Edition 3

Welcome to the Soccer Newsletter. Today's issue is about leaving your comfort zone. This is something that I notice is a huge problem in youth soccer these days and it's something that most coaches either don't understand or don't seem to particularly care about since they allow it to happen all of the time.

Describing what a person's comfort zone is exactly is not very easy to do but the best way I can do it is to say that many players like to only compete with and against players whom they feel they can be successful against. They are not willing to go out on a limb and take the chance of being embarrassed. Unfortunately, this prevents the players from being forced to get better in order to compete. We are so obsessed with winning at the youth level that we don't allow ourselves to play against teams that will force us to get better. Whenever I hear coaches talking about their won-loss record, I start to wonder whom they are competing with. Are they playing the best competition out there or just playing against teams they are confident they can beat. I can think of one region championship team I worked with who had a surprisingly poor won-loss record considering their level of play (I actually don't know what their record was because I don't keep records like that but I do know they lost more then people would have expected). Did they lose because of poor performance? No actually they were a group of very consistent performers. The reason they had so many losses is they played up in as many tournaments as we could and we also went to as many major tournaments and high level friendly get togethers as we could. Was there some grumbling from the parents after we lost some games against older teams? Of course there were but luckily I have very little regard for keeping the parents happy and am much more concerned with doing what is best for the players.

There are other ways to force players out of their comfort zone as a coach. The easiest way to force a player to improve without traveling all over the country for competition is to increase the pressure in training. Keeping in mind that pressure is defined in soccer as the absence of space and time, you can increase pressure by reducing the amount of space used for small-sided games or by increasing the number of players in the same small sided games while demanding the quality of the play remain the same. It's easy to decrease the space or increase the numbers but they are both useless if you are not willing to demand the quality remain high. It will take players some time to get used to the increased pressure but they should be able to adjust and in fact improve with the proper encouragement. One of the most annoying things I hear on soccer fields is whenever players make mistakes they automatically say "I'm sorry" or something like that. While it's nice that they are willing to acknowledge they made a mistake, it is so much more important to actually do something about the mistake to make sure it doesn't happen again. While this might seem like a simple thing and it would be easy to assume that this is what they really mean, based on the same mistakes being made over and over again. There is nothing wrong with demanding that things be done correctly every time and until we do this we will never get better.

In short, by decreasing space, decreasing time and striving for perfection, we can get people out of their comfort zone and force them to get better. If you are a coach and are not forcing your players out of their comfort zone you will never achieve the highest level of play they are capable of competing at.

The next Soccer Newsletter will be sent out in the next few days and will talk about switching the ball around the back. If you know anyone who would like to receive this newsletter, please have him or her subscribe either at http://finesoccer.com/subscrib.htm