How to Measure Development Both On and Off the Pitch
Consistent development is an ongoing part of a high-level athlete’s life. When you have big goals - like playing college soccer or going pro - you have to take some big steps to get there. For high school aged soccer players, that means elevating their game to another level, from both a physical and mental standpoint.
The question is, how do you know you’re on the right track? How do you know you’re using your time wisely and bringing yourself closer and closer to your long-term goal?
While physical development is fairly easy to assess, mental development requires a very different approach.
How to Measure Physical Development
The most effective way to measure physical development is testing yourself with increasingly difficult short-term goals, or challenges, as we say at Beyond Goals Mentoring. You pass one test, you move on a tougher one, and so forth.
Each challenge should be easily quantifiable, so you can clearly see which metrics you’re trying to surpass.
For instance, let’s say you want to improve your speed and athleticism. In this case, you could set a challenge to run the 40-meter dash in under 6 seconds after 6 weeks of training. You outline your training schedule and you get to it.
Once you meet this challenge in the established time frame, it’s time to set another, more difficult challenge that tests your athleticism even more rigorously. The point is, you can be absolutely sure you’re progressing with the numerical evidence that you’re able to meet increasingly difficult challenges.
How to Measure Mental Development
Of course, elite technical skills and athleticism aren’t the only requirements play college or pro soccer. You also need an elite mindset, a key aspect of which is resilience.
With athletic skills like speed, technical skills like touch, it’s easier to look at your day and assess whether you got better or not. With mental skills, it’s harder as it’s much more subjective and objective.
Techniques such as journaling can help. When you take 10 minutes at the end of the day to write down how you felt today (and why), you are able to track how you progress on the mental side. Are you handling setbacks better? Are you focusing on what you need to do more consistently? Are you doing what you need to do (like training to increase your speed) even when you don’t want to?
Working on your emotional resiliency is as important as your technical skills if you want to go far in soccer (and it’s an important life skill to boot).
The Challenge with Developing Resilience
But comparing your responses to adverse situations is hard to do on your own. A great solution to this widespread dilemma is mentorship. Evaluating your own resilience requires a level of self-awareness that most kids haven’t developed just yet. A mentor also knows what an elite mindset looks like, and can tell when someone has made an improvement in mental strength.
How a Mentor Assesses Mental Growth
During a video analysis of games, your mentor can observe how you respond after making a mistake. Are you playing more intelligently to prevent the same thing from happening again?
Additionally, your mentor will work with you on how you respond to adversity, like getting benched or coming back from an injury.
There’s a specific process for dealing with these situations like a professional. Unfortunately, it’s completely absent in the typical soccer training regimen, which is why we started Beyond Goals Mentoring. Harnessing our own experience as retired pros, we help athletes develop the mental tools to embrace adversity and thrive under pressure. Lots of young athletes possess the physical requirements for success, but few have the mental side of the game at the same level – which is why it truly separates good players and great players.
So, if your athlete is struggling with a recent setback or could use some help with the mental component of soccer, let’s set up a mentoring session today.
