Development Philosophies

What is a coaching philosophy?

Put simply, it is an attitude held by a coach (or club) that acts as the Guiding Principles for the training and development of an athlete, team or club as as a whole.

A coaching philosophy should give an insight into who you are as a person, a coach and in this case – a Club. Needham Soccer Club strongly encourages our coaches to create their own personal coaching philosophy to distribute to every member of their teams. We do not expect all of our coaches to be robotic in how they follow our club philosophies but encourage and hope that the core values of all of our individual coaches align with the core values displayed in our clubs coaching philosophy below!

Age and Stage appropriate Standards, Training Directive’s and Initiatives intended to help our coaches better understand how to deliver on our goal of creating a player-centric environment that gives our kids immediate positive experiences so that we may guide them through their long term development!

At NSC we work to educate our coaches on these “Best Practice” principles to connect our values and objectives for player development with world class leaders in this space such as US Soccer, US Youth Soccer, Mass Youth Soccer & others. Many of these standards and training directives have been taken directly rom US Soccer’s Grassroots Coach Education and Player Development Initiatives of 2017 and tweaked to fit the needs of our Needham Soccer Club players.

These Player Development Initiatives have specifically been designed to help address a few key points of interest for our players that include..

• Provide Age & Stage Appropriate Environments
• Align with international standards for youth development
• Create uniformity across the entire club
• Moving focus away from the team, and on to the individual.
• Develop intelligence with and without the ball.
• Moving focus away from bigger, faster, stronger.
• Develop improved skills with the ball.
• Develop character both on and off the field.

Put simply, the Player Development Philosophy and information is encouraged for our coaches to use as best practice methods in everything they do with our teams from day 1 through their final day in Needham blue!