The Soapbox: Soccer Coaching Blog & Podcast
Heads and Volleys is a grassroots Soccer game that reflects the youth soccer environment.
The game was played as everyone VS the GK and you could only score with a header or a volley. Simple, right? Wrong. It was complex and fraught with arguments that resulted in 'taking my ball home' or some kind of one-off shot to determine if it was a goal or not. Much like those arguments, this podcast will embrace discussions, trends, and ideas to grow the game, and will not let anyone take their ball home early.
Heads and Volleys Podcast.
Welcome to my soapbox. This is where I think out loud about coaching.
You'll find long-form writing on coaching methodology, session design, game models and player development — plus every episode of the Heads and Volleys podcast. It's written for youth and club soccer coaches, directors of coaching, and anyone building a curriculum they want their whole staff to speak.
Most of what's here comes back to a few ideas: that soccer is 1v1s with help, that a Common Language across your club beats a clever drill, that the rule you add is the game you get, and that you can't coach what you haven't defined.
New posts most weeks. Start anywhere below, or grab the monthly newsletter.Popular Reads
The Common Language
- The Power of a Common Language
- The Common Language Methodology: The Game is Already in Your Practice
The 1v1 Series
Session & Practice Design
- Can You Recreate the Game in Practice?
- The Rule You Add Is the Game You Get
- From 1,000 Touches to 1,000 Decisions
- Optimize Your Training Environment
- The First Pancake Is Always Awful
Game Day
Player Development
What Did You Do With Your Summer?
"I spent this summer doing something I said I didn't believe in. And I'm glad I did. Here's what challenging your own assumptions as a coach actually looks like."
Summer's over. After Labor Day, that's it. The Sunstroke Classic in Sacramento has been played, the bleep tests are done, and now we're heading into the real thing.
Before it all kicks off, I want to ask you something: how was your summer? Not just in terms of how much you coached — but what did you actually take from it?
What I Did That Surprised Me
I spent a meaningful chunk of my summer doing something I've long said I don't really believe in: isolated technical work.
I don't like dribbling through cones. I don't like standing players in lines to practice a pass. For me, everything lives inside the game — reality-based learning, experiential, competitive, game-realistic. That's my methodology and I'll defend it.
But this summer I deliberately challenged myself. In one-on-one and small group sessions, I started breaking down body shapes, fakes, angles of reception, first touch mechanics. The kind of technical fundamentals I haven't really isolated since I was running grassroots camps years ago. Not as the core of the session — but as a layer alongside the game situations I usually work in.
And here's what I found: breaking things down that carefully gave me better language. When I'm now working in a team environment and a player needs to take a different touch in a positional play, I've got something more precise to offer than "take a better touch." I can describe the body position, the fake, the angle. That detail didn't come from the team sessions. It came from the quiet, methodical work of the summer.
The reflection: I was too quick to dismiss the value of it. Not because isolated technique should replace game-realistic training — it shouldn't. But because refusing to explore something means you never know what you're leaving on the table.
The Gift of Summer
Here's what makes summer different from the season: there's no game on Saturday.
No tournament prep. No league results to respond to. No state cup looming. You can be methodical in a way that the season never allows. You can try something, observe what happens, adjust, try it again. You can send a player home with a specific challenge — work on that first touch, play with that quick turn off the wall — and come back next session to see what they did with it.
The minute the season starts, all of that patience compresses. Now it's training last night, game tonight, debrief this weekend, prep for next week. The window closes.
So the question is: did you use the window?
Reality-Based Learning — and the Extra Layer
I was interviewed on KCBS this summer and they asked me: what is reality-based learning? I gave an answer I wasn't entirely happy with, which is why I want to revisit it here.
The label says what it is: you expose players to the reality of the game they're going to face. Opponent. Competition. Game moments. Decision-making under pressure. Not cones, not lines, not drills divorced from context.
But there's an extra layer I think about a lot. The reality of what that player is doing outside of training. Are they watching soccer? Did they catch any of the Women's World Cup? Are they seeing Premier League clips on YouTube, or highlights on Instagram? Because a player who goes home and watches the game, who connects what they're practising to what the pros are doing, is building a different kind of understanding than one who only ever sees soccer on their own training field.
I can't force that. But I can create the conversation. I can ask: what did you watch this week? Did you see anything that reminded you of what we've been working on? That question — and the habit behind it — is part of the reality I'm trying to build.
Two Teams, One Coach, Two Different Worlds
This season I'm coaching two groups that couldn't be more different.
One is driven. Aggressive. They push each other. They want to be the best. They show up wanting to be challenged and they're annoyed when it's too easy. The other group is there for the social element, for the joy of having a ball at their feet, for learning to love the game. They're not trying to make MLS Next. They're trying to have a good time with their friends.
Back to back training sessions. Completely different environments. Completely different needs. I've long said that coaches who work with boys and girls, or different age groups, or wildly different levels simultaneously are magicians. This season, I've become one myself.
Knowing that going in is half the battle. I'm not going to treat them the same. I'm not going to bring the intensity of the competitive group into the fun group, or soft-pedal the challenge from the competitive one because I want to match the other group's energy. Context, again, is everything.
Pre-flection
US Soccer's coaching education has made a clear shift. It's no longer a driving test — A, B, C, pass. Now it's about reflection. Are you growing? Are you honest about what isn't working? Are you a different coach coming out of this course than you were going in?
That shift in approach is the right one. And it applies to the summer too.
