Your Coaching Toolbox: Five Tools, and When to Actually Use Them
If you coach soccer, you've got a physical toolbox. The big trolley with the flags, the mannequins, 1,000 cones, 100 pinnies, the clipboard, the easy-up, the fold-out bench. That's the gear.
But the toolbox I want to talk about is the one you use to actually coach your players. The methods. The moves. The habits you've built up on the sideline and in sessions. Because a lot of coaches are relying on one or two tools and leaving the others sitting in the bag — and some of the best ones aren't being touched at all.
Here are five I come back to, and some thoughts on when each one actually earns its place.
1. The Freeze
Let's start with the one everybody knows. A moment in training isn't working — you keep failing to build out from the back, say — so you stop the play, freeze everyone in place, paint a picture, and try to show them what's going wrong.
I have a complicated relationship with the freeze. I like it and I also really don't like it.
Here's my concern. The moment you say freeze, watch what happens in the next five seconds. Players drift. They look around. They talk. The left back you froze in exactly the position you wanted to highlight is now ten yards forward because no one actually stood still. And now you're recreating a picture that no longer exists.
I experienced this from the other side on a coaching course. The instructor froze the session and talked for five minutes. By the end, a friend and I — who should have known better — had drifted close enough together that we were whispering to each other about what he was doing wrong. We'd moved completely out of position. If two coaches who understood the point of the exercise did that, imagine what your players are doing.
The freeze also has a targeting problem. It's very easy to freeze the group and end up pointing at one player: "Johnny, why do you keep giving it away?" Even if you don't mean to embarrass them, that's what's happening. Be especially careful with this when you're coaching girls — isolating a player in front of the group has a real adverse effect on how they receive everything that follows.
If you're going to freeze, freeze briefly. Reconnect players to their positions fast. Coach the pattern, not the person. Then rehearse — walk through the solution you want, give defenders two options so they're not just reading where the ball is going, then restart live.
But the freeze should be a last resort. If you've tried everything else and a trend keeps repeating, then freeze. Not as the first move.
2. The Tactics Board
This is my favorite tool, and I don't think enough coaches use it well.
Think about a CrossFit gym. You walk in, the workout is on the board, you look at it, you know what you're doing. You don't wait for the coach to gather everyone and explain. You read it and get moving.
That's what the tactics board can do at the start of training. Arrival game written up, teams set, rules noted. Players walk on the field, check the board, and go. No waiting. No standing around while coach gets organized. And the rules on that arrival game can already connect to what you're going to work on in the core session.
Beyond arrivals, I use the board through the whole session. After a five-minute block of play, I might bring a team or individual player to the board rather than freezing everyone. "Show me what you were trying to do. Here's where you were positioned for most of that block — how does that help us?" And then they move the pieces. They talk through it. It becomes their idea, not something I imposed on them.
The board removes the heat of the moment. In a game, when a player tells another player to make a run, it can land badly — who are you to coach me? But around a tactics board, same conversation, nobody's watching, no pressure. Players are more willing to think out loud.
Pair it with something like TacticalPad for sessions you send to players and parents in advance, and you're reinforcing the same information through multiple channels — visual diagram, GIF, and the physical board on the day.
3. One-on-One Coaching
One of the worst habits coaches develop is giving all their feedback to the group. You coach the team, the team nods, and then you watch the same individual mistakes happen again because the individual who needed the message didn't know it was for them.
I try to connect with each player individually — at arrival, and then two or three more times during the session. Not to correct them in front of everyone, but to give them a specific challenge.
Touch the ball five times in the next six minutes. Be an outlet three times, whether you get the ball or not. Tuck inside twice when we're defending. Small, achievable, specific. That's the Ollie Watkins approach — when he was in the lower leagues in England, his coach gave him individual tasks that got him hunting for the ball rather than standing wide and waiting. It works at every level.
When you need to go deeper with a player, sub them out and use them as a feeder or target while you stand next to them. Now you can talk without stopping the session and without the group watching the conversation. You can even bring them to the tactics board one-on-one. You have the time and the privacy to actually coach them — not at them.
4. Hot and Cold Feedback
Two feedback moments that I think are underused by most coaches.
Hot feedback is immediate. The player makes a decision — tries to slide a ball inside and overhits it — and in that moment, instead of "unlucky" (the most useless word in coaching), you ask: what did you see? What were you trying to do?
There's no right or wrong answer. You're not correcting them on the spot. You're building a picture of how they see the game, what they're reading, why they make the choices they do. That information is worth more to you long-term than telling them they got it wrong.
Cold feedback is the end-of-session version. "Remember in the fourth moment of the game when you played it long? What were you thinking in that moment?" They won't remember exactly, and that's fine. It prompts reflection. It connects the session to something they experienced. And it gives you a chance to offer a coaching point without the heat of the in-game moment around it.
Together, hot and cold give you a coaching loop — in the moment and in reflection — that goes much deeper than stopping play to correct mistakes.
5. Power Words
This is one I come back to a lot, and it sounds simple but it's surprisingly effective.
"Switch" is the classic team power word. You shout it, players understand — change the point of attack, open the field. Everyone on the team, every parent on the sideline, could shout it and it would still mean the same thing.
But I'm more interested in individual power words. The player who keeps booting the ball away when they're under pressure — find a word that means settle, take a touch, look for the option. I use "banana" a lot, just as an example, because it has nothing to do with soccer, which means nothing else triggers it. You say it at the right moment, they hear it, and it connects them to what they've been working on.
What you're doing is building a private language with a player. It removes the instruction from the moment and replaces it with a cue. You don't have to stop play. You don't have to embarrass them. You just say the word, and they know what it means, because you've built that together in training.
The Notepad
I want to add one more to the list, even though it's not quite the same category as the others.
Write things down.
I use a notepad throughout training and games — noting trends, tracking what challenges I've set individual players, flagging things I want to come back to. It's how I avoid relying on memory at the end of a session, and how I make the micro-cycle something I can actually track.
But here's the other thing I use it for: writing down what I actually think of the referee.
If the referee makes a call I completely disagree with, I write it down. That's where it goes. Not onto the field, not into my voice, not into my body language that my players and their families can read from the sideline. I write it down and I close the notepad.
I've watched coaches at ECNL showcases, at ODP events, with college scouts watching, completely lose the plot over a refereeing decision. That moment follows them. You are representing yourself, your club, your players' families, and sometimes your players' futures in those environments.
The notepad holds it. Nobody else needs to know.
The freeze has its place. But it's one tool out of five. The tactics board, one-on-one coaching, hot and cold feedback, and power words will cover more ground, in more situations, with more impact. And the notepad will save you from yourself when you need it most.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 71 — The Toolbox
@LeeDunneSoccer