Learning on the Job: Skills Needed for Coaching Soccer
Coaching soccer can be a lot more difficult than coaching other sports. It frequently presents unique challenges that even an experienced person can have trouble dealing with. The nature of the sport leads to difficulties that would not be encountered in other sports, a few examples of which are listed below.
Athleticism
Both for the athletes and for the staff, athleticism plays a very important roll and can not be ignored. In sports such as baseball or football, athletes run far less and ultimately cover a significantly lower amount of distance over the course of a game than they would in soccer. Naturally this is also true for practices.
What this means is that not only the players, but also the people that are coaching soccer need to be in better shape to keep up with the physical demands of the sport. If the team is not at a high level of fitness, then it is advisable to slowly phase in the practices until the fitness of the team gets to a level where regular practices at high intensity can be tolerated.
Organization
Soccer has one of the largest playing surfaces of any major sport as well as one of the largest starting team sizes. There are eleven starters on a team and depending on the level, at least three more can be substituted in over the course of a game. Combine this with the fact that most of the players will cover the distance of the field back and forth many times during the course of a game and it is easy to see why coaching soccer can be an organizational nightmare!
To become proficient in the skills necessary to excel at the game, a team needs to practice them often and practice them efficiently. Due to the reasons listed above as well as the complexities of the game itself the skill sets required from position to position and sometimes even within the same position are numerous. This makes it extremely difficult to organize practices in a way such that skills are taught in an efficient and complete manner.
The best way to teach skills completely is to organize a practice schedule whereby skills are practiced and developed a little each day. This allows players to constantly work and in the long run improves skills more than a large amount of time scheduled at infrequent intervals would. An added bonus to this approach is that player skills will be at their best late in the season and into the playoffs, the time they are needed most.
If you are aspiring to excel at sports, then there are resources around to
help you. An excellent one is the Skill Storm website, which has been endorsed
by professionals from many different countries and even by soccer legend Franz
Beckenbauer, who presided over the 2006 world cup in Germany. Visit their
website at http://www.skillstorm.de for more information on coaching soccer
and access to over 900 videos that instruct on all aspects of the sport.
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