Reflection is looking back: what did I do, what did I learn, what surprised me, what would I change? Pre-flection is looking forward: what am I taking into this season, what am I going to do differently, what am I going to challenge myself on?
I feel like I used my summer well. I challenged something I thought I believed in. I found something useful in the place I'd been dismissing. I set myself up for two very different coaching environments. Now the season starts, and I'll find out.
How was your summer? What are you taking into the season?
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 77 — Summer Reflection
@LeeDunneSoccer
Stop Saying "Bring It In"
You spent time building the context. The game is live. Players are in it. Then you say 'bring it in' — and in thirty seconds you've undone all of it. There's a better way.
Think about the last time you coached. Players were in the middle of a game. Something needed addressing — a mistake, a transition between activities, a water break. And you said it.
"Okay, bring it in."
One kid still has a ball at his feet. Another kicks it away. Now we're waiting for it to come back. Someone's tying a shoelace. Two best friends are finishing a conversation they were having before training even started. By the time everyone's looking at you, a minute and a half has gone. The moment you wanted to talk about is gone. The contextual environment you spent time building — the game, the shape, the live situation — is behind them. They can't see it and they're no longer part of it.
And then, if you follow the talk with a water break, everything you just said is gone too.
This is the coaching habit I've been thinking hardest about lately. And after working with some young players — kids who are new to the game and new to life — it's become impossible to ignore.
What you lose when you break the context
You've designed the training session. You've built the environment — the space, the goals, the constraints, the challenges. That environment is doing coaching work for you. The game is asking questions. Players are finding answers in real time.
The moment you pull them out of it, the teaching stops. You're now asking them to think about a game they can no longer see, in a situation they can no longer feel, while at least three of them are doing something other than listening to you.
It's not just the lost minutes. It's the lost focus. Research in time management suggests it takes around 23 minutes to get back into a state of deep, focused work. You can scale that down for young players — maybe it's ten minutes in a training context. But the principle holds: every time you interrupt that flow, you're resetting the clock. And if your session has four or five "bring it in" moments, your players might never actually get there.
Start with the environment
Before we talk about how to coach differently, talk about how your environment is set up.
Is everything laid out before players arrive? All activities visible, no trolley-pulling across the field mid-session, bibs and balls already where they need to be? Because a well-prepared environment means you spend less time explaining and reorganizing — which means you spend more time in the game.
A tactics board changes this entirely. Keywords on the board — SCAN, SHAPE, SUPPORT — that players already know and can see throughout the session. Quick diagrams of what the activity looks like so the setup explains itself. By week two or three, players walk onto the field and know what they're doing without a single word from you. That's time back in the game.
Instead of "bring it in"
Here are the moments that usually trigger a group huddle — and what to do instead.
Water break. If players are going to a water break anyway, let them go, then address the group when they come back. They've had a moment to decompress and refocus. Whatever you say lands better there than right before they walk away.
Moving between activities. If you've got a tactics board showing the next progression, players can often self-organize into the new shape. If the space needs adjusting, you don't need a huddle for that — just have players take one step backwards. Area's bigger. Play on. No reset required.
A player who's struggling. This one doesn't need the whole group at all. While the game is running, get alongside them. Walk with them as they fetch a ball. Thirty seconds, one clear idea, back into the game. You've coached the one player who needed it without pulling sixteen out of something they were doing well.
Your small group within the game. A 4v2? When the rotation happens, send the two to get the balls — then pull the four together for a quick team conversation. What did you see? Here's one thing. Can you get five passes this round? Then go. That's a team talk that took forty-five seconds and cost nobody anything.
Less information, more meaning
There's a coaching trap that catches all of us: because we understand the full complexity of what we're trying to teach, we try to share all of it. But players — especially young ones — don't need all of it. They need the part that's relevant to where they are right now.
SCAN means something to my youngest players. For them, it's body position, seeing the ball, looking for space. That's enough. The layers — lines of sight, support angles, reading the shape of the opposition — come later. Right now, one word with one clear meaning is more powerful than a three-minute explanation of the same concept.
Keep the keyword. Ask the question. Stay in the game.
Three hours a week
That's roughly what most youth coaches get. Three hours a week, forty weeks a year. The ball needs to be at their feet for as much of that as possible. Every minute spent in a huddle they didn't need is a minute that could have been a game.
The environment builds players when you set it up right. The game teaches when you let it run. You're most valuable not when you're talking — but when you're watching, moving, and finding the individual moment that actually lands.
Try it for one session. Count how many times you say "bring it in." Then ask yourself which of those moments actually needed it.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 76 — Stop Saying "Bring It In"
@LeeDunneSoccer
Buy Your Players a Boot Brush
"I grew up cleaning the boots of older players at Northampton Town. It wasn't glamorous. But it taught me something about being ready — and I've never forgotten it."
End of season. The games are done. You've coached your socks off since August — multiple teams, state cup on top of the league schedule, evenings with no lights, weekends that belong to soccer more than to your family. And now, finally, you get to breathe.
Before you do — what are you doing for your players?
Not a big end-of-season party necessarily, or a player of the year trophy (although I grew up wanting to win manager's player more than I wanted to win most games). I'm talking about something smaller and more intentional. Something with meaning attached to it.
Here's what I do. I buy them all a boot brush.
