“A football is the best toy ever invented. It brings with it hours and hours of pleasure” Bobby Charlton
For young players, playing football is among the most fun they will ever have and when they get to do it with their friends this makes it even better. This means fun is implicit, you can’t manufacture fun.
Making sure you start and end every session with a game, players will enjoy themselves and look forward to training every week.
If you are struggling to find games at the start of the session for your players, check out our many ‘arrival game’ practices on the platform.
A lot of coaches try and cram as much as they can into one session, perhaps because they only see their players once a week. However, this means they try and do too many practices in one session which means time is lost between practices setting up the next one and kids spend more time learning the session rather than the actual skills.
Try and keep things simple, especially from a young age, and ensure players have the ball at their feet as much as possible.
If you struggle planning sessions for your players either due to limited preparation time or just a lack of ideas why not check out our ready-made season plans? They provide weekly sessions for your team and handy advice for coaches of any level at the touch of a button.
Available for all age groups. Access here.
Whilst your role as a coach is to teach the players the fundamentals of football and develop their skills on the pitch, it’s important that you let players figure things out for themselves as well.
Stopping the session too often can prove to be counter-productive and even confuse the players on the overall objective. Therefore, try and be clear and concise with your instructions and feedback.
A good way of doing this is planning your intervention ahead of time. One tool that allows you to do it is the “Intervention Wheel’ Infographic. Seen below.
Follow this link to download the blank version and plan your interventions.
It’s important to remember that you are not working with professionals or adults, young players require different types of communication and encouragement during sessions.
It may be the case that certain players can’t perform a certain skill in a practice at training. Don’t worry about it or get frustrated with individual players this is just par for the course of coaching youth/grassroots teams.
Try to be supportive and use positive language when these situations arise and linking back to the previous point try to be clear and simple in your instructions. Remember, children are brilliant at listening even when you don’t think they are.
It may be an obvious point but parents care about not only their child’s development as a footballer but also their overall enjoyment of the sport.
If a parent feels their child isn’t getting the right coaching, it can often be their decision to pull them out of the team or even stop them from playing altogether.
Involving parents at every opportunity is a great way of preventing this from happening. A few quick and easy ways you can do this are as follows:
Parents will appreciate these little things as it shows that you care about their child's development.
If you are interested about how important it is to involve parents in your coaching, check out this parent report (https://www.thecoachingmanual.com/blog/the-tcm-parent-report-2022/) that we created recently which looks at a parent’s relationship with their child’s club, their child’s happiness, whether or not they are equipped to support their child off the training field, etc.
A common problem in coaching is when we just sit back and observe key moments in training. If you see a player struggling with something in particular and you know how to help them improve or execute a certain action then do it. Then follow it up with a piece of praise.
It will help accelerate the players learning and ultimately they will enjoy it more leading to them wanting to continue playing the sport.
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