Building Great Team Spirit for Your Team

Building team spirit and getting players to bond and become a cohesive unit is vital to ensuring that the team performs to its optimum level, and as a youth soccer coach, you play a major role in building team spirit.

  • Players don't want to let their teammates down
  • Players don't want to let the team as a whole down

Conversely

  • Players will ensure that they help and support team mates as much as possible.
  • Players try and do the right thing by the team.

Here are a few simple ideas to help you achieve a great team spirit

It starts with you, the coach

Make sure that you are punctual and reliablePlayers will respond to you in a positive way if they respect you. Behaving in a responsible and profesional way will help you gain respect from the players and they will want to perform for you.See the page on Being a Coach

Setting teams objectives helps bind the team to a common goal.

When players are involved in some of the decision making, then they are more likely to take "ownership" of the team and in doing so, your players will work towards a common goal.

It is a very simple thing to do, and takes little time, so try building team spirit by setting your teams objectives
It will help your team bond and ultimately perform better.

Training under extreme conditions helps bond players

When I run a Beep Test, it is common for all the players to help each other through it and thereby bonding them. See page on fitness for details of Beep Test

Getting Players to conform to a dress standard when coming to matches.

Get your players to buy the teams gear. eg tracksuits and equipment bags etc Players will feel part of a team if they have similar gear.

Making Players feel included as part of the team

One method our team uses is to make sure that players birthdays are acknowledged, and no matter how bad it sounds, we all sing "Happy Birthday" and have a cake for the birthday player.

Make each player feel important

Here is a gem that for you to send to your players as food for thought that will help them understand the importance of being important to the team
Zvzn though my typzwritzr is an old modzl, it works vzry wzll - zxczpt for onz key. You would hardly think that with all thz othzr kzys functioning propzrly onz would hardly bz noticzd, but thz onz kzy out of whack szzms to ruin thz wholz zffort.

You may say to yourszlf, 'Wzll, I'm only onz playzr. No onz will noticz if I don't do my bzst'. But it dozs makz a diffzrzncz bzcausz to bz zffzctivz a tzam nzzds activz participation by zvzry onz to thz bzst of thzir ability.

So thz nzxt timz you think you arz not important rzmzmbzr my old typzwritzr.

You arz a kzy playzr...

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