Why Boots Matter to Me
This isn't random. Boots are personal. I grew up around the game in a way where clean boots weren't optional — they were the standard. As a young academy player at Northampton Town, cleaning the senior players' boots was part of the deal. You showed up early. You did the work. And the boot room was sacred — anyone who's been to Anfield knows about Liverpool's boot room, the meetings held in there, the history on those walls. Boots meant you were serious.
I still love getting a new pair. Still love unboxing them. I buy them for myself and I feel something when I do. That matters. That connection to the game through what's on your feet — I want my players to have a version of that.
Right now? Most of them don't. They kick their boots on in the car. They walk across the parking lot in them. They take them off and shove them in a bag, muddy and full of rubber crumb, and forget about them until the next session when they fish them out and wonder why everything feels wrong. The boots are an afterthought.
The Dollar Tree Argument
Here's the practical case: go to Dollar Tree. One dollar a brush. You coach three teams — twenty players each, roughly — you're spending $40 to $50 on something that will last the whole next season.
What does it do? It gives them a standard they're now accountable to. Your boots are clean when you arrive. Not because I'm going to inspect them at the gate, but because you care enough about this game to look after the one piece of equipment you actually need to play it. And it means something to me that my players walk onto a training field or a match field with a pair of clean boots. It tells me they're ready.
It's also not nothing on the environmental side — there's something like half a ton of rubber crumb that leaves a turf field every season on the bottom of players' shoes. Clean the boots, put the crumb back. Small thing. Adds up.
The Game Face
If you've heard my episode with sports psychologist Dan Abrahams, you'll remember the idea of a game face — the ritual that flips the switch from everyday life into competitive mode. The wrestler puts on a mask. The boxer wraps his hands. Something happens that says: I'm not that person right now, I'm this person.
My daughter watches Blippi. And I'm pretty sure when that guy puts on the hat and the suspenders, he becomes Blippi. He's not Blippi at the supermarket. But when the hat goes on, it's showtime.
The boots can be that for your players. The moment they lace them up isn't just logistical — it's a signal. We're here. We're doing this. Everything else is off. And if the boots are clean, if there's a ritual around cleaning them and putting them on properly, that signal lands differently than if they're just kicking on a mud-caked pair they haven't thought about since last week.
Accountability is a Skill Too
Here's the other reason this matters. How many of your players show up with a parent carrying their bag? How many of your older players forget something because their parents aren't carrying it for them anymore and they haven't built the habit of remembering it themselves?
Parents driving twenty minutes each way to drop off a forgotten shin guard — that's real. It happens every week at clubs everywhere. And we can build something against it.
The boot brush is a small entry point into accountability. Your bag is your responsibility. Your kit is your responsibility. Your boots are your responsibility. You know you're going to need them. Clean them, put them in the bag, and when you arrive, you'll have them — and they'll be ready to go.
If boots aren't your thing, same logic applies. Slides — so they're not walking across the parking lot in their soccer shoes. Polish. A headband for the girls. A shin guard strap. Something specific to your team that says: this is ours, this is what we do. The object matters less than the meaning you attach to it.
One Last Thing
The holidays are coming, the World Cup is happening, and players are more engaged with the game than at almost any other time of year. There's never a better moment to build something small into your team culture that could outlast the season.
A boot brush from Dollar Tree. Forty bucks for your whole squad. A conversation about what it means.
That's the whole thing.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 75 — Buy Your Players a Boot Brush
@LeeDunneSoccer
Stop Arguing About Who's Best. Start Coaching From It.
"Messi vs Mbappe vs Ronaldo — I genuinely don't care. But the World Cup just handed you the best coaching resource you'll get all year, and most coaches are wasting it."
England lost. It hurt. We played well, had our chances, didn't take them. Moving on.
The World Cup final is France vs Argentina — Mbappe vs Messi, the argument the internet has been waiting for. And I'm here to tell you: don't have that conversation.
Not because it's not fun. It is. But because "who's the best player in the world?" is a subjective, unprovable, ultimately pointless debate — and when you frame it that way, you lose the entire coaching value of what just happened on that pitch.
The Problem With the GOAT Argument
The second you ask your players who's better between Messi and Ronaldo, they pick a side. And once they've picked a side, they stop watching the other one clearly. They discredit everything the opposition argument does. They stop learning.
I've coached kids who think Messi is a joke because their favourite is Mbappe. And so they watch Mbappe and ignore what Messi does with his body shape on the wing to beat a defender without pace — the kind of thing your midfielders could actually use. Because the minute you dismiss a player, you stop watching them properly.
The reality is: there is no greatest of all time. It's a measurement that can never be proven. What there is are remarkable players, each with unique qualities, each with limitations they've built around. If you open your players up to that idea, the World Cup becomes a classroom.
What the Stats Actually Show
I track this through Opta Analyst — here's some of what jumped out.
Take-ons attempted: Mbappe leads with 46, Messi second with 38. But third? Jamal Musiala, Germany. Now out of the tournament and largely forgotten. But he was extraordinary while it lasted, and that's the point — great players appear all over the bracket, and they disappear from public memory the moment their nation exits.
Messi: 14 chances created, 2 assists, 84% pass completion. And he walked — we all know it. He walked more than anyone. The fear is that your players will see that and think it's permission to switch off. It's not. It's a lesson in reading the game well enough to know when your speed matters and when it doesn't. Messi knows. Does your midfielder?
Harry Kane: 3 assists, 5 chances created. Also, the penalty that went over the bar. We're not talking about the penalty.
