There are many techniques quite efficacious to keep players focused and doing their utmost to achieve goals for a team. Certainly, these tips are proven to be effective in many ways and have achieved the desired results. Undoubtedly, it is essential to keep players committed, enthusiastic, keen, and stimulated. As a matter of fact, the focus is the imperative and essential gateway to learning, perception, and decision making. Diverted minds do not yield any productive outputs and may lead to ineffective results. Thus, the following are the most significant ten tips to keep a player concentrated and diligent.
- Set a precedent on the first day of practice: The first impression of a coach lasts long in every type of sports activity. Being a consistent and successful coach, you need to set an example yourself right away on the first day of practice. You have to establish your role amongst team players and even other staff. For instance, call everyone to the center of the court and circulate your instructions outlined by you regarding the practice session. In this connection, use your whistle. Blow whistle to see whether participants sprint to you or not. If the response is not prompt, keep it repeating. Subsequently, you would get the proper attention thereof.
- Show your players that they matter: If you show proper care to your players, they will respond positively with swift actions. This is the best technique to keep players work hard for you and your team. Their personal matters should be discussed and sorted out thereby they would feel that they are essential and do matter to you.
- Model motivation in all of your action: Players must know as what to be done and what expectation the coach has about them. Keep praising them for their every practice and skill development. While carrying out drills, be positive and also have fun. They will start picking up your instructions willingly with impetus. Give them tasks and infuse them with a sense of competition.
- Offer verbal rewards: Rewards reinforce the motivational and commitment level to a more significant extent. It has been observed that verbal rewards, praise, appreciation always enhance intrinsic commitment. At the initial level, many beginners do not perform their drills properly and require extra attention. In this case, you need to encourage with praise for improvement and keep bucking up for diligence. It would be more effective if you praise players, especially in front of team members, because public recognition is always admirable.
- Offer occasional non-verbal rewards: At times, you can also offer tangible rewards in place of players’ phenomenal performances. Many coaches use permissions as non-verbal rewards granted to players for their good performances and achieving the set goals.
- Coach the Success of the team: By means of your specific gestures and behaviours towards players, the motivational level gets impetus amongst the players to a greater extent. Indeed, the win is important, but that should be with fun as a collective achievement. The coach should keep players realizing that they are unit like a family and only concerted efforts are the key to success. All the time, you need to remind them that “together we stand and divide we fail.”
- Add Competition to your drills: If your drills or practices are devoid of any competition, they will get monotonous. Subsequently, players will not be taking an interest and losing their focus too. In order to make them vibrant, always add competition to your practices. Due to competition, the players will start concentrating and working hard to excel with each other.
- Teach Visualization: Visualization is one of the significant tools to keep players stimulated. This skill teaches a great deal of success in the later part of athletes’ lives. Admittedly, teaching visualization is an invaluable coaching technique that teaches executing, planning, and attaining goals.
- Do not punish, discipline with the intent to teach: Avoid using a punishment style of coaching that inhibits and discourages the team from keeping focus and hampering the inspiration. It is true that some players may not perform appropriately during drills or matches, but they can be disciplined instead of penalized. Your coaching style should be mild and soft, especially in terms of cordial communication. As a result, the player would mend their ways and work hard to improve their skills.
- Set the right type of goals for your team and for your players: Every team sets goals to achieve. However, teams should not be assigned unachievable targets. Always set gettable goals that could be obtained. Your main aim should be setting a target to get through rather than scoring with prestigious statistics. Therefore, set the right type of goals for all players and teams. However, you can set the goals regarding team shooting percentage, team rebounds, number of turnovers, possession per game, and opponents shooting percentage. Above all, never forget to reward the team and best player for getting set goals.
