Every Training Session You Find Online Is Out of Context
It's one of the most common questions I get when I'm running grassroots education: where do I find good training sessions? I need help, I don't know what to do, I Googled it and I got thousands of results and now I'm more confused than when I started.
Here's the truth: every session plan you find online — including the ones on my own website — is completely out of context for your players.
The Bayern Munich build-out session with Xabi Alonso? Your U9s can't do that. The Barcelona rondo with a pivot six? Your team might not even have a player who understands what a six does yet. The session that worked brilliantly for a coach in England who runs training twice a week with a group of highly competitive fourteen-year-olds? It might be entirely wrong for your group of ten-year-olds who show up once a week and just want to kick the ball with their friends.
None of that makes any of those sessions bad. It just means context is everything. So here are the five steps I use — and the five I'd recommend for you — to take any session and make it actually work for your team.
Step 1: What Are Your Goals?
Not the session's goals. The team's goals. For the year, for the season, for the current cycle.
Are you trying to peak at State Cup? Are you working with young players whose number one goal is to come back next year? Are you in an academy environment where players are being prepared for something beyond just youth soccer? Or are you running a recreational team where the definition of success is that everyone had fun?
These are not trick questions. They just need answers before you pick up a session plan. If your goal is that seven-year-olds come back wanting to play again — which is a completely valid and important goal — then your training sessions need to feel fun, competitive in an age-appropriate way, and achievable. A session that makes them feel confused or unsuccessful every week is going to cost you players.
If you run a spring season and a fall season, set goals for each. Work backwards into your training cycles. It doesn't have to be complicated. But when you know where you're going, choosing a training session gets a whole lot easier.
Step 2: Check the Roadmaps or your Game Model
US Soccer publishes player development roadmaps. They outline what players should realistically be able to do at each age and format — 7v7, 9v9, 11v11. It's worth looking at them, and your club may have their own version.
The reason this matters: the roadmap keeps you honest about what's actually appropriate. Shooting is on every roadmap, at every age. But a shot at 7v7 looks completely different to a shot at 11v11. A seven-year-old driving the ball with their laces and hoping it goes in the general direction of the goal — that's a shot. A sixteen-year-old cutting across a defender and finishing with the outside of the foot — that's also a shot. (I scored one of those last week. Not to toot my own horn, but it happened.)
The point is: match your session to where your players actually are, not where you wish they were, and not where the session you found online assumes they'll be.
The same reference to a game model - it gives you your plan up front because you have already defined how you want to play. The sessions begin to write themselves. Especially when you repeat quality sessions!
Step 3: What Makes Your Players Tick?
I was recently asked by a coach — who had played Division One college soccer — how to light a fire under her players. She couldn't understand why they weren't competing the way she expected them to.
Her players were seven years old.
Her last experience of playing was ultra-competitive collegiate soccer where scholarships were on the line. That's the frame she brought to the field with her daughter's team. And those little girls just wanted to play and have fun with their friends.
My question back to her: what was your fire when you were seven? Probably fun. Probably friends. Probably the fact that someone gave you a ball and said go.
So does your session reflect what your players actually need? If you have older girls who need a few minutes of social time before they're ready to compete, build that in. Ten minutes of chatting with a ball at their feet isn't wasted time — for a fifteen-year-old girl, that connection might be what keeps her coming back. If you've got boys who need competition to wake up, give them winners. Reward the team that scores by letting them restart with the ball. Don't punish the losing team — just make winning feel worthwhile.
Observe your players. Find the thing that makes them push, and build your session around it.
Step 4: Combine — Make It Yours
Now you take the session you found and you adapt it. Remove a player if the numbers don't work. Change the goals to change the behavior. Add a timer if you need competition. Add a monster — a coach or assistant running around in a bib — if you're working with young ones who need a villain to chase.
What you see online will never look exactly the same on your field. Prepare for that. Your space is different. Your players are different. Your numbers might be off by two. That's fine. Tweak it. Make it fit.
And if your players aren't ready for what the session is asking — if the Barcelona pivot six is a concept they've never heard of — that's okay too. Slow it down. Introduce the idea first. Add it in over time. You're not running a first-team training session. You're building a foundation.
Step 5: Do It Twice
This is the one people skip. They plan a new session every single night, and then they wonder why they never have time to observe, or why they're always spending the first fifteen minutes explaining rules.
Run the same session again.
The first time, your players are learning the activity. They're figuring out the rules, the shape, the purpose. By the end they're just starting to play well. Then you go home, reflect on it, maybe share it with parents so they know what to expect. The next session, your players already know the game. They arrive, they go, and now you get to actually coach — because you're not managing confusion, you're managing the game.
Three or four times in a row might be too much. But twice? Almost always the right call. Change a constraint or two if you need to keep it fresh. Same environment, slightly different rules. They stay in the game, you stay in the coaching.
Five steps. Goals, roadmaps, observation, combine, do it twice. Any session you find — online, in a coaching course, on my website — run it through those five. When it fits your players, it'll work. When it doesn't fit, you'll know exactly why, and you'll know exactly what to change.
Context is everything.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 84 — Context for Training Sessions
@LeeDunneSoccer