Eight things all great soccer coaches do – according to female youth players

The insight I am going to offer here is not simply my opinion. It is from the perspective of the player on what great soccer coaches do. As a mental skills coach, I have had hundreds of individual conversations with competitive and elite level youth female soccer players in the 10-18 age range – and during these conversations, a lot of patterns have emerged.

And let me tell you, it is good insight. Insight that has changed the way I coach on the field. 

I don’t know any of your teams, any of the players, parents, or clubs, so everything here is general concepts/notions based on recurring themes that I see show up for young women. I’m offering a look into how I help them (as individuals and teams) navigate the world of elite youth soccer, enhance their performance, and prioritize mental wellness. 

As coaches of elite level female soccer players, if we want to get the most out of our players and help them find success on the pitch, here are eight crucial things we can do.

 

1. Connect with players individually

Great soccer coaches understand that to get the best response from their players, and in turn the best results on the field, they have to connect with them individually as humans first and foremost.

 

This does not mean being soft. Coaches that get the best response and buy-in from female players are actually pretty tough on them and hold them accountable to improvement and meeting high standards. But, the reason this works is because they’ve made it a huge priority to connect with them as individual people. Great soccer coaches prioritize connecting first, person to person. 

 

When we coaches do this, everything else we say has way more power. When we connect with them as people (before soccer players), they are way more likely to hear what we are saying and want to work hard to implement it. They are able to be more growth-minded, take feedback, and accelerate their growth. Players who feel seen as people are eager for information about how to improve, they can take honest harsher criticism, and they can coach themselves through moments of adversity on the field. All of this is because they know that behind everything their coach says is genuine care.

 

2. Help players separate results from worth

Great soccer coaches prioritize helping their soccer players establish a healthy relationship with the game.

 

Yes, we can have a culture where we are super driven to win, to score, to compete, etc. Yes, every fibre of our being can be focused on winning. But, at the same time, we have a healthy striving mentality. This means that as long as we are doing everything we can, and taking care of everything we have control over, if the win doesn’t come our way, we can be disappointed or upset (totally okay!) but we also know that we will be okay. We’ll go back to the drawing board and try again, and understand that the ups and downs are a crucial piece of growth in sport. 

 

Having a healthy relationship with the game means we still can be frustrated or upset about a loss, we just don’t associate it with our value and worth as a person. We use it as fuel to drive us to get up and go again. 

 

3. Normalize the conversation

Great soccer coaches understand that pressure, expectations, self-doubt, and comparison culture are very real things in a teenage girl’s world.

 

These are real things that each of them is dealing with, even the ones that seem like they have it all together. Doesn’t matter if we can see it ourselves or not, it is happening and it is hard. And it shows up differently for every one of them.

 

How we help them is by normalizing the conversation about the harder pieces of being an elite youth athlete. We acknowledge that adversity is 100% a part of this journey. We help players stop trying to hope that pressure and nerves will go away, and teach them that being at this level is about learning to exist with them and still perform.

 

We also need to help them understand that while having high expectations of themselves is a good thing, most of the things they probably think are high expectations are actually impossibly high, unrealistic, expectations of perfection. And those ones aren’t good. High expectations must be limited only to things we have complete control over. Movement, communication, ball striking in front of the net… those are parts of the game that we can have high expectations for. Scoring a goal every time you shoot, not a high expectation because you don’t have full control over whether this happens or not.

 

Great coaches help players make these distinctions and regularly acknowledge that managing pressure is hard, but part of the work of an athlete.

 

4. Never shut up about mistakes being okay

Great soccer coaches consistently talk and talk and talk and talk about how mistakes are a part of the game.

 

Great soccer coaches talk about how (of course!) we are all doing our best to eliminate as many mistakes as possible - always – but we are never going to be in a place where they don’t exist. And that is actually a good thing. Because if we never make mistakes, it means we are never playing teams that are better than us. And, if we never play teams that are better than us, we don’t have our gaps exposed, and we can’t maximize our potential and improve. We need to be in situations where we make mistakes in order to know how to improve.

 

We have to consistently talk about this because many young women (even if the team and home environment are both great) have been socially conditioned to believe that mistakes are not okay (and not just in soccer). 

 

In their head, they know that mistakes are part of the game. They are smart kids. But, in their hearts, many of them still feel like they should be playing perfectly and that mistakes are not okay and make them a bad player (and even a bad person!). 

 

At this point, they don’t learn from their mistakes because they are tying their self-worth to their performance. They are defining who they are as person based on their ability to not make mistakes and get stuck in a cycle of perpetually feeling inadequate. And, as a coach, you need them to learn from their mistakes so that you can get better as a team. 

