Coaching The Coach Review

If a person starting out to coach youth soccer asked me to recommend a good introductory book I’d suggest Coaching The Coach: A complete guide how to coach soccer skills through drills by Richard Seedhouse. It’s a nice, concise, no frills, 115 page introduction to coaching fundamental soccer techniques. In particular I like how it covers some key technical points, especially on 1v1 attacking that is rarely spelled out in other books.

I recommend Seedhouse’s book not so much for the activities which are similar to those in many other books. Instead I like this book because of the technical detail along with his Socratic approach of asking questions of the coach.

If you’re looking for information on tactics, formations or strategy you’ll need to look elsewhere because this book doesn’t touch on these subjects. But that is its strength: a laser focus on one subject – technique.

Favorite Coaching Books

I probably have 100 coaching books in my library. Out of this collection two stand out: The Complete Guide to Coaching Soccer Systems and Tactics by Jacob Daniel and The Art of Soccer by Mark Catlin.

Daniel's book covers the basics of attacking and defending with good diagrams that show the right and wrong ways of doing things the moves on to explaining the various formations and the variations used by different international teams. Daniel's book concludes with ideas on practices for training different positions within a formation. Each time I read Daniel's book I find myself underlining more and more of the text.

Catlin's The Art of Soccer provides a high level conceptual approach with many photographs of actual games (some indoor and some outdoor) to illustrate these concepts. Although there is significant overlap between the books Catlin's spends no time on formations or sample practices.

If I were forced to keep only two books out of the library I'd keep these two.