Four Ways to Connect With Every Player in Every Session
Think back to your last training session. You had somewhere between twelve and eighteen players. Now think honestly about how many of them you actually connected with — not just coached at, but genuinely connected with.
My guess: fewer than you think.
Here's a simple test. Film a session and listen back to how many times you say each player's name. You'll say your best players' names a lot — coaching them, encouraging them, pointing them out as examples. You'll say your most challenging players' names a lot too, because they keep giving the ball away or making the same mistake. But work your way through the full squad and you'll find a large middle group that barely gets a mention.
Those players are still there. They still showed up. They're just invisible.
Here are four points of contact I try to have with every single player in every session.
1. The Personal Connection
This one sounds obvious but it's harder than it looks.
The players who arrive early are easy — you've got five minutes, you chat, you find out how their day went, whether they had PE, whether they played basketball this morning. You're relaxed, they're relaxed, the conversation happens naturally.
The player who arrives twenty minutes late is also easy. You pull them aside, you find out what's going on, you catch them up on what they've missed. That's a contact point.
The ones you miss are everyone in between. The twelve players who arrived in the middle of your warm-up while you were setting up the first activity. They came, they got in, they started playing — and you never actually spoke to them as people.
Be deliberate about it. "How was school?" is a simple question that tells you a lot. I had a player show up for a high-intensity session after running five miles for cross country at school that morning. Knowing that changed how I involved her in the session. It wasn't that she got a pass on working — it was that I was conscious of what she'd already done and adjusted my expectations and conversations accordingly.
Knowing your players as people is also how you know when something is off. The player who's quiet when they're usually loud. The one who's not tracking defensively and it's got nothing to do with their tactical understanding. Thirty seconds at the start changes the whole dynamic of what you can offer them.
2. Coaching for Improvement
In the flow of the session, you're going to coach. The question is who you're coaching.
Here's where the orientation method helps. Say you're working on building out against a high press. Your natural focus is on the team trying to build out — they're the ones you're trying to improve. But the pressing team also needs coaching. If you go to them first, and challenge them on their shape and their triggers and their positioning, you've just created a contact point with six or seven more players.
Then when you move to coaching the team building out, you've got another group. Both sides of the ball, coached genuinely, in the flow — that's twelve to fourteen players getting an improvement conversation in a single activity.
The ones you miss are the ones not directly involved in the topic. If your session is about building out through the thirds and your wide forwards aren't part of that phase, they need a different coaching focus. What are they doing while the back four and the midfield are working? That's where the fourth point of contact comes in — but first, the praise.
3. Praise and Encouragement
A lot of coaching defaults to improvement. Improve, correct, fix, adjust. And over time, without realising it, you create players who are waiting to be told what they're doing wrong.
Praise is a coaching tool. Not fake praise — not "great touch" when the touch was average — but genuine recognition of something a player is doing well or trying to do. The player who tracked back forty yards and didn't win the ball but was in the right position. The goalkeeper who communicated clearly even when the defence didn't listen. The wide player who made the diagonal run three times and finally got the ball on the fourth.
These moments happen constantly in sessions and most coaches let them pass. When you name them — out loud, specifically, directed at the player — you do two things: you reinforce the behaviour, and you make that player feel seen. And a player who feels seen gives more.
Same challenge applies here. Who gets the praise? Usually the players already performing well. Make it a conscious habit to find something real to praise in the players who are having a harder time that day. It changes the energy.
4. The Individual Challenge
This one is for the players who are stuck — and most squads have a few of them at any given time.
Stuck doesn't mean bad. It means they're repeating the same pattern, making the same choice, getting caught in the same moment, and nothing in the session is shifting it. The center back who plays the same short pass to the same player every time regardless of the pressure. The left back who cuts inside every single time because they've had success doing it and now can't see anything else. The wide forward who stands next to the touchline and waits for a through ball that comes once every twenty minutes.
For those players, I set a private goal. Before the next activity, I pull them aside: "In this block, I want you to try and distribute to at least four different players — not just the obvious one." Or: "I want you to check your shoulder before every touch in the next five minutes." Something specific, observable, and achievable within the session.
Then at the water break, I come back to them. How's it going? Have you tried it? What's stopping you?
This is the version of the Ollie Watkins approach — small, personal, individual goals that get a player hunting for something specific within the game, rather than waiting for something to happen to them. Done well, you build it into their IDP and it becomes a thread you can track across weeks.
Why This Matters Beyond Development
The stat I come back to is this: the overwhelming majority of players you coach will never play professionally. Some will play in college. Most will stop somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two and go build their lives.
But the ones who felt genuinely connected to their coaches — seen, coached, challenged, encouraged — are the ones who give back. They become coaches, volunteers, administrators, the parents on the sideline who actually understand the game because someone took the time to teach them. The players who felt invisible tend to drift away from the game entirely.
Sixteen players. Four contact points each. That's not a perfect session — that's the job.
Start with their name.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 65 — 4 Ways to Connect With Every Player
@LeeDunneSoccer