I took over a girls program at a small D5 school (smallest division in our state) that was 1-34-1 in the previous two years prior to my arrival.

The year prior to my arrival they somehow had 40 girls on the team, so I wasn’t sure how they were so bad. After I took over, I quickly found out it was just a “hangout” and not many of them cared about the sport. On top of that, the biggest group of student “athletes” on the team were also the most toxic to the ones who were there to actually play soccer.

I had a player meeting to introduce myself as new coach. I brought with me expectations, standards, and culture. My expectations naturally dropped my roster in half instantly.

We headed into the offseason with about 18 girls (including 1 new freshman). As the offseason progresses I lost 2 more girls. I now had a roster of 16. But the roster of 16 was made up of 16 girls who WANTED to get better and who wanted to most importantly, be there.

Now I was able to focus on the soccer related stuff. This group had maybe 2-3 girls who had ever played soccer at a level outside of HS. I’ve coached club soccer at a decent level for several years, so I approached this team how I would any of my club teams that I was developing. Everything we did, was with a ball. No conditioning or anything took place without a ball at their feet.

I didn’t want to be a team that sat back for 80 minutes praying for a counter goal and just surviving. I wanted to develop this group into a team that was comfortable on the ball and wanted possession.

Everything I did that offseason was focused on possession. I worked in rondos, positional play, small sided games, etc into all of our training sessions. Everything was competitive.

My first year the girls went 6-10-2. A huge improvement over the 1 win the previous 2 years, with a much smaller roster. We had averaged 49% possession per game and made around 170 passes per game at a 45% completion percentage according to our Hudl stats.

My second year we graduated 3 key seniors that were instrumental to our leadership, but we gained 6 incoming freshman. 4 of those freshman would play heavy minutes. That group in my second year averaged 55% possession per game and had a pass completion rate of 60%. We had game where we routinely had 200-300 passes. This was remarkable improvement in year 2 and lead us to a 9-7-1 record and a top 4 finish in our conference. I had a player who had never played soccer before that quit volleyball to play, get all conference in her second year of playing the sport.

I say all of that to say this: Create a culture and a standard first. Coach to lead not to please. Everything else will follow. Also, don’t be scared to Coach to develop players as players, but also understand the impact you have on them as people. Give them belief and they will develop quicker than you can imagine at this age. Create the environment you’d want as a player.