Coaching Education content presented in partnership with The FA Learning
Coaching Yourself
What are coaching principles?
All soccer coaches have beliefs and opinions about what coaching is and how coaches can help players. Some might believe that players, especially young players, should not be coached, but should be allowed to develop by themselves, while other coaches might believe players should be nurtured carefully from an early age to avoid development of bad habits.
You should share your coaching principles with players, parents, club members and fellow coaches so that they can clearly understand your beliefs, motives and reasons for certain strategies.
Some principles of successful coaching might include:
- Respecting the needs of individuals and treating all players fairly.
- Developing independence by encouraging players and other coaches to accept responsibility for their own behavior.
- The development of individuals as people as well as soccer players.
- The development of mutual trust, respect and commitment.
- Positive acknowledgement of progress and achievement.
- Communication with players, coaches, parents and others.
- Promoting fair play and respecting the dignity of opponents and officials.
- Accepting responsibility for the conduct of players and encouraging positive social and moral behaviors.
- Maintaining confidentiality of information when appropriate to do so.
- Ensuring as far as possible the safety and health of players.
- Developing personal competence as a coach.
Soccer coaches come from a variety of backgrounds and bring with them their own beliefs, expectations and personal qualities. However, it is possible to identify the common knowledge and skills that underpin effective coaching. These include:
- Teaching players how and when to use techniques and skills.
- Asking appropriate questions, providing explanations, using demonstrations, listening and observing what players do.
- Leading and motivating players.
- Planning and preparing sessions to meet players’ needs and ensure safety.
- Delivering and controlling coaching sessions to ensure safe practice.
- Analyzing performances and guiding relevant progress.
- Organizational and administrative skills.
Whole and Part Methods
There are two basic methods used to develop techniques and skills in soccer. First, they can be undertaken by learning the whole technique or sequence of movements, or second, by breaking the movement or sequence into parts and learning each constituent part. In soccer coaching, it is beneficial for the whole and part methods to be used in combination.
The most effective ways of combining whole and part methods are:
- Shaping – All players find big movements easier to learn than small, accurate movements (i.e. passing the ball with the inside of the foot is easier to develop than a drag-back turn). Shaping makes learning a technique more straightforward by leaving out some of the parts to begin with and adding them later.
- Chaining – This involves breaking a technique down into component parts so that players can work sequentially through each part. However, if a technique is too complicated to break down into parts (i.e. the basic kicking action), the shaping approach might be more beneficial.
- Whole-part-whole – “When are we having a game?” is a question asked by most children after 10-15 minutes of practice. In helping children learn about soccer, use simplified versions of the game (the whole) that are constructed to promote practice of new techniques or skills (the parts).
To capture players’ interest and maintain their motivation, as well as providing a testing ground for new techniques and skills, a game is a useful starting point within a practice session.
Often called the “isolation method,” removing a part for specific practice and then putting it back into the whole is common within teaching. Remember, the whole can be a small-sided game situation (i.e. three vs. three) and not always a full version.
Introduction to Coaching Styles
How you coach is as important as what you coach. Your planning, preparation and approach to a session can be undermined if you don’t adopt a style of coaching which suits the needs of the players.
Are you the bossy coach who makes all the decisions and tells players what to do and when to do it? Perhaps you are more of a guide who shares decision making and encourages players to set their own performance targets. Most coaches lie between these two extremes and personality, coaching philosophy and the nature of the activity influence which coaching style is most appropriate.
One-to-one coaching, game-related practices or working with more experienced players might favor a guided-discovery style of coaching. This style encourages more involvement from the players in their own learning by setting problems to solve and asking more questions.
Resolving Conflict
While we want our players and teams to have a challenging attitude and win, it should be without the negative influence that internal or external conflict brings. Conflict may arise at any time in the highly charged arena of soccer. As a coach you should try to calm any situation of conflict. This can be achieved in any number of ways and will require you to remain calm and not get involved.
Conflict on the pitch is the responsibility of the match officials, but as the coach it may be your responsibility to influence a situation. If the conflict is addressed towards you, try to take yourself out of the situation by moving or adapting your behavior.
Conflict between your players will not always be sorted out quickly. You may have to instigate strategies to help the team gel and either begin to like, or at least tolerate, each other. There could be times when, for the benefit of the team, you have to let perfectly good players go because of their poor interactions within the team.
Your coaching view is based on how you learned to play soccer, on your present knowledge and on your future expectations. Your coaching is affected by your beliefs, attitudes and motives. These factors will influence your reasons for wanting to coach and provide the personal, moral and ethical principles that guide your coaching. Coaching yourself is as vital as coaching your players.
A coach who is too proud to learn from others is one who may not be coaching for long. Picking apart the tendencies of these soccer behemoths and learning their strengths and weaknesses can only help improve your team, not to mention probably exciting your players when you tell them they’re learning tricks of the trade from the world’s best.
