After a bad result.

One of my weekend soccer conversations was how to help a team rebound from a bad result.  First of all, "bad result"  is a relative term. The team of the coach I was speaking with was coming off a 1-2 loss to a team he felt they should have beaten, easily. That's one end of the spectrum.  On the other end of the spectrum we would find both Van Wert and Bath.  So, a bad result really is a matter of perspective, but the way to move on remains a consistent - focus on positives.

Coaches of teams on the losing end of a bad result must find positives to hold onto. They need to examine the details of the process for positives to motivate and inspire their team to improve. These positives should hopefully be found in the outline of your season plan.  What are the points of emphasis you identified for your season?  Find positives there and identify them for your team. Discuss the improvement in these areas. Re-energize your commitment to continuous progress improvement in these areas. Then get to it with enthusiasm!

The mistake coaches will make is being disheartened and focusing on all the negatives they have perceived in their teams play. "Where do I start?"   I have been there. It's definitely not my "happy place."  It is a place fraught with danger for coaches.  If we allow ourselves to be swallowed by our frustration over poor play we have lost the battle ... and have probably lost our team as well. 

I walked off the pitch after our first match at the Galaxies College Showcase this past spring (a 0-2 loss, IIRC)  with "Where do we start to put this right?" racing through my head.  I had to go off by myself to calm down and think things through because we had two more games to play in the next 18 hours. I had a roster full of all-state, all-district, all-league players. These young men were highly skilled, intelligent soccer players.  Even so, my 3 points of emphasis in the season plan for them were fairly simplistic and focused entirely on the transitional phase of play moments:

1) When we lose possession, 3 players press and 8 get behind the ball ASAP.  We fill from the back forward regardless of what position an individual player was assigned to.

2) When transitioning to attack, we play to the targets feet.

3) Ball movement is predicated on player movement.

Within those three ideas we worked on technical aspects of the game that directly applied. When we came back for the second game I emphasized specific points in our play from the first match where what we had been working on was in evidence. We may not have executed well in those moments, but I applauded the attempt, the thought, the effort.  I gave the players positives from what we had worked on in training to boost their confidence, to motivate them to continue working hard in these areas and to inspire in them belief in our system of play.

The second match went much better.  Although we didn't, we certainly could have won it. It was one of those games where you walk away thinking "Dang, we were the better team out there, but it just didn't go our way."  In our third match we defeated a team that had previously beaten the first two teams we played. The keys to the turn around were two-fold.  First we were gaining experience playing together as a team.  Secondly I got a hold of my frustration, cleared my mind and stayed with our season long plan. We did not abandon all we had worked on indoors for the past 3+ months and go off on some other path. We stayed the course.

Interesting side note to that weekend was we found ourselves in reversed roles the next weekend at the Early Bird Classic. We played the Croatian Eagles from Wisconsin. They came south to get out of the snow. Our match was their first outside last spring.  They came out and went up 2-0 on us by virtue of two of the best goals I have ever seen from high school aged kids. Absolute lasers from 35-40 yards out. I found myself thinking the rout might be on and just wanting to get to halftime without any further damage being done.  Our kids kept their poise and we got on the board just before half time to make it 2-1. Still, I held no illusion about who the better team was - that Croatian Eagle team was the best collection of teen aged athletes I had ever seen on a soccer pitch.  Our half time, run pretty much by the players, was as usual calm, confident and productive. We identified areas we had to shore up. Then we identified our successes. We then went out and scored two more goals to win that match 3-2.  The points of emphasis the kids brought up during that halftime were what we had been focusing on throughout winter training.  Their confidence was based in our training. They found their motivation in the successes that training was beginning to deliver to them.  They found their inspiration in being able to execute our system when down 0-2 and being on the verge of getting blown out.  That goal just before half time was the single most important goal of the season. It cemented the course our season long plan set for us.

Not every team, not every program, can measure success the same way our Grand Lake United team did. Not every team is going to win the vast majority of their games as we did.  Every team can improve upon their season long goals. Success can be measured by improvement made. In fact, this must be the cornerstone for building your teams platform for success.