Antoine Griezmann, who I don't think gets enough credit: 8 tackles, 6 interceptions for an attacking midfielder. He ran the game against England, created, tracked back, competed. That's the full picture of a modern 10 that nobody talks about when they're listing the greats.
Jude Bellingham: 15 tackles, most in the tournament. He's 19. He won the ball 15 times in games against the best players in the world. What are you asking your central midfielders to do in terms of defending?
Tyler Adams: I had three players training the other night — one in a Pulisic shirt, one in a McKinney shirt, one in a Dest shirt. That's remarkable and it's something I've never really seen before at this level in the US. Adams is another one worth pointing your players toward. The clips will be everywhere. Watch how strong he is in the press, how he wins the ball in contact, how he reads second balls. That's teachable.
The Team Style Question
Beyond individual players, the World Cup is the best data set you'll see all year for thinking about how teams play — and how you want your team to play.
Spain: 135 sequences of 10+ passes in their games. The build-out, the positional play, the patient building from the back. They got knocked out by Morocco, who played a completely different style with complete conviction — pressing, winning second balls, defending with their lives. Both approaches got teams into the knockouts.
Teams that barely built out: Uruguay, Wales, Iran, Tunisia. Most of them didn't go far.
But this isn't about saying one way is right. It's about figuring out which way is yours — and then finding examples in the World Cup to show your players what that looks like done well. You play possession? Pull up Spain clips. You want to press high? France vs England. You're going direct? Find Morocco defending and counter-attacking and show your players exactly what that looks like at the highest level.
The Challenge I'm Giving My Players
Send them to Opta's stats. Or send them with a question: find me one clip of your favourite player doing something that connects to what we work on in training.
Not just a skills clip. Not a screamer or a nutmeg. Find me the moment where a player works to get into the right position before the ball arrives, or presses to win it back, or uses their body to create an angle. The detail.
You might say to your team: we want to play like Spain. We want to keep the ball. We want to build from the back. Now go find a moment where they did that, where 10 passes led to something. Watch it. Tell me what you see.
The access we have to this stuff now is extraordinary. FIFA used to release a technical report six months after a tournament. Now the data is live. Your players can watch everything. The question is whether you're giving them a framework to actually learn from it — or whether you're just letting them argue about Messi and Ronaldo in the group chat.
The World Cup is over in a few weeks. The window to use it with your players is now.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 74 — Who Is The Best Player?
@LeeDunneSoccer
The Scrimmage Isn't a Reward. It's the Best Coaching Tool You Have.
Look around at the end of any practice night and you'll see the same thing. Coaches talking to each other, sitting down, watching from a distance. The players are scrimmaging and the coach has checked out. That's the problem.
Walk around any youth soccer training session towards the end of the night and I'll tell you what you'll see.
The scrimmage is happening. Players are out there playing. And the coaches — the ones who were deeply involved in every moment of the session up until this point — have disengaged. They're talking to each other. Sitting on the bench. Watching from the side. Mentally done for the evening.
Or even worse: the scrimmage has been turned into a carrot. You worked hard tonight, so you get to play. You didn't match expectations, so the scrimmage is shorter. Which means the message players receive is that playing the game is the prize, not the point.
I think we've got this completely backwards.
We're Creating Players Who Can Train But Can't Play
Last night I ran a 7v7 for our grassroots session. During the core portion of the training, we were working on 1v1 defending. I watched this happen: a player attacked, took a shot — and immediately stopped. The defender, who had been defending hard the moment before, also just stopped. Walked behind the goal. Started mentally preparing to take their turn as the attacker.
Nobody told them to do that. Nobody blew a whistle. They stopped because that's what training has taught them to do. The ball leaves play, the coach calls the next pair, you wait your turn. That's the rhythm of a drill-based session. Everything is cued by cones and whistles and rotations.
Then we say: go out there and play a game.
And coaches wonder why the players look blank. Why they don't react. Why they stand around waiting for something to happen. They've been trained to wait. We've taken the game out of practice and we're surprised it doesn't show up on game day.
I've run ODP tryouts where coaches asked whether we should change the format because the players looked bored. All we were doing was playing 7v7. The players weren't bored with playing — they genuinely didn't know what to do with the open nature of it.
Your Players Don't Play Enough
Here's the reality. A typical youth player gets one or two games at the weekend, usually during a 12-week league cycle. Maybe some tournaments mixed in where they cram a lot of games into a short window. Outside of that? If training doesn't include meaningful game time, they're just not getting it.
That's why I started taking pickup soccer to schools in San Francisco. Take the game to where the players already are, without the structure, without the stigma of what a training session is supposed to look like. Get them playing. Because they're not getting enough of it anywhere else.
And if your training session ends with a throw-it-out scrimmage while you chat with the assistant coach, you're not solving that problem. You're contributing to it.
What the Scrimmage Should Actually Look Like
If I've spent the session working on defending the goal in a 1v1, the scrimmage at the end should connect directly to that. I might set it up as two defenders against two attackers — a two-and-a-two — central goal, both directions. The players are in the same positions they just worked in, dealing with the same demands, but now it's live. No cones dictating movement. No coach calling the next rep. The game is asking the questions.
If I've got enough players to run a full 7v7, we play a 7v7 in the formation we use at the weekend. I set it up, I tell them how we're lining up, and then we play. The goalkeeper builds out because at the weekend, the referee doesn't say "just play from the back, it's fine, don't worry." The kickoff happens after every goal because that's how the game works.
