One-to-One Coaching: Give a Player Their Own Game

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

Most coaches think one-to-one coaching means saying it quietly instead of shouting it.

That's the entry level, and it's worth doing. If a player needs to open up and receive so we can break pressure, telling them while you walk alongside them will land better than announcing it to eighteen people. Almost guaranteed.

But that's still you delivering instructions. It's the same coaching in a lower voice.

The version that actually changes players is different. It's giving them something of their own to do.

A game inside the game

Pick a player. Give them one specific, countable thing to achieve in the next two minutes, or before half time.

Cut inside three times. Look for a shot with your weak foot. Play a give-and-go three times.

Bring the back line up, together, five times.

Now they've got a job. They're not drifting through the session hoping to be noticed, and they're not carrying a vague instruction to get on the ball more that nobody can tell whether they've achieved.

The number is the whole trick

"Be more involved" isn't a challenge. It's a wish. Nobody can act on it and nobody can tell afterwards whether it happened.

Three times. Five touches. Two minutes.

The number does two things. It gives the player a way to know they've done it — and that's where confidence actually comes from, not from being told they're good, but from setting out to do a thing and then doing it. And it gives you something real to talk about afterwards. If they didn't get there, that isn't failure, it's information. Why not? What got in the way? Now you know something you didn't.

And it has to be about the process, not the result

This is the part coaches skip.

Cut inside three times, and don't care what happens. Not "cut inside and score." Not "cut inside and beat him."

Because the moment the outcome is in the target, you've handed the player back exactly the pressure that was stopping them. A winger who's frightened of losing the ball won't try the thing if trying and failing counts against them. Take the outcome out and the attempt becomes the win.

Then they attempt it. And having attempted it three times without the roof falling in, the fourth one is free.

Ollie Watkins and five touches

I've told this story on the podcast a few times. Watkins, before the Premier League, playing lower league football in England — and getting stuck.

Stuck wide. Standing on the touchline waiting for the ball to arrive so he could do something with it. Isolated, uninvolved, waiting for the game to come to him.

His coach gave him a challenge. Touch the ball five times in the next two minutes.

Not score. Not beat your man. Touch it five times.

Were all five touches valuable? Almost certainly not. That was never the point. The point is that a player who has to touch the ball five times in two minutes cannot stand still on a touchline. He has to go and find it. He has to come inside, drop in, show for it. And a player who's involved is a player who's in the game.

You'll recognize the problem, because it's sitting in every 1-4-3-3 in American youth soccer. The seven and the eleven stand wide and wait. The opposition full back stands next to them and waits too. Both of them are waiting for something to happen and neither is making it happen. Then when the ball finally arrives, the winger tries to beat his man and run forty yards to score, because that worked once.

Same problem. Same fix. Give them a number and make them go and get it.

The defender who became a leader

My favorite one wasn't about the ball at all.

I had a defender whose challenge was to bring the back line up together five times in a game. That's it. Not to win headers, not to make tackles. Organise the line and push it up, five times.

What I was really doing was handing him a reason to speak.

He had to talk to do it. He had to look across, get their attention, choose the moment, and take three players with him. And because it was a countable job rather than a personality note — nobody ever became a leader by being told they should be more of a leader — he just got on with it.

By the end he was pulling the whole team up the pitch. He'd become the loudest voice in the back four. Not because I told him to lead, but because I gave him something that required it.

The simplest version of all

Not every one-to-one needs a designed challenge.

An enormous amount of it is just asking how they are. What they're seeing. Where they think they can make an impact today.

Ask a player what they see and you find out whether the picture in their head matches the one in yours. Usually it doesn't, and that gap is the most useful thing you'll learn all evening.

How to use it

Find the moment. In the flow when the ball's nowhere near them, as it's about to come their way, or at a stoppage. Which of those works depends on the player, and you can find that out by asking them.

Keep it to one thing. A player carrying three challenges is carrying none.

Make it countable, make it about the attempt, and check in afterwards — that's your cold feedback, and it's where the two tools meet.

And if they don't hit the number, resist the urge to be disappointed at them. Ask why. That answer is worth more than the five touches were.

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