Posts Tagged ‘Coaching Youth Soccer’

How to be a soccer star

     To be a soccer star you need to take responsibility for your own future.  Of course you need great coaching to show you the skills and techniques you need to master, but in the end its you who have to master the skills, techniques and tactics to become that player.  For this it helps to have the right frame of mind.  By this I mean a willingness to be highly coachable.  Your coach will really like this and want to help you as much as he or she can.  I would also highly recommend learning how to critique your own skills and game performance.  Make a mental note of the mistakes you made in your last game and work on them during the week.  It really helps if you have a partner to practice with.  Seek perfection.  100% perfection is of course not always possible but the difference between good players and great players is consistency.  The best players preform consistently well week in and week out.  The only way to preform skills well under pressure and consistently is to own the skills.  This means you have mastered the skills so thoroughly that you can preform them spontaneously in the game.  To own your skills you have to practice them as much as possible on your own as well as in team practices and in games.   If you ask any great player in any sport they will tell you they have spent countless hours on individual technique training.  Remember that perfect repetition is the mother of perfection.

     Watch the best teams and players in the world play such as Lionell Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo and try to immitate certain aspects of their game.  In the end you can only be yourself,  but you can gain emormously by picking up subtle  aspects of great players games, their superior technique, their first touch on the ball, their great vision and how they play on their toes. Remember if you want to be the best learn from the best.

     It is a good idea to have a picture in your mind of how you want to play.  Envision yourself preforming skills flawlessly, then don’t quit until you get there.  Its not as far away as you might think.

Richard Moore                                                                                                                   Inventor of The Kick Coach                                                                                                 www.thekickcoach.com