Last updated on December 15, 2024
Everyone wants their child to do well and have fun with youth soccer. Being in your child’s coach’s good graces can only improve your child’s youth soccer experience. Here are the 7 most important things you you can do to be your child’s coach’s favorite soccer parent:
1. Respect Your Child’s Level of Interest
All youth soccer players have their own level of interest in the sport. Some players think about soccer 24/7, watch soccer on TV, play pickup games, and cannot wait to get to practice. Other players only want to practice enough to let them play in the games. Many are somewhere in the middle. Allow your child to follow their own path and avoid pushing your child to participate beyond what they really want. Placing your child in a level or type of competition where the child does not really want to be lessens the youth soccer experience for your child and everyone involved.1
2. Let Your Child Participate as Much as They Want
This is the other side of the coin from respecting you child’s level of interest. There are certain children who really want to go at soccer full speed ahead. Sometimes, parents limit their child’s ability to do this. (I once had a parent announce that a player had played “enough soccer” that weekend and not bring the player to the Sunday games of a Saturday/Sunday tournament. Mind you, this was on a top-level competitive boys U16 team.)
If your family circumstances make a high level of participation challenging, talk to other parents, your child’s coach, the club’s director of coaching, and maybe even other people in club administration. There are lots of really good people out there who want help youth soccer players and, chances are, someone will be able to help you out.
Coaches love players who are “all in” and, by extension, the players’ parents.
To be clear, I am recommending supporting and advancing what the player wants, not what you want. Players want your support, not pressure.2 “Coaches should encourage parents to offer suggestions and guidance about sports, but ultimately, within reasonable limits, they should let the child go his or her own way.”3
3. Speak Well or Don’t Speak at All
You would be surprised how many youth soccer parents talk badly about the coach, other players on the team, the club, referees, other teams, etc. If you are doing this, just stop. Aside from creating a generally negative atmosphere, this also diminishes your child’s belief that what they are doing has value and decreases your child’s experience. Your child’s coach will inevitably know, and all the complaining isn’t going to help your child’s status in the coach’s eyes.
If you have a question or concern you are certainly entitled to speak to the coach. You might consider having that conversation without your child there. Keep the conversation private. You do not need to discuss it with other parents. They don’t care.
4. Make Sure Your Child Is On Time
Almost all coaches have requirements for when players are to be at training and games. It is not unusual for a coach or club to want youth players to be at training 10 or 15 minutes before training starts. Arriving 30, 45, or 60 minutes before a game is also not unusual. (The length of the arrival time before the game generally increases as the players’ age and level of play increases.)
Having you child where they are supposed to be on time shows the coach and your child’s teammates that you and your child are taking soccer seriously. It also teaches and reinforces the life lesson of timeliness.
To move toward being an elite soccer parent, this quote by author Eric Jerome Dickey: “Early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable.” Arrive earlier than required. If you do this, you are very, very likely to be on the coach’s good side.
5. Have Your Child Dressed Properly
Have you ever seen a professional soccer game where 1 or 2 of field players were wearing different jerseys, shorts, or socks from the rest of the field players on their team? Uniforms exist for a reason. When your child shows up dressed wrong, it sends the message to your child’s coach and the rest of the team that you and your child are not taking soccer seriously.
The same goes for training. Many clubs have specific training gear. Your child’s coach will notice when your child is consistently dressed properly. The coach will also notice when you child isn’t.
As with almost everything else in youth soccer, dressing according to the team or club requirements helps teach and enforce life lessons about discipline and consistency. It will also help you and your child to be in the coach’s good graces.
6. Hold Your Child to Their Commitments
Sports is intended, in great part, to teach life lessons and life skills.4 One of the important lessons youth soccer teaches players is to keep their commitments.
If your child has committed to play on a team for a certain period of time, unless there are extreme circumstances, your should child play out their commitment, attending all practices, games, and other required events. If your child wants to quit soccer or move to a different team, that is fine, after they have finished their season-long commitment to their current team.
7. Leave the Coaching to the Coach and the Reffing to the Ref
Go to any youth soccer game and you will see parents yelling instructions at players from the sideline (“boot it,” “clear it,” “dribble,” etc.). This is disruptive to the players and does not let them learn to play the game for themselves. It is also entirely possible that what you are yelling is contrary to what the players have been instructed to do by the coach. Coaches really dislike this, and generally don’t think very highly of the parents who do this.
The same thing goes for yelling at the referee (or for the referee to hear). It is not a foul every time a player falls down. A handball found has not been committed every time a ball touches a players hand. There is no such foul as “playing on the ground.” All of this parental yelling might distract the referee such that the ref cannot make proper calls or discourage the referee from making calls in your child’s team’s favor (referees are human, after all). Not only does yelling at the ref get you on the coach’s bad side, it also makes you look like a clown. Please stop.
If you can master these 7 key elements of youth soccer parent behavior, you will be your child’s coach’s favorite soccer parent. The behaviors should also substantially improve your child’s youth soccer experience, and a lot of other people’s experiences as well.
SOURCES
- Smoll, F. L., Cumming, S. P., & Smith, R. E. (2011). Enhancing Coach-Parent Relationships in Youth Sports: Increasing Harmony and Minimizing Hassle. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 6(1), 13–26. https://doi.org/10.1260/1747-9541.6.1.13. ↩︎
- Bonavolontà, V., Cataldi, S., Latino, F., Carvutto, R., De Candia, M., Mastrorilli, G., Messina, G., Patti, A., & Fischetti, F. (2021). The Role of Parental Involvement in Youth Sport Experience: Perceived and Desired Behavior by Male Soccer Players. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(16), 8698. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18168698. ↩︎
- Smoll, et al. (2011). ↩︎
- Mossman, G. J., & Cronin, L. (2018). Life Skills Development and Enjoyment in Youth Soccer: The Importance of Parental Behaviours. Journal of Sports Sciences, 37(8), 850–856. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2018.153058. ↩︎
This text is like a cup of fine tea — soothing, warming, and quietly profound.