I Deleted 2GB of Session Plans. Here's What I Learned.
Over the holidays I went through my Google Drive. You know the one — the folder that has folders inside it that haven't been opened since the course you took three years ago. Session plans, curriculums, screenshotted diagrams from Academy Soccer Coach and Tactical Pad, content from webinars and seminars and state federation downloads, all saved with the best of intentions and almost never looked at again.
I deleted over two gigabytes of it.
And here's what surprised me: it felt like a weight lifting.
I expected to feel like I'd lost something — all those sessions, all those drills, all that accumulated material from years of coaching education. But sitting there looking at a cleaner folder, I realized I wasn't going to miss any of it. Because I never really used it. And the reason I never used it is that by the time I actually need to plan a session, the answer doesn't live in a folder. It lives in what happened at training last week and what the game on Saturday showed me about my players.
The Problem with Collecting Sessions
Here's what I found when I went back through that folder. A 3v2 that rotates between squares. Players making five passes, then switching to a new grid. It's a tidy diagram. It probably came from a reputable source. And I genuinely can't tell you what it's for.
What does it develop? What moment in the game does it prepare players for? Why do they change squares after five passes — what's the game equivalent of that? I don't know, and I used it. And if I couldn't answer those questions now, I couldn't answer them then either.
The session plan culture in coaching education is that there's a right activity for every topic. Want to work on switching the point of attack? Here are three drills. Want to develop pressing? Download this pattern. And coaches — myself included for years — collect these things the way you'd collect recipes: maybe I'll need it one day, maybe it'll solve a problem.
But if you're working from a games-based approach — if the game is the teacher — sessions don't really work like that. The session comes from the game. Something breaks down on Saturday. You understand why. You build a game situation in training that creates the same problem and lets your players solve it. That's it. The session plan writes itself, because the source is your players, not a folder.
Play Practice Play — And Why It's More Than a Structure
Working through my application to become a US Soccer instructor, I've been deep in Play Practice Play. And while I've been using this approach for years in various forms, going through the evidence behind it has been clarifying in a way I didn't expect.
This isn't just a preference. There's data behind it.
The opening play — arrival games, players getting on the field and immediately playing — isn't just a nice way to start training. Research supports it. Players who arrive to a game environment are more engaged, more likely to stay invested in the session, and more likely to enjoy themselves. It also removes something that I'd never quite named before: the coaching dependency.
I work with ODP players. These are some of the best players from across Northern California — talented, experienced, competitive. I get on the field, and they stand there. Looking at me. Waiting.
Coach, what do we do? Coach, what do we do?
These excellent players have been trained — by years of coach-led sessions — to wait for instruction before they can function. The arrival game breaks that. They get out of the car, they see the game set up, they play. Nobody told them to. And now they're warming up, they're making decisions, they're arguing about a call from three minutes ago. They're soccer players, not students waiting for the lecture to start.
The practical side of it matters too. When I was coaching on a field in the far corner of a complex with ten other teams training at the same time, a 15-minute walk from the parking lot, I started using arrival games simply because I needed players to run to training. It worked. Now there's evidence telling me why.
The Practice Part — Nonlinear Is Not the Same as Unplanned
Here's where I think coaches get nervous about this approach. If sessions write themselves, and if the game is the teacher, does that mean you just let them play and hope for the best?
No. And this is important.
Nonlinear practice means you're not isolating a skill and drilling it. You're creating a game situation that requires that skill, and the skill develops through playing. That's different from throwing balls out and walking away.
Let's say your team is struggling to build out of the back. The classic approach is to stop everything and do a passing pattern. You line them up, you walk them through it, they repeat it. And then Saturday comes around and the press is on and it looks exactly like it did before, because the pattern didn't prepare them for the chaos of the real thing.
The nonlinear version: build a game that replicates the pressure they're facing. Set the defending team up to press the way your upcoming opponent presses. Make the reward for successfully building out into an end zone or to a target player — and make it count in the game. Now your players are solving the actual problem rather than practicing a version of the problem that doesn't exist in real matches.
Or take finishing. You want first-touch finishes. You've seen the data — over 70% of goals are scored with one touch. So you build a game where a first-time finish counts double. Suddenly every player is getting into positions to shoot first time, every player creating the killer pass is motivated to find the right moment, and the game is teaching the skill through the game. You didn't run a finishing drill. You created the conditions for finishing to matter.
That requires something from you as a coach. You're not controlling the session. You're designing the environment, watching what happens, and engaging with individual players inside the flow. The real coaching skill isn't the diagram. It's the observation — knowing what to look for, who to talk to, what to say, and when to say it without stopping everything to do it.
The Final Play — Not a Reward
The end of every session should be play. Not as a reward for working hard. Not as a way to fill time. Play as the completion of a cycle — the moment where everything you worked on in the practice phase gets tested in the closest thing you have to a real game.
Maximum roster. Game-like setup. Goalkeeper if you have one. Formation that mirrors how you play at the weekend. And you — the coach — still engaged. Not packing up cones. Not talking to parents. Still watching, still connecting with players, still tying the threads between what happened at the start of training and what you're seeing now.
This last part is where most coaches lose the session. The scrimmage becomes a reward and they check out. Which means the players check out too, and you've lost the most valuable twenty minutes of the whole evening.
What's Actually in the Folder Now
I kept a few things. Things that genuinely connect to my game model, that I come back to, that reflect the way I actually coach. The rest is gone.
And what I know now — more clearly than before — is that the session plan I used to look for never existed. The right session was always going to come from watching my players in the last game. From understanding what they need, not what a curriculum says they should be working on this week. From knowing the game well enough that when I look at eleven players on a field, I can see the problem and build the environment to solve it.
Coaches who collect sessions are preparing to coach. Coaches who know their players are coaching.
The folder can stay empty.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 66 — Play Practice Play
@LeeDunneSoccer