Your Players Aren't Lacking Intensity. Your Session Might Be.
I was running a coach education class recently and a question came in at the end: How do I add more intensity to my training sessions? How do I demand it from my players?
It's one of the most common questions I get. And every time I hear it, I hear the same thing underneath it — a coach standing on the sideline saying "come on, guys, let's go, lift it up, work harder" while the players kind of shuffle around looking like they'd rather be somewhere else.
That's a tough place to be. And every coach who's been there has good intentions. But I want to give you the honest answer, even if it's not the comfortable one.
It's probably not the kids.
Before you do anything else, ask yourself: are these same players intense in games? Are they competing, fighting for balls, desperate to win? If the answer is yes — and for most youth players it is — then the problem isn't your players. The problem is that your training session doesn't look like the game.
That's where I want to start.
Session Design: Does It Look Like the Game?
When players step into a match, they're competing. There's direction, there's an opponent, there's something to win and lose. The environment creates the intensity naturally.
Now look at your training session. If you're doing isolated skill work, if you're running drills that have no opponent and no real consequence, if the game doesn't come until the last fifteen minutes — you've removed every element that creates intensity in the first place. And then you're standing there wondering where it went.
Play-Practice-Play fixes this. Players arrive and go straight into a small-sided game. Not a free-for-all — a structured, coached, managed game with direction and competition built in. Then you coach through the game. Then you go back to the game. Intensity is present from the first minute because the environment demands it. That's the model.
Meeting the Needs of Your Players
Here's something coaches don't think about enough: when is your training session?
Is it right after school, when the kids have been sitting in class for six hours and they need to run around before they can think straight? Or is it right after PE, when half your team just ran three miles and their legs are already gone?
Is it a hot Thursday in July? Is it raining? Did these kids eat dinner yet?
I'm not saying lower your standards. I'm saying understand your context. A training session plan you found online was written with no knowledge of your players, your schedule, your weather, or what was happening in their lives that day. You have to adapt.
If your players come to you twice a week and don't touch a ball otherwise, that's different from a group that plays on the street every afternoon. If you're coaching boys who need competition to come alive, that's different from an older girls' team where the social element matters and you need to warm them into it — maybe they get five minutes with the ball at their feet in pairs before you ramp it up. Try it. See what happens. Didn't work? Try something else. That's coaching.
Timers: The Real Magic
Here's the one thing I'd put in every training session tomorrow.
Timers.
Not vague time pressure. Actual, out-loud, countdown timers. "You've got two minutes — go." And when it hits two minutes, stop it. Count down the last ten seconds out loud. Let them hear the clock.
Here's why this works: before you use timers, you let the game go until the quality drops. You've seen it — someone falls and laughs, the ball goes out and gets jogged after instead of sprinted, players start grabbing each other's shirts and giggling. The intensity is gone. You let it go too long.
The timer stops that. You watch the game, you find the sweet spot — that moment just before the quality starts to fall — and you stop it there. Now they want more. Now the player on the ball is getting a shot off even as the whistle blows, because they're not done yet. That's the moment you're looking for.
And here's the flip side: it keeps you accountable too. A two-minute phase of play means you don't stop to check your phone. You don't pull a player aside for a five-minute conversation while the others drift. The clock is running for everyone.
Then when you reset, you can tweak the constraint. Winners keep the ball to start. That's one of my favourites — reward the team that scored, don't punish the one that didn't. Suddenly the incentive to win is baked into the game itself.
Read the Room. Have a Pivot.
Sometimes you do everything right and the session still feels flat. The kids are exhausted, something happened at school, three players are injured and the game doesn't flow. It happens.
The best coaches I've worked with don't fight that. They read the room, they adjust, they have a pivot. Not every session is going to be your best one. But if you understand who you're coaching, what they need, and what the environment is asking of them — you're going to hit the mark far more often than you miss it.
Intensity isn't something you demand. It's something you design.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 87 — Training Lacking Intensity?
@LeeDunneSoccer