|
Edition 10
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 be 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.
To subscribe to the Soccer Newsletter, send a blank email to soccer@finesoccer.com. To unsubscribe to the
Soccer Newsletter, send a blank email to soccer-unsubscribe@finesoccer.com To
subscribe to the Goalkeeping Newsletter, send a blank email to keepers@finesoccer.com. To unsubscribe send
a blank email to keepers-unsubscribe@finesoccer.com
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please send them to comments@finesoccer.com.
Check out the archives at http://finesoccer.com.
Have a great day.
Lawrence