Welcome to the Franklin County Soccer Association and the world's most popular game!
Soccer is a great sport... not just for fun, but also for helping your child to develop skills, become physically fit, learn to make good decisions and practice good sportsmanship.
Practices The focus is on developing skills and individual decision making. Soccer is fast, so players must think quickly and make their own decisions. There is no time during a game to concentrate on executing a detailed coaching plan. Players learn the game through activities with the ball and personal experience. The job of the coach, then, is to "Let the game teach itself." Practices help players learn on their own through many ball touches and game-like activities to help teach decision-making skills.
Games Please cheer for the team, but avoid giving instructions to the players. Your instructionsmay contradict what the coach wants and if the children are listening to you, they are not thinking for themselves. Most coaches encourage players to think for themselves by limiting their own instructions during the game.
Please don't cheer for unnecessary long kicks, since this reinforces the wrong action. Yelling things like "BIG KICK IT!!!" or "GET IT OUTA THERE!!!" might sound good and the results might even be good at that moment but, in the long run, these are NOT the way to play soccer. Here's an analogy using a game we are mostly all familiar with--basketball. Would you, in watching a basketball game, when the opposing team is attacking your basket, yell to one of your players to intercept the ball and then, once they do, yell at them to "THROW IT DOWN THE COURT!!!!"? Well, some of you, of course, are saying "if they had a breakaway, I sure would." Nothing wrong with that. But if your team did NOT have a breakaway....and you were trying to STOP the opponent from scoring...would you yell "take the ball away and throw it down the court!!!!"? Of course you wouldn't. But that is the message we send our soccer players when we yell "BIG KICK IT!!". More often than not, "Big kick it" means....turn the ball back over to the opposing team because in all likelihood, the opposing team is going to regain control of the ball.
If you really want to help your team...the best instruction is NO INSTRUCTION. Let the game teach itself!!! The players need to develop a soft first touch on the ball to control quickly it so that they can then dribble, pass or shoot.