Punishments
I've done all four of these things. I want to be honest about that before I go any further, because I'm not coming at this from the outside. I made kids run. I made kids do push-ups. I withheld the scrimmage until they'd earned it. And I thought I was creating discipline.
What I was actually doing was creating the conditions for the behavior I was trying to stop.
Here are the four categories I see, and why I think each one deserves a second look.
The Arrival Lap
Kids come to practice excited. They've been waiting for this — to be on the field, with their teammates, with the ball. And the first thing we do is send them for a lap.
The justification is usually one of two things: it calms them down, or it warms them up. I want to push back on both.
On calming them down — that energy is a resource. Channeled into a game, it's exactly what you want. Channeled into a lap around the field, it's burned off before the session starts, and now you have flat players rather than excited ones. We're not trying to neutralize them. We're trying to direct them.
On warming them up — when, in a game of soccer, do players run at a constant speed in a large rectangle? We're warming them up for a movement pattern they will never use. Dynamic movements, changes of direction, acceleration and deceleration — those happen when the ball is in play, when there's a reason to sprint and a reason to stop. So put them in a game.
A few years ago I was coaching in the far corner of a complex — two full-size turf fields, sixteen teams total. Parking lot chaos. My players had to cut through half the site to find me. But they ran — literally ran through other teams' sessions — to get there, because they knew the moment they arrived, there would be goals set up and a game running. That energy, directed at something real, is worth more than any warm-up lap.
Kids can be in a Fortnite game within sixty seconds of turning on a PlayStation. The challenge is: how quickly can you get your players into a game when they arrive? The closer you can get to that number, the better your session starts.
The Behavior Punishment
"Be quiet — or run."
I understand the impulse. You're trying to coach, nobody's listening, something needs to reset. But before you send players off for laps, it's worth asking why they're not listening.
These are kids who have been told what to do all day. School, parents, Zoom calls for eighteen months during COVID — adults telling them where to sit, what to read, what to eat, when to talk. They arrive at training and we add to that list. Stand still. Look at me. Don't touch your ball.
If all those adults in their lives have already been teaching them discipline — and they're still not standing still in your session — maybe it's not the kids. Maybe the session is boring. Maybe it's too complex. Maybe you've pulled them out of a game and now they're standing in a group with balls at their feet, and if you've coached younger players you already know what happens when you do that. They kick each other's balls. Every time. Without fail. Because you've put them in the worst possible environment — excited kids, no game, nothing to do.
The practical fix is to do your coaching in the flow, with individuals, rather than stopping the game for a group talk. Take one player out for thirty seconds while play continues, talk to them, get them back in. Then move to the next. It takes longer but it's information that lands, because the game is still going and they're ready to apply what you just said.
When you freeze the whole group and talk at them, they want to get back to playing. That's not a discipline problem. That's entirely reasonable.
Losing the Ball = Punishment
A player did push-ups in a game once. Right there on the field. They lost the ball and dropped. Because that's what happened in training every time they lost possession, so that's what their body did.
The coach was losing their mind on the sideline. But that player didn't invent the behavior — we trained it into them.
The six-versus-two rondo is the most common version of this. Six keep the ball, two in the middle try to win it. If the six lose it, sprint to the fence and back. And here's my question: when do we play six-versus-two in a game? We don't. So the drill doesn't prepare them for anything real, and the punishment doesn't teach them anything about how to keep the ball — it just makes them afraid of losing it.
Fear of losing the ball is one of the main reasons youth soccer looks the way it does in the US. Players get the ball and immediately boom it long, because somewhere in their development they learned that losing possession has a physical consequence. So they remove the risk. Play it long, chase it, take your chances.
The alternative is simple: reward the opponent. If the two win the ball in a rondo, give them a target — connect three passes, get out of the circle. That's worth points. Now you've built in a transition moment. Now the six are pressing to win it back, which is what they'd actually do in a game. And nobody's doing push-ups.
The Scrimmage as a Reward
This one is the most embedded, and probably the most damaging to how coaches understand games-based practice.
"Work hard today and you'll get a scrimmage at the end."
So the session runs — drills, patterns, technical work — and then if the coach deems them to have done well, they get to scrimmage. And during that scrimmage, the coach steps back. Session over. Free play.
When I talk to coaches about using games throughout the session, a lot of them think I mean that. The game at the end, when the work is done. That's the version of "games-based" that most coaches grew up with, so that's the version they recognize.
But the scrimmage was never supposed to be a reward. It was supposed to be the vehicle. The environment where what you've been working on gets tested against a real opponent, with real decisions, with coaching still happening. Not the moment the coach checks out.
In my role working with coaches as a technical director, the shift I'm asking for is straightforward: the game isn't what you do after the work — it is the work. Start with a game. Constrain it. Coach in the flow. Adjust the constraint. Coach again. Open it up as the session progresses, but keep the standard you set at the start. The player who was dribbling under pressure in a 3v3 at minute five should still be doing it in the 7v7 at minute seventy.
That doesn't mean free play. It means the game has a purpose, and you're still watching and coaching, right to the end.
What This All Adds Up To
My working definition of punishment in coaching is: anything we make a player do as a result of a situation we could have designed differently.
Which means a lot of what we call discipline is actually an environment problem. Players who are in a well-designed game rarely need to be disciplined. They're busy. They're engaged. There's not much time to kick someone else's ball away when you're defending a goal.
The pre-practice lap, the running for misbehavior, the push-ups for turnovers, the scrimmage held hostage until they've earned it — all of these made sense within a certain framework of coaching. But that framework was built around control, not development.
Let go of the control. Put them in the game. Coach them in it. That's where the real work happens.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 57 — Punishments
@LeeDunneSoccer