 

The first thing we do to help them is we continually, over and over, talk about how its okay. Just get back up and keep going. We verbalize this. The second thing we have to do is live it.  Our own acceptance of mistakes as a necessary part of growth has to shine through in our actions, our responses, and our sideline behaviour.

 

5. Redefine success beyond winning

Great soccer coaches establish a culture that includes two separate definitions of success that the team is always striving toward.

 

Yes, winning/scoring/preventing goals is 100% success, but there’s this second definition that is equally, if not more, important. As great soccer coaches, we must help our players redefine success as it relates to them moving themselves toward being the player and person they want to be. 

 

Success for me, the player, means: identifying what is controllable, what nobody can stop me from doing- and going out and giving maximum effort and energy toward those things. If I do that, that is success, regardless of the result. It is success because it is moving me toward that future version of myself that I want to be.

 

6. Stop telling players to ’get out of their head’

Great soccer coaches don’t just tell players to be more confident, get out of their head, stop overthinking, and stop hesitating... They provide them with tangible tools and strategies to do so.

 

While saying ‘you need to get out of your head’ can be very well-intentioned, the problem is that soccer players don’t know how to get out of their head, and then just creates more stress and pressure because we are asking them to do something and not giving them the tools to do it. Mainly that because we don’t have them either, which is completely understandable, but we have to understand that it now becomes our job to find the tools (mental skills) and get them to the girls. 

 

There are two components to mental skills: enhancing performance and prioritizing mental wellness, and the ‘hows’ are really important for both of these things. Here are some examples of how players can enhance performance and work on mental wellness with mental skills:

• Using intentional self-talk to coach ourselves through a hard moment
• Neutral thinking, mastery experiences to deal with pre-game nerves
• Read a super helpful book from someone who knows how to lock-in on demand
• Use controllable objectives in your training sessions and games.
  
  

7. Be steadfast about healthy team culture

Great soccer coaches have a really good understanding of the power of the collective.

 

Players do not have to be best friends with single one of their team-mates, but they do have to have each other’s backs and be great team-mates. They have to be supportive on and off the field, so that they can be assertive with their communication and exhibit leadership without fearing backlash. At competitive levels of the game, they also need to be able to hold each other accountable in a healthy way, which they cannot do when there is pettiness, people talking behind backs and other ‘mean girl’ behaviour.

 

Cliques will undermine all of the good things you are trying to teach them about soccer and will completely limit your team’s ability to maximize potential. Helping the girls understand this, that these actions are actually the source of their disconnected play and lead to underperforming as a team, is crucial if you want to be a good team. This cannot be an optional thing either, as it will destroy your team if you ignore it. 

 

8. Prioritize the mental side of the game

Great soccer coaches teach their players that mental performance skills are crucial to gaining an edge on their competition. Because to be the best, they need to self-regulate and be in control of their thoughts, feelings and actions and not let whatever is going on in the environment control them.

 

Far too often, players let things happening in the environment destroy their focus and completely dominate their thoughts (examples: starting lineup, playing time, ref calls, bad weather, annoying opponents, loud coaches, loud parents, etc.). Locking in, playing with composure, and being consistent are all skills that players can learn. 

 

If players actually want to be elite, they need to learn to protect their headspace, protect their mental energy, and not let the environment control them. Elite performers can regulate attention, emotion, action and thoughts and keep themselves in their optimal performance zone. Under pressure. In any circumstance. No matter what the distraction. No matter what happens, they can lock in. This is mental toughness, this is grit.

 

And if you want to get the most out of your team, you have to set the tone for prioritizing this element of soccer by constantly incorporating it into your training and game plans. 

 

 

Great soccer coaches are human too

It can be difficult coaching at competitive and elite levels of youth sport. Absolutely. We all go through periods when we feel like nobody actually sees us, sees how much we care, or when our character is being misread and thrown under the bus. It’s also a struggle to balance all the things that need to be done (session planning, video review, player evaluations, technical, tactical and physical training, etc.) 

 

Throwing more things into that mix can feel very daunting and it may seem like we can put off the eight things listed above until later. But, do not fall into that trap. These eight things are things we need to prioritize right off the bat if we want to get the most from our team and have all that other work we are doing actually work. 

 

Great soccer coaches are not people who do all of the things listed above perfectly. They are people who are self-aware enough to realize that they have faults of their own, and are growth-minded and keep working to improve because they so passionately care about their players and their players’ growth. Not just as soccer players, but as human beings.