Tag Archives: soccer coaching

Soccer Fitness and Coaching: The Most Important Assessment

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Take some time out so this doesn’t become you!

I’m frequently asked, what’s the most important assessment I should do?

The answer to that is easy.

You should be continuously assessing yourself and your coaching.

There are a variety of ways to assess yourself. You can measure how much time you spend:

  • Working on soccer fitness with the team
  • Planning workouts, seasons and conditioning programs
  • Communicating with parents, team and kids
  • Learning new coaching techniques, strategies or skills
  • Taking care of yourself mentally and physically

Working with kids and youth soccer teams is a lot of fun. It is also very stressful. Be sure to allow yourself time to recoup and relax.

By taking a few moments every day or every week to go over what you’ve done and what you’d like to do better will help keep you on track.

And taking some time to yourself will help keep you on track as well.

You probably know that our bodies and brains develop during periods of rest and sleep. If you don’t get rest, recovery and relaxation you won’t be at your best.

And your team and kids need that.

What do you do to relax during the week? What do you do after a stressful experience with a parent or player? Put some comments in the box and share with other coaches and parents.

Take some time to plan your R and R. It is best for your team and you.

One thing you can do to take the stress off your job is to have the parents help. Let the parents help with their kids fitness at home. The extra time spent on soccer fitness will have a huge benefit for your team and their long term success. Find out more about developing kids soccer fitness by clicking the link.

 

Soccer Fitness and Coaching: Ways to Assess Your Team

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Assessing kids keeps them improving and developing

There are a variety of ways to measure your team’s progress. And as a coach and teacher you should be constantly measuring and testing.

You could do it on wins and losses. I think this is the worst way.

You could do it with formal tests. This way is time consuming and can be stressful for the kids. There is a place for it though, especially at more competitive levels.

And a few times a year, you should do fitness tests with your soccer team. Test for strength, speed, endurance.

It isn’t that you want your team being competitive with each other on these tests. It’s so that you can see if they are improving.

Sometimes it can be used to see if they are over-trained and need more rest as well.

There are a variety of soccer skills tests that can be assessed.

  • Dribbling around a set of cones for time,
  • How many toe touches on a ball in a minute,
  • Kicking for accuracy and distance.

All of these things can be measure.

Another way to measure progress is to have a check list of skills that each kid should be able to do. This you can keep with you and if you notice a few children are behind you can spend more time with them helping them master the skill.

This is an easy way to monitor soccer skills. It takes some time to figure out what you want to assess but doing it is simply a matter of checking things off.

Soccer fitness and developing soccer skills is a matter of using progressions. For a complete description of exercises that will build your child or your team’s soccer fitness, click the link.

Soccer Fitness and Coaching: Three Things You Always Need to Assess Your Team

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Coaches need to asses their team in a variety of areas

Always assess your team for improvement

As a coach you need to be assessing your teams progress and development daily.

This doesn’t mean you have to give them tests every day.

It does mean you must watch them and see if they are improving.

Sometimes you might have tests or other ways to measure how their soccer skills are coming along.

Let’s look at a variety of soccer skills that can be assessed and a few ways to measure them.

You could measure individual fitness. For instance;

  • Timed runs in the 100 yard dash and the mile run;
  • How many push-ups can they do in a minute;
  • What’s the average distance per kick out of five trials?

Obviously, there are a ton of things to measure and it would depend on your philosophy, the kids age and experience and the time of season that you would measure.

You can also measure practice stats as well. How many come to practice? How long does it take to get practice going? How much time is spent on warm-up, strategy, scrimmage?

And of course, you can measure game statistics. The worst thing to measure is how many wins you have or how many goals. This tends to make you focus on the outcome of the game rather than then the process of learning and improving.

The next post will be about different types of assessments and some of the advantages and disadvantages of them.

Hey, if you read this, you might be wondering who I am. My name is Ron Usher and I’m a kids fitness expert. I help parents, teachers and coaches work with kids for fitness, health and sport. You can read my complete bio here by clicking the link.

Choosing Up Teams for U8 Soccer

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Yesterday’s post was about getting kids to buy into being part of the team. Today’s post is on a similar subject.

Always mix up your teams

One of the biggest problems that a coach can face is dividing kids into teams for drills. So many times, kids are either picked last, or left out entirely. How many times have we seen it at elementary schools? Here are some ways to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

  1. Randomly pass out vests during a break
  2. Organize kids by birth month
  3. Group kids by hobbies and interests

Whereas before, players were being told that they were less important, here, they’re being told the opposite: that each of them is a valuable part of the team.

Team-building like this both includes the less-skilled players, and also allows the kids to get to know one another, and build team unity.

This article here on how to choose teams lists over 40. I’m sure you can find some that will work.

I always try to mix up my groups as much as possible. It gives everyone a chance to learn or help each other. For high school, I like having the varsity workout with the freshman as well. They serve as leaders, teachers and role models.

When I was in high school, the varsity would pound on us freshman like a piece of leather. And we did the same when we became varsity. This is not a way to build a cohesive team, to make the sport fun or to teach kids.

And that is what youth soccer should be about.

Do you agree? Do you have a different philosophy? Let me know by filling out the comment for below.

Thanks! Ron