Goal Setting Strategies for Coaches in Athletics

Whether you are an elementary school soccer coach, a high school tennis coach, a collegiate skiing coach or an intramural mixed-age basketball coach, the techniques employed to bring out the best skills in your athletes are centered on setting goals. There are outcome-oriented goals that stress doing something better to get to an end result such as getting a scholarship; emotional goals that focus on the mental aspects of the sport in question like just having fun; and performance-oriented goals that target a particular skill set.

  1. Create Recognizable Goals

    • Athletes can better work on their performance if you set goals they can visualize. Don't tell your high school basketball point guard to dribble better, but instead create dribbling drills that focus on crossover dribbling, working with both hands and dribbling without looking at the ball. All athletes need physical training whether such training is weight lifting, endurance or skill focused; make sure to provide clear instructions on what should be done. A football wide receiver needs sprint speed, but just telling he should set a goal of running a 5 second 40-yard dash will not help him; work with him to improve take off from the line of scrimmage and provide specific training guides to improve muscle speed.

    Time Constraints

    • Set well-defined schedules for your athletes' goals. During the off-season most athletes continue training in the gym in preparation for the next year. If you are a cross-country skiing coach, your athletes need endurance, leg and upper body strength and good flexibility. Create a daily training schedule that states clearly when the athletes should attain certain goals. An unclear goal that says you will need to run a 5 minute mile doesn't help anyone. Such a goal should say within one month you can run a 5.45 minute mile, in two months a 5.30 minute mile and so on. Do not make the goals too difficult; it can discourage your athletes.

    Monitor Progress

    • Make a goal chart, whether performance, emotional or outcome-oriented, when setting an athletes' goals. You can make the chart by hand or in a spreadsheet. Sit down with the athlete and discuss each of the aspects of the chart, having them fill out all the information as they complete it, and then continually monitor their progress. Track and field coach Bill Bowerman created a statistical analysis chart to examine each of his runners' improvements over time. He would then use those numbers to monitor their progress, devise better training regimes and compare them to other runners. An athlete needs to see where they've been, where they are now and where they want to be; such detailed scrutiny provides a system to build confidence in training.