Designing a Session
Most coaches don't plan a session. They plan ninety minutes of activities and hope a session breaks out.
There's a difference. A list of activities fills the time. A session takes players somewhere they weren't at the start, and every part of it points the same direction.
The gap between those two things isn't talent or experience. It's four decisions, made in order, before you ever draw a grid.
First, you work out what this is actually for. Not the topic — the reason. Who's in front of you, what they need, what you saw last week that made you pick this. Get this wrong and everything downstream is well-organised guesswork.
Second, you understand what your job is once the session starts. Coaches tend to assume their job is to talk. It isn't, and knowing the actual tasks changes how you spend the ninety minutes more than any activity design will.
Third, you build the thing. There's a structure that works, and it isn't accidental — each element does a job the others can't, and skipping one is usually why a session that looked good on paper died on the grass.
Fourth, you shape behaviour rather than instructing it. This is the one that separates coaches who are still shouting in year five from coaches whose players work it out themselves. Change the rule, change the game, change what your players have to solve.
Work through them in that order. The temptation is always to start at the fourth — the clever constraint, the activity you saw online — and reverse-engineer a reason for it afterwards. That's how you end up with a brilliant practice that has nothing to do with your team.
@leedunnesoccer
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