Becoming a coach can be a exciting, rewarding, and also difficult.  Working with a wide range of personalities, abilities and commitment can create many obstacles for coaches and teams to overcome. Here are a few tips that will help you structure your season, shed some light on unknown expectations and advice on how to coach your own child.

Practice
Practices may initially be more important than matches as your players learn their sport from the ground up. A coach at this level should use practice as an opportunity to discover their players' varying strengths and weaknesses while teaching them fundamentals, the rules of the game, and, as time goes on, strategies for winning. 

Every Child is Unique
Remember that each player will have a different degree of motivation, personality, and wildly different learning styles. To coach effectively, you must recognize these differences in order to know how best to teach each player and to maximize your results as a team. 

Growth Before Victory
Unlike competitive leagues, a recreational coach's first priority is not necessarily to create a winning team. Instead, the coach's job at this level is to help every player progress according to his or her capabilities. Stress growth before competitiveness; competitiveness will develop naturally as the players learn to love the game.

Coach-Parent Relationship
Dealing with the players' parents is one of the most frustrating parts of the job.  Dealing with parents who do not approve of your coaching style or how your choosing to play their child is common.  Conflicts are going to crop up, that is a fact. It's important that you do not say anything you are going to regret or that will negatively affect your team's unity. Remember that the players are your top priority, not you and not their parents. Some people will be unhappy no matter what you do or say, but your final commitment must be to the team. The team, as a whole, is more important than any of its individual parts.

Discipline
Young athletes can often be rash, hotheaded and immature. It is in their nature, and it means that part of being a youth-sports coach is, unfortunately, being a disciplinarian. It will fall to you, as a coach, to correct inappropriate behavior and to maintain order. When your team is out on the field, or the ice, or in the gym, they belong to their coach. 

No matter what the players' rules are at home, a coach needs to set their own rules and promote an atmosphere in which those rules are respected. Make sure that the limits of appropriate behavior are clearly defined and do not let the children overstep. If you allow your players to break the rules that you have laid out without enforcing the consequences, you will lose control over the team.

Setting an Example
The coach is a role-model, a template from which young athletes draw their own behavior. The principle of equality applies here, as well. If your best player does something wrong or acts inappropriately, you must respond in the exact same way that you would with your worst player.  Let your team know that they are all on an even playing field that will only be distinguished by their conduct.

Have Fun
Coaching recreation sports is not akin to coaching the New York Jets. Your first priority is to have fun and to help your young athletes learn and grow while you learn and grow right alongside them.