Coaching Youth Soccer - Use These Evaluations For a More Focused Team

As a Youth Soccer Coach, even at the younger U8 or U10 age groups, you can use a written evaluation tool and share with your youth players to help them in their progress. These evaluation tools can be as simple or involved as you want to make them. As a rule I'd say the younger your soccer players the more basic you want to make the evaluation tool.

Coaching the youth soccer player can be a challenging adventure as you get further into the season. You will see the play and skill of your players start to plateau as you move along. Putting your players through an evaluation system, can help them realize where they are and where they need to continue to learn. Ideally you want to do this at the beginning and then again at the end of the season. But you can still reap a lot of the benefit by just completing an evaluation toward the end of the season.

Soccer Drills

You will want to make a special practice to evaluate your player's skills. Basically you will want to start by setting up a few stations that measure speed, passing and foot skills and giving your youth soccer players a number grade, say 1 -5 based on skill. Then adding a more judgmental section for your Coaching comments on such things as game preparedness, attitude, etc... You can give your players and their parents some very helpful feedback that they will appreciate.

Coaching Youth Soccer - Use These Evaluations For a More Focused Team

When evaluating the players and again when taking some time to cover the evaluation with your youth soccer players, you need to approach in a very positive and open manner. If your players think you will use the evaluation as a tool for discipline it will not work as intended and probably backfire as a useful tool. Approach this as another useful skill building session just as you would a drill, be sure you explain it and get feedback from your players and give them a copy of the evaluation.

When going over the evaluation let your youth soccer players know you will again cover the evaluation with them after the season ends to see if they were able to make progress on the skills that needed work. Again you will want to keep this process as simple, positive and rewarding as you can. Keeping in mind this is a tool by which you want to improve the players on your team, skill and attitude wise.

Coaching Youth Soccer - Use These Evaluations For a More Focused Team