When coaching young kids, I have come across players that are super motivated, appear to be uninterested before they have begun and everything in between.
These 6 tips can greatly increase the motivation level of all of your players:
- Make the learning objective clear to each player
- Relate the learning objective to game situations
- Praise effort
- Make sessions fun and challenging
- Read the players’ body language
- Create a reward system
As well as going into more detail for each one of these tips, I will give you information on a great FREE app that will help motivate your players to consistently try their best, as well as give a competitive edge to your training sessions.
Make the learning objective clear to each player
Every training session should have a learning objective, a specific aspect of the player’s game that you want to develop.
This however must be communicated well to the team, before the beginning of training, making sure everyone understands, whilst being reinforced throughout the session. By reinforcing the objective, players are continually thinking about how they can successfully achieve the task and therefore providing a constant stimulus to give maximum effort.
Relate the objective to game situations
On many occasions, the reason for the lack of motivation can be a player’s lack of understanding as to the correlation between the learning objective and how this relates in actual matches.
By giving examples, or better still providing a visual example, this can spark a cord with players and so they will now have a clear perspective as to how the session will improve their game.
Praise Effort
Developing players is a long-term strategy. With this in mind, being able to execute the perfect turn or perform complicated coordination exercises might not be a realistic target for your players. So we must realise that we are coaching players through the process (developing stage) and we are not necessarily at the stage of perfecting a specific ability.
Understanding this will place greater emphasis on recognising effort. Carol Dweck has championed the concept of a growth mindset to help kids gain confidence to seek challenges as well as being motivated by the process of learning.
Carol Dweck explains that from her study, she found that children became more fearful of failure when praised for getting things right and therefore the children only wanted to do things that they knew they could do.
In contrast, when children were praised for effort (not success), this led to youngsters seeking difficult challenges and not being scared of so-called failure due to being motivated by the learning process.
I can give you a good personal example from my current U12’s team. At the start of this season (2021-22), my goalkeeper would always ask an outfield player to take goal-kicks. This is something that I am personally opposed to for a number of reasons:
- The team has less options when attempting to play out from the back
- The goalkeeper will never learn or gain confidence to execute a long pass
- When the goalkeeper starts to play 11-a-side football next season, he will struggle with his kicking as he will be playing on a full size pitch.
I have explained these reasons to both the player, in an individual setting, and to the whole team. Simply stating that he is preparing for next season and beyond, when he plays on bigger pitches. For this reason we accept there will be misplaced passes but in order to reach a certain level, he must go through the process of practicing and learning.
This process will obviously include mistakes but it is not about the now, but instead it is more about in a year’s time and more.
Make Session Fun and Challenging
If players are bored then there is very little chance that they will participate with much effort and this will lead to a lackluster session with not a lot of learning happening.
To keep players motivated we must always keep them engaged throughout each session.
Utilising fun activities that promote the learning objective, whilst also being challenging, is key to keeping players motivated.
For example, if you are working on dribbling then playing triangle tag or crabs is a great way to expose players to dribbling the football whilst playing an enjoyable game.
We do have to also be realistic and know that some of the youngsters’ practice time (when in the developing phase) will be spent repeating a skill in a non-game environment, such as the technical square, to gain the fundamental technical skills required. This may be where players are less motivated.
To combat this, try to keep the activity short, focusing on quality effort rather than quantity of repetitions. Instead of simply practicing the step-over for 10 minutes, tell the players that they are going to perform the skill 10 times (5 times with each foot), having a short resting period between changing feet to re-enforce some technical points and regain maximum focus for the next five.
Of course, you might want to do more than 10 repetitions which is fine. Just remember, for each 10 can you break it up by giving feedback to the players and may be adding another technical focus to keep them motivated without them getting mentally bored of the constant repetitions that are needed to develop various skills.
You may need to use differentiation to challenge players who find a task easy. For example, if there are some players who find the step-over easy, then you might speak with them individually, without stopping the session, and ask them if they can try a double step-over.
Read the Players’ Body Language
Being able to read a player’s body language is critical for any coach. One of the reasons why it is important is that we can gage if a player is engrossed in the session or not.
At the moment that you detect any players have lost motivation, a number of strategies might be used:
- If it is just one or two players then you can speak with them, without stopping the session, and reinforce the objective and ask them to demonstrate if they can do it for you
- Again without stopping the session, give them a more difficult challenge within the exercise that is being done
- If the majority of players seem disengaged, try calling them all in and reinforcing the learning objective as a group, make the exercise more challenging or realise that it is time to change the exercise
Create a Reward System
Whilst we should strive to help players be intrinsically motivated, at the end of the day the majority of players respond well to prizes. After all, as a player, we all work hard in a game to win 3 points, win a league or win a cup. So why should it be any different in training?
For this reason, creating a point system for various things throughout every training session is a great way to keep players highly motivated. I personally do this with my U12’s and they have responded really well.
Make sure to explain the point system such as what the points are awarded for:
- Effort
- Good communication
- Good sportsmanship
- Achieving a realistic target (over a short or long period of time)
The above are just some examples of the types of things that you could reward with points.
With my team, the points are awarded throughout each month to determine who was the best trainer and the winning player wins a little prize at the end of the month.
Every player starts on zero points at the beginning of each month, all points are recorded during the whole season and a trophy is given to the player with the most points.
Team prizes can be introduced to promote teamwork with X number of points needed to be won from the whole team to gain the prize.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, I will share with you what I use to easily keep a track of all the points. It is a completely free app and very easy to use.
The app is called ClassDojo and can also be used by the coach for sending messages to parents and vice versa. Both players and parents will have access to view the points and so it is completely transparent whilst being simple to use on a mobile or computer.
The app also enables both the coach and parents to share photos of the team whilst also allowing the coach to upload videos that he/she might want the players to watch as part of an analysis.
I hope this blog post was useful to you. Don’t forget you can check out other blog posts that you might find interesting on the blog post page.