Soccer Coaches Essay

Coaches play an important role in the development of children. Approximately 35 million children who range from the ages of 5-18 years old participate in organized sports. Coaches have a variety of roles, they serve as advisors, mentors, teachers, and more. The soccer field is a place where the child is able to develop as an athlete and as an individual. Coaches help children learn new experiences, learn about themselves, build relationships, and overcome obstacles. Coaches aid in the four stages of intellectual growth of children proposed by Jean Piaget, the sociocultural theory fundamental ideas proposed by Lev Vygotsky, and also in intelligence and achievement in soccer. Soccer coaches are able to have a positive impact on children through

Each stage is important in the development of the children. Coaches are able to help children through each stage of intellectual growth. The first stage is the sensorimotor stage, this stage is when the children learn through their senses and motor ability (9/25/17). The children learn through experiments and by simply playing soccer. They also learn actions and consequences. For example, children learn the action that if they pass the soccer ball to the other team and the other team then scores the child will no longer pass the soccer ball to the other team because the child does not want to lose the game and understands the consequence of losing the soccer ball. The second stage is the preoperational stage, the limitations of this stage are egocentrism and centration (9/25/17). Egocentrism is when the children think that others see the world as they see it and they are therefore not able to think logically (9/25/17). Centration is defined as the difficulty of integrating multiple pieces of information at one time (9/25/17). Soccer coaches are able to help the children with these limitations because they are able to provide information on ways for children to think outside of the box and they are able to help the children start to think about multiple pieces of information during soccer games. The third stage is the concrete operational stage, this stage is when the children develop concrete ideas, they

Children fail multiple times while they are participating in drills, practices, and competitions in soccer. In the face of failure children make attributions, otherwise defined as explanations (10/11/17). Coaches can help the children with the attributions about failures because they are able to provide a social scaffolding on why the failures may have occurred and how to motivate the children to not give up in the face of failure. The primary attribution that coaches can aid children in is the unstable attribution. An unstable attribution is due to things that are likely to change in the future (10/11/17). In the face of failure children make these attributions, soccer coaches are able to help the children through these failures and attributions because they can alter their coaching style to tailor to each child. They can design more drills to help the children learn in new ways and they can also give more positive feedback to the children during practices and competition to increase the children’s success. Coaches can allow practice of new skills on a daily basis to help with the unstable attributions because they can help control what is likely to change in the children’s performance in the future. They can help encourage children to continue to practice on their own outside of practice to improve their success in practices and competitions. There are two patterns of motivation in response to failure,