Are You Getting 20 Years of Experience, or One Year Repeated 20 Times?
Quick question: how many hours did you coach last week?
Count it up. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Practice sessions, games, small groups, one-on-ones — all of it.
This week I'm pushing eleven hours of practice across small group and team environments. Add two games on Friday, two more on Saturday, and potentially more on Sunday depending on how the tournament goes — I'm looking at close to twenty hours of coaching. And this is on top of everything else going on.
Now. Of those twenty hours — how many would you say are actually quality?
"I'm Showing Up. Isn't That Enough?"
Honestly? Sometimes it has to be. I'm grateful I have a wife who accommodates an evening-and-weekend coaching schedule. I don't know if my kids have opinions about it. I haven't asked. That's probably a sidebar for another day.
But "I'm showing up" is the floor, not the ceiling. It's the bare minimum we can offer the players we coach. The question is what we bring with us when we show up.
Are your hours planned? Are they a continuation of a cycle, building on what you worked on last week? Or are you turning up with a vague idea and figuring it out when you get there? Both happen. But only one of them compounds.
20 Years of Experience — or One Year, Repeated?
Here's the thing that bothers me. A coach with twenty years of experience doesn't automatically make a great coach. Not if those twenty years are the same year, repeated twenty times.
Same session structures. Same approach. Same response to the same problems. No new education, no curiosity about what other methodologies might offer, no honest reflection on whether what you're doing is actually working.
Compare that to a coach who takes each year seriously — who tries something different, who asks questions of other coaches, who reads, who watches, who is genuinely in a different place at the end of the year than they were at the start.
When I finished my A license, I had this feeling of — right, done, checklist complete. I'd been working through the US Soccer license pathway and when I got to the end of it, I felt like I'd ticked the last box. And then something shifted. I realised that finishing the checklist was the beginning, not the end.
Since then: an MBA. The Tovo coaching course. Looking into Raymond Verheijen's work. Planning to shadow a friend who runs an academy in Europe, just to see how they do things differently. Todd Beane — controversial for some, but I'm interested in both him and Verheijen.
These aren't things I was supposed to do. They're things I wanted to do, once I stopped waiting for the next formal step to tell me what to learn. Where is your education coming from right now? When did you last try something genuinely new?
The Wagon Coach
I want to paint you a picture.
A coach walks across the field pulling one of those big Jeep wagons. Poles hanging out the side. A mannequin in there. Different sizes of soccer balls. A rebounder wall. Tennis balls, cones in three different sizes, a speed ladder, a couple of flags. Looks incredible. They spend thirty minutes setting it all up and it looks like a proper professional training environment.
And here's my question: can your players go home and do any of that?
I'm not saying the wagon is wrong. I'm saying — what's the point of a training session if it only exists inside that thirty-minute setup? If the learning can only happen with those specific pieces of equipment, in that specific arrangement, with you managing every part of it — then the moment the session ends, the learning stops.
I want my players to be able to take something home. That's always the goal. In small group training, I'll ask a player: what do you do when you train on your own? What does it look like at home? Then I try to build something into the session that connects to that — a turn, a way of breaking pressure, something they can practice off the wall in their room with a tennis ball. Parents might not love it. But they'll be working on soccer.
What Did You Learn?
At the end of every session, before you drive home, ask yourself: what did I learn today? What am I going to adapt, tweak, or do differently next time?
Not what the players learned. What you learned.
That question is what separates coaches who are accumulating experience from coaches who are just accumulating time. You are always the student too. The moment you stop believing that, your hours start becoming repetition rather than growth.
I've coached in 105-degree heat in Northern California with forty kids at lunchtime. I've done six-hour days, five days a week, through entire summers. Those hours taught me a lot — about managing energy, about reading groups, about handling the chaos that comes with all sorts of ages and abilities in the same space. But I was also learning something every single time, or trying to.
That's the standard worth holding yourself to. Not just how many hours, but what you're bringing to them — and what you're taking away.
How did you maximize yours?
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 81 — Maximizing Hours
@LeeDunneSoccer