I know that sounds basic. It is basic. But walk out to your next session and count how many of those game realities get skipped in the scrimmage phase. No corners — we just keep going. No build-out line — don't worry about it. Throw-ins — just toss it in anywhere, doesn't matter how. And every time we skip one of those things, we're making the scrimmage a little less like the game. And our players a little less ready for it.
One of the moments that stuck with me most was watching coaches during a 6v6 session we ran recently. One team had seven including the goalkeeper, the other had six with a pug goal to defend. First half, coaches called no corners and no throw-in rules. I understood the instinct — keep the flow going, not much field space. But by removing those things, they'd turned the scrimmage into another coaching activity. The game has corners. The game has throw-ins. If your players don't have enough experience with them in training, you'll get to the weekend, lose possession off a foul throw, and then spend 20 minutes on throw-ins the following week. Which you'll do once, and then not again.
Practice them in the scrimmage. Use what you have.
You're Practicing Coaching in the Game Too
Here's something coaches rarely think about: the scrimmage is also where you practice your job.
You get to coach in a real game once or twice a week during the season. Tournaments are about results — that's not the place to try things. The league game at the weekend is where you apply what you've worked on. And if you spend the scrimmage phase of training disengaged, you've cut your opportunities in half.
If you train three times a week with a proper game phase in every session, plus two games at the weekend, you've got five opportunities each week to practice coaching in the game. You learn your team's shape. You see how the two center backs communicate. You find out how the team transitions after a goal. You learn to challenge a player individually without stopping play — pulling them to the side for a question while the game continues, then sending them back in.
I told my previous club: Thursday is game day. Every single Thursday, all we do is play. No core session, no drills, no patterns. We just play. The players get game experience. I get to coach in the game. We all get better at the thing the weekend is actually going to test us on.
Keeping Every Player in the Game
One more thing — what about the players who seem switched off during the scrimmage? The ones doing cartwheels when the ball goes out, leaning against the post, not really engaged? I hear coaches say they don't let those players drag the scrimmage down. That's the wrong instinct.
Don't reduce scrimmage time because of two or three disengaged kids. That punishes the rest of the team. Instead, give those players individual tasks. Can you touch the ball four times this quarter? Can you intercept once before we call time? Can you take three throw-ins in this half? You're not lowering expectations — you're giving them a specific purpose, something achievable that pulls them into the game.
The Ollie Watkins approach. When he was in the lower leagues of English football, he was given individual tasks that got him involved rather than waiting on the wing for something to happen. It works with your players too.
And then manage the parents. Because if a parent is watching their kid stand in goal, seemingly not doing much, they're going to have questions. Get ahead of it. Explain what you're doing and why. The environment looks messy. Players fall over and laugh. There's noise and chatter and moments that don't look like "serious" coaching. That's the point. That's what game experience looks like.
At Least Half Your Session
If I coach for 90 minutes, I want at least 40 of them to be scrimmage. Not scrimmage as a reward. Scrimmage as structured game time that connects directly to the topic of the session, mirrors the formation we play at the weekend, and is played with real game rules.
Your players need to play the game. You need to coach inside it. The scrimmage gives you both at the same time.
Stop treating it like a filler. Start treating it like the point.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 72 — Play 2: Scrimmages & Games
@LeeDunneSoccer
Your Coaching Toolbox: Five Tools, and When to Actually Use Them
You probably know the freeze method. You probably use it too much. There are four other tools in the box that are more effective in more situations — and one of them is a notepad you use to write down what you actually think of the referee.
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
Just Be
72 players showed up to ODP tryouts. About 40 of them told me they were a number 10. I didn't argue. I just asked them to do one thing: just be.
I've watched a lot of pre-tryout talks. The rousing speech. The hard-ass coach telling players they need to be exceptional just to be considered. If you've watched All or Nothing, you know the version — the intensity, the clipboard, the stare. If you've watched Mikel Arteta, you've seen the childlike drawing of a brain with arrows explaining how much it can grow.
That's not really me.
When I gathered 72 players at ODP tryouts for the 2010 boys, I kept it short. I introduced myself and the assessment team, and then I told them their job for the day was simple: just be.
Blank looks. What does that mean?
It means believe. And it means effort. That's it. Just be — belief and effort.
Let me tell you why those two things, in that context, matter more than most coaches realize.
Forty Number 10s
When the check-in forms came through, I saw that roughly 40 of my 72 players had listed themselves as a number 10 or a number 8. That's more than half the group. All playmakers. All in the middle of the field, controlling the game, finding pockets of space, linking play.
Now think about how that happens. A kid is bigger, faster, and has a better touch than the rest of their team. Their coach puts them at 10. Or they watch Messi operate in central pockets and decide that's who they are. Or they've been the best player on every team they've played for, and the 10 shirt comes with that. The position becomes identity.
So you get to an ODP tryout, you're competing against the best players from your state — players from big clubs, small clubs, rural areas, cities — and suddenly there are 40 of you claiming the same shirt. And most of you aren't going to play there.
That's not a criticism. It's a problem created upstream, at the club level, over years of development where players are plugged into a position and left there.
Belief Is Often Given, Not Built
Here's what struck me most about those tryouts. When I asked players to try something different — to go play at left back, to fill a number three role, to drop into a more defensive shape — the thing that stopped them wasn't technical ability. It was belief.
