Tag: patrick murphy

The Problem Most Youth Coaches Don’t Know They Have – Guest Post

Coaches, ever found yourself in this situation? Practice gets cancelled. Or rescheduled. Maybe it’s raining. The venue changes. Whatever it is, everyone on your team needs to be told.

What most youth coaches do next is send out individual text messages and emails to players and parents. Sound familiar?

It’s fiddly. Takes time. You’re anxious about leaving someone out. Not everyone responds. How are you supposed to know if they’ve seen your message and received vital information?

The result? Players straggled at the wrong location, late, or missing practice altogether. Or kids uncollected because mom and dad didn’t get the new message. It’s you who loses out, the long-suffering youth coach with a screwed-up practice and only sad little Taylor for company!

It’s a problem. And it hinges on that essential element of youth coaching: successful communication with your team.

How to Communicate Better with Your Youth Team 

Now, imagine this instead. Practice gets cancelled. Your team needs to be told.

This time, you blast the same message to all players and parents at the exact same time. Team contacts are listed for you. Just hit send.

Best of all, you can see exactly who reads your message and who doesn’t. You know who needs reminding!

Information’s not lost, practice goes smoothly and everyone’s picked up safely.

Sound too good to be true, youth coaches? It’s not.

The solution is a fantastic app called Heja. Coaches love this app because it was made specifically for the challenges of running a youth team. It works brilliantly and – here’s the kicker – it’s absolutely FREE!

Heja allows you to:

  • communicate with your players, their parents and your coaching staff
  • see who has received your messages
  • organize your team in a clear Team Schedule
  • share images, videos and more useful features

Even if the only thing you got by downloading Heja was knowing exactly who has seen your messages, it would be worth the 2 minutes it takes to get set up on the app. But that’s far from the case.

Why Youth Teams Need a Live Team Schedule

Ever been cornered by parents asking what the practice schedule looks like over the next few weeks? You do your best to share dates and times by email, text or in person. But it’s unorganized.

Here’s why Heja’s Team Schedule is beloved by the 50,000+ coaches currently using the free app.

How does it work? Update practice, game and workout times on your Team Schedule in Heja. Coaches, managers, players and parents access the schedule in the app. Everyone knows where to be. Kids show up on time. And if something changes, everyone gets notified.

BONUS: Players even check “going” or “not going” to each practice, game and workout so you know precisely who’s attending.

Does Your Team Really Need a Communication App?

Open, honest and instant communication is crucial to running any great team. Nowadays, digital communication plays a huge part in that.

However, nearly 60% of youth coaches admit to still relying on SMS and emails to communicate with their team, according to Heja’s survey.

When superior options exist, choosing not to utilize them has consequences. Over the course of a season, parents miss messages and interrupt practice.

The folks at Heja told me that’s one reason their app remains free. They believe great team communication shouldn’t be a luxury only afforded to some youth coaches.

Of course, other great services exist too. But no communication app is so well suited to the needs of youth coaches while remaining 100% free for the whole team (with no ads), which is why I’m happy to recommend Heja.

Get Your Team Started on Heja Now

Ready to try the app? It’s easy.

Download Heja on your phone. Create your team. Invite coaches, managers, players and parents to join with a team code and you’re good to go.

The whole process takes 2 minutes to set up and Heja’s customer support staff are brilliant when you need them.

Don’t settle for outdated communication this season. Invest 2 minuts now and unite your team on Heja. Trust us, your team will thank you for it later!

You can download Heja free here: https://go.heja.app/free-download

Disclosure: I was paid a small fee to endorse this app, but having seen all of its features and ways it can make a coach’s life easier, I fully support this article and encourage coaches to check out Heja and see how it can help their team.

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Building confidence as a young basketball player – Guest Post

Building confidence as a young basketball player

When I was a kid I used to play pick-up basketball every day of the summer with a few older players on a local court. One of the biggest lessons they would teach me was that basketball was a game of confidence. I would later come to understand that this is true for many other sports, not just basketball, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

First we need to distinguish between two types of confidence, healthy and unhealthy confidence. Healthy confidence is grounded in reality and it is honed through practice; it lets you recover after making a bad play and it lets you make a great play under pressure. This is the kind of confidence you want to build. Unhealthy confidence is not grounded in reality, it’s simply you overestimating your abilities for whatever reason. While unhealthy confidence may be beneficial in the short run, in the long run, it will end up hurting you and your team.

Many young players are holding back their own development because they’re preventing themselves from taking that next step forward and expanding their game. They might have a move they’ve been practicing on their own but they’re too afraid to try it in a 5 on 5 practice, or they might even be doing it in practice but they’re afraid to do it in a game. The cause of this fear is usually the same, they’re afraid of making a mistake. What if you miss, or what if you lose the ball?

