Coaching

Congratulations, you're a soccer coach! That may be an exciting or perhaps frightening statement for you but the fact that you are reading this now tells us you are interested in improving your coaching skills. This is great because our children deserve our best. As we attempt to give our best to our children we naturally try to improve our own coaching skills. To do this as a novice coach is extremely difficult if only because of the enormous array and volume of material available. A simple Internet search of coaching sites will overwhelm you with hundreds of thousands if not millions of "hits"; not all of which are useful. Our hope with this manual is to start you on your journey to become a better coach no matter if your goal is to participate for years or if your goal is to just get through one season as a fill in coach. If you are already an experienced coach perhaps we can offer a few tidbits to fine-tune your skills.

We have tried to digest many different sources of information about youth soccer coaching and glean the most important points to present to you. Certainly this is not the only way to coach but we feel it represents proven techniques and philosophies by experts in the field with decades of experience. (We're not the experts in the field, silly, the guys who wrote the books are!) There are some wonderful resources in print and on the Internet and we hope to point you toward some of them without necessarily duplicating their content within this manual.

Start with the "Ten Commandments of Soccer Coaching". If you will judge yourself by these standards and attempt to adhere to them you are on your way to a successful season. The next step on your journey should be the "Player Development" section. It is futile to attempt to teach certain skills to certain aged players. Learn what are reasonable expectations for the age player you are coaching. Thirdly read the "Coaching Philosophy" section. This is where we outline in broad strokes how we believe you should move your team from point a to point b. Lastly you should look in the "Resources" section where you'll find specifics about games, drills, etc. If you start here (the resource section) you will get lost in a sea of fine details that will be hard to organize.

In closing let us write something that you may not see or hear again…. Thank-you!!!! Thank-you!!!! Thank-you!!!! Investing your time and energy for the betterment of our children is a wonderful and worthwhile thing.