One player was struggling to hold down a position in the midfield. Strong attributes — good movement, sharp on the ball. I could see center back written all over him, and I told him so. His dad came to me afterward and said, "My son's not a center back."
I said, "Your son is not going to play six in this group. But I think he can be a strong four."
He didn't agree. His son went out and played center back anyway, and he was excellent. But I wonder what that player carries with him because someone told him that's not where he belongs.
That's what I mean when I say belief is often given, not built. A player's confidence in what they can do is frequently a reflection of what the adults around them have told them they can do. And when that picture is narrow — you're a 10, that's your position, stay there — you get players who are scared to try something else, even when something else is exactly what they need.
Can you go play center back? I can't, Coach.
Can you try?
That's the only question that matters.
Pickup Soccer and the Freedom Experiment
Think about what pickup soccer looks like. Old men on a Sunday, no pressure, no parents watching. They start in one spot and drift around. Someone drops into midfield for a bit, moves to the wing when they feel like it, goes up front when the team needs something. Nobody labels them. Nobody has told them they're a 10 and nothing else.
And they're fine. They figure it out.
Now think about how many of our club players could do the same. Thirteen-year-olds who have never played anywhere other than the position their coach put them in at eight. Who are physically capable but mentally closed off to the idea that their game might exist somewhere else on the field.
That's what ODP shows me every year. Players who have real quality but have been developed in such a narrow lane that they arrive at a high-level environment and freeze the moment someone asks them to adapt.
The clubs that serve their players best are the ones teaching them enough of the game that they aren't confused when they're asked to step backward a line or shift to the right. That's still rare.
The Effort Part
Belief is the internal piece. Effort is the external one — and it's more complex than it looks.
The easy version of effort is the eye test. Kid sprints to win a ball back. Kid runs the channel on a throw-in nobody else chased. Kid picks up a teammate after a mistake. You see it and you love it.
But the real version of effort includes something most coaches try to squash: negative emotion. The frustration when a teammate gives the ball away. The visible anger after a missed opportunity. Coaches often try to flatten that because it can become toxic — and it can, when it's unmanaged.
But I'd rather have a player who is genuinely mad at a mistake than one who doesn't care either way. The mad player has standards. What they need is to learn how to flip that feeling into something useful — not an arm around the shoulder, not telling the teammate what they did wrong, but tracking ten extra yards, blocking a passing lane, giving the teammate something to play to. That's competitive effort. That's what it looks like when you channel the feeling rather than suppress it.
I tell my players: you can be mad. Show me you're mad by working harder. That's the only version I'm interested in.
What the Tryout Actually Measures
Our ODP setup is straightforward. We run mixed teams, watch players in a game environment, and then split into two fields — one for the players who are in the conversation, one for the players who are fighting to get there. No mystery. No waiting to find out how you did. You can see it.
That clarity matters. When a player on the development field is called over to the other field to try a different position, they know what the opportunity is. When they're asked to play somewhere they've never played before, the framing is already there: your belief and your effort got you this chance. What you do with it is up to you.
Some players grab it. They try the center back role, find that their reading of the game translates, and suddenly they're a different proposition to the assessors than they were two hours ago.
Some can't get past what they've been told they are.
As a club coach, you're the one doing that telling. Every time you put a player in the same position, season after season, without ever showing them what else they might be — without ever asking them to try — you're narrowing their belief before they even get somewhere like ODP.
The technical and tactical stuff matters. But a player who believes they can try and who gives genuine effort? That's a player I can develop. A player who's only ever been one thing and is scared to be anything else?
That's a harder conversation to have at thirteen.
Just be. Believe you can. Try. Show me the effort.
That's the whole talk.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 70 — Just Be
@LeeDunneSoccer
Don't Ask a Club What They Have. Tell Them What You've Got.
Every week, directors of coaching get emails from coaches asking if there are any teams available. I used to be one of those directors. Here's what I can tell you honestly: that email goes nowhere. Here's what does.
I've been on both sides of this conversation.
I've been the coach reaching out to organizations asking if there's anything available. And I've been the director of coaching on the other end of that email, looking at a name I don't know and a license level on a resume and thinking — well, we've got volunteer parents coaching teams. What do you have that they don't?
The honest answer, most of the time, is: not enough.
That's not a criticism of the coaches sending those emails. They're trying to get involved, they've put time and money into their coaching education, and they genuinely want to contribute. The problem isn't the intent. It's the framing.
The Cold Email Problem
Here's what the typical message looks like: Hi, I'm a coach with a B/C/grassroots license and X years of experience. Do you have any teams or opportunities available?
On the receiving end, that message creates a very short thought process. The director checks the team list, checks the coach list, sees everything is filled, and says no. Or they forward it to an age group coordinator who does the same thing and forgets about it by the end of the day.
And that's the end of it. Not because the coach isn't good. Because the question only opens doors that are already visible.
The problem with asking "what do you have?" is that you're putting all the work on the director to solve your problem. And directors of coaching don't sit around waiting to solve other people's problems — they're too busy solving their own. Managing parents, managing boards, managing field access, managing coaches who are burning out or underperforming, managing league registrations and tournament applications and the guy who's supposed to be lining the fields but isn't showing up. That's the job. And into that chaos lands your email asking what's available.
It's not that they don't want to help. It's that you haven't given them a reason to stop and think about you.
The Goalkeeper Coach
Here's what the better version looks like.
