Welcome to the
combination of the Soccer Newsletter and the Goalkeeping Newsletter.
Because this subject is relevant to everyone, I have decided to combine the two
lists and just send this to everyone. The subject is building upon the
beginning of a season.
Many teams, whether they are high
school, college or club, have just recently begun their fall season and either
have experienced some success or failure. The question now is where do you
go from here? If your team experienced success in the beginning, it is
real easy to get complacent and to think that everything is great. If your
team was unsuccessful, then it's easy to put your head down and think you are no
good and things are hopeless. It's very important to realize that you are
probably not as good as you think you are nor as bad as you think you are. The
problem with "rating yourself" based on your won-loss record or
tournament results is that this means you are not looking at what you are
capable of but rather simply comparing yourself to the level of others.
What if you play against an extremely bad team and win easily. Does
this mean you are a great team or player? Of course not but it is easy to
delude yourself into thinking this way. Likewise, it is easy to think you
are no good if you happened to play against a great team. If you beat a
bad team, it is necessary to simply look at that game and ask yourself whether
you played the best you were capable of playing or simply well enough to beat
the opponent. If you only played good enough to beat the opponent (even if you
beat them easily) then you are a failure. If you played the absolute best
you are capable of playing and still lost the match then you are a success.
Too often when a team loses a match, the coach uses the old cliché that it
doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it's how to play the game.
However, these same coaches tend to talk about the importance of getting the win
after all of their wins. Isn't this hypocritical?
I have found that as I changed my
priorities and started to concentrate more on helping teams to get better and
less on winning that an interesting thing has happened. Not only did the
individual players begin to get better at a quicker rate but also the teams I
have been coaching winning percentages have gone up. At first this seemed
weird that the less I emphasized winning, the more I won but after giving it
more thought, it makes a great deal of sense. The less I compared myself
to others the better I have done. The reason for this is quite
simply that I have established much greater standards then do my
"opposition". When I was concentrating on beating opponents, I
wasn't always pushing my players to a higher level because if they started
at a higher level, there wasn't much need to improve since the primary objective
was to win. My teams occasionally became stagnant because they were
able to maintain a certain level of mediocrity and still be successful at the
level they were playing. Once I de-emphasized winning and raised the level
of expectations, the players weren't able to be complacent and allow themselves
to stagnate because of the lower level of expectations of others. If you
and your teams are able to raise your standards and disregard the standards of
others, you will find you will be much more successful.
