t make your palms sweat when you start to read it. For relatively young, beginning players, the game you will be teaching them is pretty simple. As your little athletes get older and more skillful, their game will become more complex. As your task becomes more complex, you will also grow as a coach. However, you will be creating unnecessary stress for yourself if you try to understand professional level soccer when you will be coaching 5-year-olds.

Learn How to Coach Soccer
Again, the key at this stage is to understand your coaching target. If you will be coaching 5-year-olds, don’t look at coaching instruction that tells you how to teach your team to hold its defensive shape when going from defense to offense. At age 5, players tend to want to follow the ball around the field in a giant wad, like a rugby scrum. Obviously, your issues, as the coach of a team of 5-year-olds, will be very different and far less intense than the issues of the coach who has a team of 19-year-olds.

The best thing you can teach your little athletes as they start out on their soccer careers is the very basic elements of the sport. Don’t even try to teach them anything fancy at this stage. Their bodies will eventually grow into the skills as they develop the size and coordination to accomplish them more easily. What you want to focus on with the beginning player is the following:

Simple touches on the ball. Warm them up each practice by having them move the ball around with both feet, developing a feel for how the ball moves when they touch it with the insides of their feet, the outsides of their feet, their laces, etc.
Simple passing, both short and long, adding movement as they progress.
Dribbling through cones. Start with the cones spaced widely apart and move them closer as they progress. Add relays for fun and an additional challenge.
Trapping. Kids love to trap the ball. Pair them up and have them serve the ball to each other for foot traps, thigh traps, and chest traps. You can introduce softly served headers too. After they’ve gotten pretty good at static traps, have them move across a space while serving and trapping the ball.
You will also want to teach them the rules of the game, and basic positional soccer. At the younger, beginning stage, you should encourage your players to try out many different positions on the field. The earlier they get a feel for the different needs and pressures of these various positions the better. You will be rounding them out as players.

Teach Them about SPACE
Your biggest challenge as the coach of younger, beginning players is to teach them to move away from the ball and into space, because they will be drawn to that ball like goats to a rodeo. It is never too early to teach the concept of space, but the way you teach it can be too complex. I once watched a well-meaning coach try to teach a group of adorable 7-year-old girls how to move to space by outlining a drill that they would have struggled with if they had graduated Summa Cum Laude from MIS. This very bright guy knew what he wanted to teach them, but he wasn’t quite able to bring the information down to their level and feed it to them in digestible chunks. It was really pretty entertaining to watch the results! Don't make this mistake.





Organize Your Season
Before we talk about how you will get organized for your season as a coach, let me first say this: GET A TEAM MANAGER! I’m sorry to yell at you that way, but I really mean it. It is certainly possible for you to coach and do the administrative things that will need to get done during the season, but why would you want to? You can usually strong-arm some poor, unsuspecting parent into becoming the team manager, and it will make your life much simpler.

Basically this is what you'll want to do as soon as you know who your team will be:

Set up some kind of communication plan for the team. I always create a database with names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, parents names, etc. This comes in really handy when we have to send out information or make phone calls to announce practice cancellations.
Make copies of the schedule for the season, tournament information, maps to games, and anything else your little munchkins will need for the season, and send these documents out with an introductory letter (described below).
Send out an introductory letter with information about yourself and your first practice. In this letter you should also set up a time to meet with players and their parents to give them your coaching philosophy and your expectations of the team for the season.
Create your practice plan, including a wide variety of games and drills that will teach them the basics without boring the snot out of them.
Now put a smile on your face and get out there and make yourself proud. It’s a GREAT day for soccer!