A coach reached out to me when I was running things in San Francisco. She's a goalkeeper. She'd pursued her coaching licenses seriously, taken goalkeeper-specific education in the UK, played the position herself. And instead of asking what we had available, she reached out and said: I can see you don't have any goalkeeper training for your players. No camps, no clinics, no regular sessions. I'd love to change that. Here's what I'm thinking.
That's a completely different conversation.
I didn't have to figure out what to do with her. She'd already done it. She'd looked at what we were offering, identified a gap, and arrived with a solution to a problem I hadn't even formally recognized yet. We built a Goalkeeper Academy together. It started small, we trialed it at the end of a season, it landed well, and then we grew it. Players got specialist coaching in a position that usually gets completely ignored at recreational level — where "goalkeeper" just means whoever drew the short straw and is hoping nothing gets past them.
She created that. I didn't post that job anywhere. She made it exist.
What Your Strengths Actually Are
Most coaches, when they think about what they offer, think about their license and their experience on the field. That's the floor, not the ceiling.
Think about what else you carry.
Are you a specialist with a particular age group? One coach I worked with reached out asking if I had anything available, and the honest answer was: not obviously, no. But I had a conversation with him rather than just saying no, and eventually got to the fact that he was at his best — genuinely his best — with five to eight year olds. Little programs. Early development. He knew what he was doing in that space in a way that most coaches don't. So we built something around that and gave him a programme to own.
That never would have happened if he'd just sent the initial email and waited for a reply.
What else can you offer beyond the pitch?
Can you write? Can you build a curriculum? Can you manage a social media page in a way that actually reaches families? Can you handle tournament applications, league registrations, Team Snap admin — all the things that eat up a director's time and that nobody in the organization particularly enjoys doing? Can you film training sessions and games? Can you edit footage into something useful for coaches or players?
These things sound like they're adjacent to coaching. They're not. They're valuable, and in most clubs they fall into a gap, and the director knows they fall into a gap but doesn't have the bandwidth to fix it. You showing up and saying "I can take this off your plate" is not a small thing.
The Sacramento Republic Experience
When I got involved with the Sacramento Republic, I didn't arrive asking for a role. I arrived and said: I'll pick up the cones. I'll make sure the balls have air in them. I'll fill the water bottles when the trainer is getting overwhelmed with taping players up. Just let me be out there.
No expectation of pay. No expectation of a job offer. Just the offer of being useful in exchange for the experience of being in that environment.
That's how you get your foot in rooms that don't advertise openings. Not by asking what they have for you. By showing them what you can do and making the cost of taking a chance on you as low as possible.
The long game is obvious: you build a relationship, you demonstrate your value, you're in the room when something does open up. But even if none of that happens, you've gained experience in an environment you wanted to be in. That's not nothing.
Write Them Down
Here's the practical version of all of this: before you reach out to anyone, sit down and actually write your strengths out. Not just your license. Not just your years coached. Your actual strengths — the specific things you're good at, the age groups you're best with, the areas of the game where you have real knowledge, and the things you can do behind the scenes that a club actually needs.
Then look at the club you want to approach. Spend twenty minutes understanding what they do and what they're missing. And then reach out with: here's what I see, here's what I can offer, here's how I'd do it.
That's not a cold email anymore. That's a proposal. And proposals get read.
The question isn't what a club has for you. The question is what you've got for them.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 68 — What Are Your Strengths?
@LeeDunneSoccer
Winning
We say it's not about winning, but then we put kids on a plane to a prestigious tournament, put the trophy pictures on the website, and wonder why everyone's acting like it's about winning. It is. We just need to be clearer about what winning actually means.
Let me ask you something. Go and look at your club's social media right now. Not the mission statement on the about page — the actual posts. What do you see?
My guess: tournament wins. Trophies. State cup. League titles. Maybe some action shots, but probably fewer than you'd think.
Now read the captions. Is the story about players developing? Or is it about results, rankings, which college a senior just committed to?
I'm not saying that to make you feel bad. I'm saying it because the messaging your club puts out determines the culture your families build their expectations around. And if the message is trophies, the culture is trophies. Even if you stand in front of parents on the first night of the season and tell them it's about development.
So here's where I land: it is all about winning. We just need to be honest about what winning means — and most of us aren't there yet.
The Prestige Tournament Problem
Here's a contradiction I see all the time. A club books their team into a high-profile national tournament. Players are excited. Families book flights. The entry fee is substantial. The bracket is competitive. And then the coach stands up and says: we're going there for the experience. It's about development. Results aren't the priority.
And the families look around at each other, because they just spent two thousand dollars to go and watch their kid lose with grace.
I'm not saying don't go to good tournaments. I'm saying be honest about the environment you're putting your players in and what it's optimized for. You can't take players to a prestige event, put the bracket results on the website if you win, and then tell them the score doesn't matter. They're not stupid. They can feel the contradiction.
The environment you create tells the story. If every environment you put your players in is organized around results, then results are the measure. And then when those results aren't there, everyone — coaches, parents, players — defaults to what they can control, which is usually the wrong things.
The Position Problem
Here's a specific way winning is being lost every single week, and almost nobody talks about it.
I was at an ODP event in Phoenix. Best players from Northern California — genuinely talented kids. I sat with them in a team meeting and started asking questions. What formation do you play? What position? Could you play a false nine? What if we shifted the whole team to one side? What if we went to three at the back?
Seven of my forwards could not do anything other than play forward. None of them could play wide defender. None of them could operate as a false nine. They could get the ball and go toward goal. Full stop.
