Goals, Fun, Culture & Conduct

As a coach, you want to have long term and short term goals. Long term goals are things that you want to teach your team over the course of the season. This should be the primary focus in each season. At the lower ages, it might be 1v1s, or footwork related, while at the older ages, it could deal with passing better, or movement off the ball. 

For long term goals, you want to choose one or two major topics and track how well your team is progressing in these areas. For example, if you want your team to improve in passing, count the number of passes your team completes in the first game, and track that for every game to see if the number is improving. While keeping track of your data, come up with drills at practice that emphasize passing (such as rondos, or drills where players are finding passing lanes). 

Conversely, short term goals are things that you want to work on with your players because they may have had trouble in the last game in this area. Short term goals is where the Coaching Cycle comes into play. Find out what you need to work on (through games or scrimmages), come up with a plan, implement that plan, and finally, reflect on how everything went. Did the players create new habits based on your plan? If not, is there a way to change things in the next training so they do create new habits?

Oftentimes, you can find ways to intertwine short term goals with long term goals. For example, let’s say your long term goal is getting your team to pass better. But in your last game, your players weren’t shooting that well. You could create a rondo where, if one of the teams gets a certain number of successful passes (say, 5), they can shoot on goal. 

Culture is one of the most overlooked aspects of coaching, but it’s an important one. A good culture will create and foster the habits that a coach is looking for in his or her players. The 6 Roles of a Coach has an item called “Leadership” but that could easily be changed to culture. By setting expectations for your team, and then getting buy-in from the players, you can create something that most other coaches ignore. 

One great way to implement a culture is to understand exactly what you want, and then model it. If, as the coach, you model yelling at the referees, guess what your players and parents will start doing?

In the introduction to this document, I spoke about “serious fun,” and drilling that in for a team helps create a culture.