3 Strategies to Building Confidence in Players as a Coach

Confidence is an important part to the performance of your team. Teams playing with confidence have a higher probability of winning, quicker bounce backs from losses and are much easier to coach.

The same is true for the individual players. The more confident in their ability to get the job done, the more you will be able to get out of them as a coach.

A confident player will exceed expectations. A non-confident player will fall short.

The problem with confidence is it is not easily gained and it is easily lost. Months of building confidence in ones game can be thrown sideways by one bad play.

The good news : confidence can be created in players. Whether they are naturally confident or not, it can be taught.

I am not a naturally confident person. It is something that I need to work on consistently. And when I do, my confidence is likes it’s been there all along.

Try out these strategies to keep your players confident in their game:

Game Situation Preparation

Confidence can be built by having success in the activity being done. The goal is to prepare players for game time – so practice that way. Continue to push your players to play at game speed regardless of the drill being done. Choose drills that simulate game situations. By doing this your players will get comfortable playing at the level they need to be at during games. So when the game starts, they won’t be caught off guard.

Position to be successful

Managing the line up is a skill that needs to be developed for a coach. Developing this skill will give you the ability to put your players in the position to succeed. With success, there is confidence.

Giving the opportunity of success is the job of the coach. Coaches cannot play the game for their players, but they can make the game easier. If a goal scorer is on a line with two grinders, it is going to be harder for that individual to be successful. Goals will be hard to come by and confidence will fall. Take that same player and put them on a line with a skilled playmaker, all of a sudden they are scoring goals. Confidence increases. All caused by being in a position to succeed.

Be the solution

Everyone is very good at pointing out flaws in others. Pointing out the mistakes is not the hard part, it is finding the solution.

Think about it in terms of your coaching. You are being reviewed on your performance and all you hear is you are horrible at managing the clock. Over and over it is just beating you down. Next time you get in that situation there isn’t going to be much confidence that you are going to magically be good at it.

What if it went this way – you are having trouble managing the clock lately. Here are the tools that you can implement and examples to watch to get your mind right during those times. Now you have the ability to do the preparation before getting into the situation again. So when you are there, you have a fighting chance at being successful.

Bring solutions to your players not more problems.

Players share the burden to execute on these strategies. They need to take advantage of the opportunities, apply the solutions and want to work at game speed. It is up to the coach to give them the chance to do their part.