1.  Lay out goals for each individual player that are challenging, engaging, and measureable.

2.  Find out the real reasons (social, prestige, belonging, etc) your guys are playing football and make sure you are meeting those needs. 

Sports performance depends on the athlete being fully committed to numerous goals over many years. In competition with these goals the athlete will have many aspects of daily life to manage. The many competing interests and commitments include work, studies, family/partner, friends, social life and other hobbies/sports

Within the athlete's sport, commitment can be undermined by:

• a perceived lack of progress or improvement
• not being sufficiently involved in developing the training program
• not understanding the objectives of the training program
• injury
• lack of enjoyment
• anxiety about performance - competition
• becoming bored
• coach athlete not working as a team
• lack of commitment by other athletes

Setting goals with the athlete will raise their feelings of value, give them joint ownership of the goals and therefore become more committed to achieving them. All goals should be SMARTER.

• S - goals must be Specific
• M - training targets should be Measurable
• A - goals should be Adjustable
• R - goals must be Realistic
• T - training targets should be Time based
• E - goals should be challenging and Exciting
• R - goals should be Recorded

Many people (coach, medical support team, manager, friends, etc) can contribute to an athlete's levels of commitment with appropriate levels of support and positive feedback, especially during times of injury, illness and poor performance.

As a coach, to increase commitment, you have to figure out why your players are playing at all?  It may have very little to do with a love for the game.  It could be:

• social outlet
• sense of belonging
• likes the idea and image of being a player
• likes the benefits of being a player 
• likes keeping in shape
• friends are doing it
• wants to learn something about themself
• wants to test their limits
• wants to release anger or aggression
• thinks it will look good on a resume
• peer pressure or family pressure

Sit down with your players and uncover their real motivations.  Then see if you can increase what they're after.  For example, if one of the reasons is social, increase the number of social functions for the team.  Do not judge their motivations, but play to them and broaden them. 

Anne Morriss:

The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating -- in work, in play, in love. (part of a quote from The Way I See It #76, Starbucks Coffee)

Leo Buscaglia:

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

Marian Wright Edelman:

I'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important.

Marian Wright Edelman:

You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.

Marian Wright Edelman:

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?

Rollo May:

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.

Stephen Covey:

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

Talmud (attributed):

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

Thomas Jefferson:

We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour. Declaration of Independence

Vince Lombardi:

Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.