The Notepad: The Tool That's For You

One tool from the Coaches Toolbox. Start with the full toolbox.

Every other tool in the box is pointed at your players.

This one is pointed at you. It's private, it's in your pocket, and I'd recommend it as strongly as any of the others.

Before kick-off

The line-up goes in first. Then a reminder of our goals for this game — what we're actually trying to do today, written down where I'll see it, because the first goal against has a way of erasing everything you decided on the drive over.

Then any special notes for this one. Whatever's particular about today.

That page takes two minutes and it's the difference between coaching a plan and reacting to a scoreline.

During

Notes of the action as it happens.

Timestamps — moments to go back and look at later. Not a description, just a marker. 19 minutes. That's enough.

Comments attached to our goals, so I'm not collecting general observations, I'm collecting evidence about the thing we said mattered today.

And the admin: subbing times, who came off, who went on. Sounds trivial. It isn't, when a parent asks you on Tuesday, or when you're trying to work out why one player looked heavy in the second half three weeks running.

Half time

Three key things. Tied to our goals.

Three, because you've got a few minutes and a group of teenagers with the attention span that implies. Tied to the goals, because otherwise half time becomes a list of everything that annoyed you in the last forty minutes.

Having them written down means you walk in with three things instead of finding out what you think while you're already talking. Which, as I've said elsewhere, is where waffle comes from.

After

Quick thoughts. Mine, not theirs.

This is my own hot feedback. Immediate, before I've had time to build a tidier story about what happened. What did I see, what did I do, what didn't work, what do I want to look at again.

Same rules I use on my players apply to me here. First answer. No editing. No arguing with it. Come back to it cold in a day or two and see whether it still holds.

Almost everything I've changed about how I coach started as three scribbled lines in a car park.

Why write it rather than say it

Some of what lands on that page is feeling, and feeling is better written down than shouted.

There's a moment in most games where something wants to come out of you — at a referee, at a player, at the touchline generally. Writing gives it somewhere to go that isn't a fourteen-year-old's evening.

It also just settles you. Putting a thing in order on paper forces you to make it into a sentence, and by the time you've done that it's usually smaller than it felt.

And it keeps you looking. A coach with nothing to do with their hands watches the ball. A coach who's making notes is watching the game.

The recall

The last thing it gives you is memory.

You will not remember the 19th minute on Wednesday. You won't remember who you subbed at 60 or what you noticed about your left back's first ten minutes. You'll remember the goals and how you felt at the end, which is the least useful version of the afternoon.

The notepad is the only reason any of the rest of it survives.

Get one

Any notepad. It goes in your pocket.

That's the entire setup cost of the tool I'd least like to coach without.

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