If this sounds like you then you’re most likely, whether you see it or not, striving for perfection, which is ironically an excellent way to sabotage yourself. Perfection brings the burden of unrealistic expectations. A perfect player would never miss a shot, yet even Steph Curry missed around 56% of his threes this season. Missed shots and mistakes are a part of the game and the best way to get over your fear of mistakes is to go ahead and make a few, you’ll see that it’s not the end of the world.

Get Comfortable With Making Mistakes

Being a naturally shy and quiet person, my lack of confidence in games was a major obstacle during my early years. Playing with close friends and having nothing to prove, I would be in the zone and play completely free from any feelings of fear. Yet during tryouts or in the games with an audience, I was suddenly afraid to make bigger plays and always played things safe. With that attitude, I wasn’t ever going to impress anybody.

This lack of confidence didn’t just haunt me in basketball. Back then I was playing water polo alongside basketball. I was keyed up before my first official match and had some friends coming to watch me play. I was a goalkeeper, and in goal you only have a handful of opportunities to show what you’ve got. My mind was racing – ‘don’t screw up!’, I repeated to myself.

As you can probably guess, I did. Frustrated by my lack of contribution to the game and eager to make something happen, I launched a long ball directly to an unsuspecting teammate hoping to make a quick counterattacking play. That was out of character for me, a player who would otherwise stick to passing to the nearest players. A few seconds later the ball was in the back of my own net – my attempt at trying something bold had backfired. I felt horrible and I thought my coach would never let me hear the end of it.

To my surprise my coach seemed impressed, “I certainly haven’t you seen you try that before!”. I suddenly realized it wasn’t the end of the world. In fact, it was one of the best learning experiences I could ask for as a young player. After that, I was mentally tougher and more confident in sports and even throughout other aspects of life.

Building Confidence Is A Journey

The sport is different but the principles are the same. I’m not telling you to start taking wild shots from 30 feet in your next game just for the sake of shedding that fear of screwing up. Building confidence is a journey. Are you trying to expand your game in some way e.g. add a new move? Good, you should be. The first step towards successfully doing this is to master it on your own terms.

Go out to a local court and practice whatever it is you want to add to your game on your own until it becomes second nature. Bring a friend with you if you need to, they can help you out or they might notice things you don’t, have them record you if it will help. Every time you fail, make sure you understand why it happened (video will help with this) and try to fix it on your next attempt. Once you’re able to do it on your own consistently you’re ready to try it out in basketball practice.

You already know you can do the move, but during practice things are a bit different. There are now teammates and opposing players to consider. Mistakes still can and will happen. Let them happen and learn from them, that’s what development is all about. Talk to your coach, see if they have any advice for you. Ask them for drills you can do on your own. Doing it in practice builds the healthy confidence you want, and when you start consistently doing it in practice then you’re ready for prime time.

You have the move down in your muscle memory, you know you can do it even when pressured by the defense, you are no longer holding yourself back. All that’s left now is for you to go out and show them what you got. You’ll begin to realize that even the best players can’t make the right play or perfectly execute a move every time. But these great players all share something in common – they’re not scared of making a fool of themselves.

Max Kesler runs a website focused on providing helpful tips and advice for youth basketball. He shares on training, gear, and fitness. You can take a look here: https://www.hoopsbeast.com

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9 Characteristics of a Successful Soccer Team – Guest Post

Year over year, some teams are able to rise above the pack and succeed. While this is generally a collection of many, many things, we share the 9 most important characteristics that make up a successful soccer team.

Physical Characteristics

1. Sound Fundamentals

Teams that have sound soccer fundamentals will perform at a higher level each and every minute of game time. Good skill sets surrounding trapping, dribbling, passing, shooting, and heading allow soccer players to perform higher with every touch of the ball.

This translates to higher possession, more ball control, and better shooting. These characteristics sharply increase the chances of your team winning.

2. Fully Fit and In Shape

Soccer is truly a game of endurance, and a fully fit team stands a much better chance of performing well. Keeping a team in shape and fully fit requires constant training that is specifically focused on fitness, with running and agility exercises daily or weekly.

Teams that emphasis fitness, though, tend to do better. More goals are scored at the end of a game than at the beginning, and this has a lot to do with one team getting tired and the other capitalizing.

3. Always Improving

Good soccer teams are always improving their fitness and fundamentals, even throughout the season. So often, teams focus on fundamentals and improvement in training sessions before the season starts, but slack off as the season gets going.

Good teams are always working hard to improve, even if the changes are incremental and small. You can see this play out as the successful teams pull away in the end.

