How to set soccer objectives

"Setting goals that will help your players gain the skills necessary to succeed is one of your primary jobs as a coach"

Before you can set a child his or her personal objectives for the season you have to establish a base-line from which to measure their improvement. To do this you need to find out how good each of your children are at all or some of the core soccer skills of running, turning, dribbling, heading and shooting.

This baseline testing is quite easily done over a couple of practice sessions but you will need an assistant to look after the rest of the team while you run the tests.

If your children are like mine they’ll enjoy finding out how good they are at basic soccer skills.

They will also:

	Benefit from the immediate feedback and rewards that the test results provide,
	Have their self-esteem boosted from seeing how they improve during the year,
	Be more relaxed and confident knowing that they are not expected to compete with each other,
	Become motivated to practice at home in between sessions.

Please remember that you will need assistants, (a good job for parents!), to help you during the testing programme.

Of course, you don’t have to run all of the tests. The benefits of setting individual objectives will be felt even if you set objectives in just one of the core skills.

If your help is thin on the ground you should definitely consider setting your children objectives in one - or at most two - core skills and carry out baseline testing accordingly.

I can understand how all this might seem like a lot of hard work for no immediate or obvious reward.

I can assure you, however, that these tests are not very difficult or especially time consuming to run once you get into the swing of them - they are definitely worth the effort.

Setting children individual and achievable targets keeps them involved and allows them to experience success, even if they are not the most skilful of players.

This is, perhaps, your own most important objective.

Achieve it and you will have done a good job.