Welcome to the Grassroots

You probably got volunteered.

Somebody needed a coach, your hand went up or didn't go down fast enough, and now there's a bag of balls in your trunk and a group chat full of parents. Welcome. That's how most of us started.

Or maybe you've been doing this a while and you're here for the badge. Also welcome.

Either way, here's the thing I'd want to tell you before you walk in.

It's four hours

That's it. Four hours.

And you will spend most of them thinking about your next practice.

Not sitting in a classroom being talked at about formations. Not taking notes on a whiteboard. working through a fantastic methodology, with a group of other coaches who are in exactly the same boat as you.

There's a reason for that, and it isn't that we ran out of slides. The course is built on Experiential Learning — the idea that people learn from doing a thing and then making sense of what happened, rather than being told about it first.

So the course does to you the exact thing you're going to do to your players.

You'll feel what a well-designed session feels like from the inside.

You don't need to know everything yet

The most common thing I hear from people before a course is some version of "I'm not sure I know enough to be here."

You know enough to be here.

Grassroots isn't a test of how much soccer you know. It's an introduction to how children learn, what a good environment looks like, and the handful of things that actually move the needle for a young player. If you can watch a group of kids and notice what's happening, you have the main skill already.

The rest is language, structure and practice.

What you'll walk out with

A way to plan a session that doesn't involve standing in lines. A few tools for how you actually coach in the moment. A clearer sense of what your job is on a Saturday — and, more usefully, what it isn't.

And connections. This is the part people don't expect. You'll spend four hours with coaches from other clubs, at other levels, dealing with the same problems you are. Some of the best coaching conversations I've had started in a parking lot after one of these.

Come with a willingness to be a head coach or assistant in a part of the session plan, and ask as many questions as you can. That's the whole entry fee.

Next up: Experiential Learning — what it is, and why the course is built this way.

@leedunnesoccer