The First Ten Minutes Might Be Your Most Important Coaching
Quick question: how do you start your training sessions?
Not the first drill. The first five minutes. When players are arriving, bags going down, someone's in the wrong socks again, another one hasn't got their shin guards — what does that look like, and what are you doing while it's happening?
This is something I've evolved a lot over time, and it's become one of the things I think about most carefully. Because I believe the first ten minutes of training might be the most important coaching you do all session.
Multiple Points of Contact
My goal with every player, every training session, is at least two points of contact. One is a coaching moment — a position, a touch, a scan, something connected to what we're working on. But the other one is personal.
How's your dog? How did the move go? You mentioned you were going to see your grandma — how was that?
I know it sounds small. But I had a player once who was a chess champion. I had no idea until I actually talked to him. And once I knew, so much about how he played made sense — how he processed space, how he anticipated moves ahead of time, the way he understood cause and effect in the game before it happened. That conversation unlocked something for me as his coach. I couldn't have had it if I was setting up cones the whole time they were arriving.
Let Them Play First
My first group now turns up fifteen minutes early. Not because I told them to — they started doing it themselves. They're bugging their parents on the drive over. They're sprinting through the building to get on the field. They make their own teams and away they go before I've even finished setting up.
I love that. That is the dream. When players are fighting to get more time with the ball before practice even starts, you've created something.
I'm not always there fifteen minutes early — sometimes I hit traffic, sometimes I'm there right on the hour. And I've made a rule for myself: if players arrived early and started playing, we go for an extra five minutes. It's not their fault they weren't early if the other kids weren't. I'm not cutting their game short because someone else just got there.
When I was a kid I used to get to school at 8am. School didn't start until 9:05. Every morning we played football on the blacktop. And we started getting there earlier and earlier because the games were good. That's what I want to create.
The Huddle
After the arrival game, I pull them together. Arms around each other. And here's the sequence.
First, I ask for a reflection. It might be on the last game, or the last training session — thumbs up, thumbs down, or hands in: two hands in if you loved it, one hand if it was okay, no hands if it wasn't for you. And it's a safe space. No hand is the wrong answer. If you put no hands in, I want to know why — not to challenge it, but because that's useful. That tells me something I need to know.
Then: chins on chest, eyes closed, three deep breaths.
I'll be honest — when I first saw another coach do this, I smirked. I thought it was a bit much. But I started using it, and I kept using it, and now I won't run a session without it. What it does in those thirty seconds is settle things. These kids have come from school, from arguments, from traffic, from whatever their day was — and the three breaths are a signal. We're here now. This is what we're doing.
Then I tell them what we're focused on today. Not a long speech. Just: this is the theme, this is what you can expect, here's what we're after. Then water break, get the balls, go.
That whole sequence takes about ten minutes. And from there, everything else flows more cleanly.
Not Laps
When I run coaching education, I hear it all the time: "I send them on two laps to burn some energy off, to calm them down."
It doesn't work. Running laps doesn't create focus. It just delays the problem. A purposeful huddle — where players feel seen, where the session has a clear intention, where they've had a minute to breathe and land — is a thousand times more effective than any lap of the field.
Reading the Room
The other thing the huddle gives you is the read. The player who's grumpy, who's whining, who's a bit off — you notice it in those first few minutes. And your response to that matters.
I had a player just recently who was in a terrible mood. Complaining about everything, snapping at teammates. The old coaching instinct says get it together, stop whining, focus up. But I know this kid. Something was going on.
Instead: "Hey — it's okay to have a bad day. What do you need right now? Do you want to play a bit more free? Be a plus one? Go in goal for a bit?"
That's it. Acknowledge it. Meet him where he is. And nine times out of ten, that's all it takes. Because what he needed was just to feel like someone saw him.
Think about it from his side. He's had adults telling him what to do and what he's doing wrong all day at school. His parents might have been stressed in the car. He shows up to practice carrying all of that, and the last thing he needs is one more adult demanding he perform on command.
Your first ten minutes can change all of that. Or it can make it worse.
So: how do you start? What does the first ten minutes look like for your players? And — honest question — are you actually using that time, or are you just getting through it to get to the session?
I'm always stealing good ideas. Let me know what you do.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 79 — Team Huddle
@LeeDunneSoccer