 

Tactical Characteristics

4. Proper Positioning

For a lot of teams that don’t end up succeeding, they can be considered to be a collection of good individual players, but not a team. While there are a lot of factors that go into playing as a team, one of the most important is proper positioning.

A good soccer team utilizes all 11 players on the field in the best manner possible, with each player understanding their position on the field. Proper positioning allows the coach to fully implement their strategy, and each player to maximize their abilities.

5. Good Communication

Soccer is a fast paced game with a lot of movement, and players will constantly be defending and counter-attacking. This frequent movement across and around the pitch means that communication is paramount.

Good communication allows teams to capitalize on mismatches in the game, while simultaneously not exposing themselves to danger.

6. Cover for Each Other

Covering for each other is really a combination of the first two points, but brings the tactical essentials together. Through proper positioning and good communication, soccer teams can outpace, outplay, and beat other teams. All of this culminates in the simple concept of covering for each other, whether on offense or defense.

 

Mental Characteristics

7. Steadfast Belief

Soccer games can swing on a single goal, and it is easy to get down on yourself (and the team) when something doesn’t go your way. Belief in the strategies and tactics that have been set up, along with the belief in fellow teammates, is essential.

So often, the most successful of teams remain steadfast in their belief that they can win the game. These teams are able to “dig deep” to find what is necessary to win games.

8. Mental Fortitude

Mental fortitude in soccer plays itself out in the ability to execute the game plan and soccer tactics, even when it is very difficult. Whether the team needs to absorb a lot of opposing pressure, or rebound from missing several wide open shots, a team needs to have the mental fortitude to push forward.

Many have correctly identified this as having a short term memory. The best forwards forget their misses, continuously shooting. The best defenders forget their penalties, continuing to make timely tackles.

9. Constant Focus

Successful teams rarely have mental lapses, and this can be accounted to their constant focus. While a soccer game is more than 90 minutes long, it only takes a few seconds for the game the swing. Often, this is the result of a lapse in concentration and focus.

Staying focused for 90+ minutes is difficult, and the successful teams are able to do this down each and every player.

 

Bring these 9 characteristics to your soccer team, and continuously working on them to see improvement and success!

 –

Tim Frechette runs a website focused on providing helpful tips and advice when it comes to different athletics, such as soccer and volleyball. He shares different drills to run, a breakdown of different positions, shoe and clothing suggestions, etc. You can take a look here: https://athleticlift.com/  

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The 8 Hidden Talents

I had the pleasure of interviewing Travis Daugherty in this week’s podcast, and he shared some great wisdom from his book, The Lens.

He shared one of the best lists I have seen defining what characteristics we should focus on developing (in ourselves and in those we coach.)
He calls it The 8 Hidden Talents…
  1. Loving the game
  2. Giving your best
  3. Overcoming adversity
  4. Seeking improvement
  5. Getting coached
  6. Being a teammate
  7. Taking risks
  8. Having a positive attitude

What a great list to work off as you develop your team’s core values. And the great thing is they are all controllable, for every player, whether the star athlete or the last guy off the bench.

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Anatomy of a Teammate

Team – A number of people organized to function cooperatively as a group
Teammate – A partner
Selflessness – Putting other people’s needs, interests, or wishes before your own​​​​​​​
Image
I’m going to keep this post short and sweet because I want you to spend 7 minutes watching this video instead of reading a post. 
I met Patrick Murphy, the coach of Alabama softball, at a recent conference. He told a story about calling timeout in a key situation, walking up to the girl he was coaching, putting his arm around her, and saying ‘I am going to love you no matter what the result of this at-bat is.’

The core value you will see plastered all over their facility is: 
PERSON
———-
ATHLETE
​​​​​​​Person over athlete. That is the type of people Coach Murphy is developing, and it is contagious.
​​​​​​​Watch the video and see how this attitude has permeated into Brittany.

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Anatomy of a Teammate ?? Captains Part 3 of 4

Team – A number of people organized to function cooperatively as a group
Teammate – A partner
Selflessness – Putting other people’s needs, interests, or wishes before your own​​​​​​​
Image
I’m going to keep this post short and sweet because I want you to spend 7 minutes watching this video instead of reading a post. 
I met Patrick Murphy, the coach of Alabama softball, at a recent conference. He told a story about calling timeout in a key situation, walking up to the girl he was coaching, putting his arm around her, and saying ‘I am going to love you no matter what the result of this at-bat is.’

The core value you will see plastered all over their facility is: 
PERSON
———-
ATHLETE
​​​​​​​Person over athlete. That is the type of people Coach Murphy is developing, and it is contagious.
​​​​​​​Watch the video and see how this attitude has permeated into Brittany.

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