And this isn't a criticism of those players. It's a description of what they'd been taught — or rather, what they'd never been taught. US Soccer's love affair with the 4-3-3 means that in most clubs, the left winger plays left wing, the right winger plays right wing, and the center mid plays center mid. Season after season. And then they come to ODP and I ask them to solve a problem they've never been given before, and they freeze.
Go and watch a youth soccer game on the weekend. Watch the front three in a 4-3-3. The wide players are standing on the line, isolated against a fullback, waiting for a through ball that's going to arrive maybe four times in the whole game. When the ball comes, they beat the player or they don't. When it doesn't come, they stand there. And when the coach needs them to shift centrally, or combine with a striker, or support a midfielder under pressure — they don't know how.
That's not winning. That's waiting. And we've built it into the system ourselves.
What Winning in Training Looks Like
The fix isn't complicated, but it requires letting go of the rigidity.
Run a small-sided game and change the shape partway through. Play a six-a-side where one team is 3-3 and the other is 4-2. Move players to positions they've never played. Challenge your left winger to play a false nine. Challenge your center back to step into midfield when you have the ball. Make it a game — combinations between the two strikers are worth double points. Now you've built a specific task into the environment that rewards exactly the behavior you're trying to develop.
And then here's the key step that most coaches skip: take that goal into the game at the weekend.
Don't just coach the training and then show up on Saturday hoping it transfers. Tell the players before kickoff: this is what we're looking for today. How many times do those two forwards combine? How many times does the wide player cut inside and connect with the eight? Have a parent or assistant tracking it. Celebrate it at half time, whether you're winning or losing on the scoreboard.
Now you've created a second scoreboard — one that's entirely within your control, that reflects the work you've done in training, and that your players can win regardless of the result.
Then tell your parents about it. This is what we've been working on. This is what to look for today. Not because you're managing expectations, but because you're bringing them into the right conversation about what success looks like for this group right now.
IDPs and the Individual Win
I ran 18 individual development plan meetings at that same ODP event. Eighteen players. All eighteen told me they want to be a professional.
Which is great. And I believe in letting players dream that big. But then I asked them: do you understand what it actually takes? And the answers varied enormously. Some of them had a clear picture of the work involved. Others thought it was mostly about talent and hard work. And almost none of them had thought seriously about the element of luck — that at the right moment, the right scout needs to be watching, and you need to produce a moment of brilliance that makes them stop.
This isn't defeatism. It's honesty. And honest conversations unlock something in players that reassurance doesn't.
So we work backwards. If the long-term goal is professional, what does the next month look like? Last month you worked on receiving the ball under pressure and connecting with the player underneath. This month I want you to play the ball with the outside of your foot as you cut inside. That's the next piece. That's the next win.
That's how an IDP actually works — not as a form you fill out once and never look at again, but as a living document that tells every player, including the one who isn't getting much playing time right now, what they're working toward and why.
The Club That Keeps Players
I saw something on social media recently that's stuck with me. It said: putting on the same uniform doesn't make you a family.
It's a bit harsh, but it's also true. Players leave. Parents leave. Families shop around. Your A team's best player goes to the bigger club down the road, and you act surprised, but you probably saw it coming. That's the reality of youth sports.
The clubs that hold onto players — and more importantly, hold onto the players' commitment even when they're there — are the ones that make every player feel like they're winning in some way. Not just the starters. Not just the ones who are already good. Everyone.
When your best player sees the kid who used to struggle now thriving in a new position they've worked on together — that's culture. When the player who's been told their whole life they're a number ten discovers at fifteen that they're actually a brilliant number three — that's development. And it's also winning, in the way that actually matters over the long arc of a player's relationship with the game.
One percent of people listening to this are coaching at a level where winning on the day is genuinely the measure. For the other 99%, we are in the business of building players who will love this game long after they've left our teams.
That's the win. It's worth tracking.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 67 — It's All About Winning
@LeeDunneSoccer
I Deleted 2GB of Session Plans. Here's What I Learned.
Over the holidays I went through my Google Drive and deleted over two gigabytes of session plans, curriculums, and downloaded content from courses I've taken over the years. I expected to feel like I'd lost something. I felt the opposite.
Over the holidays I went through my Google Drive. You know the one — the folder that has folders inside it that haven't been opened since the course you took three years ago. Session plans, curriculums, screenshotted diagrams from Academy Soccer Coach and Tactical Pad, content from webinars and seminars and state federation downloads, all saved with the best of intentions and almost never looked at again.
I deleted over two gigabytes of it.
And here's what surprised me: it felt like a weight lifting.
I expected to feel like I'd lost something — all those sessions, all those drills, all that accumulated material from years of coaching education. But sitting there looking at a cleaner folder, I realized I wasn't going to miss any of it. Because I never really used it. And the reason I never used it is that by the time I actually need to plan a session, the answer doesn't live in a folder. It lives in what happened at training last week and what the game on Saturday showed me about my players.
The Problem with Collecting Sessions
Here's what I found when I went back through that folder. A 3v2 that rotates between squares. Players making five passes, then switching to a new grid. It's a tidy diagram. It probably came from a reputable source. And I genuinely can't tell you what it's for.
What does it develop? What moment in the game does it prepare players for? Why do they change squares after five passes — what's the game equivalent of that? I don't know, and I used it. And if I couldn't answer those questions now, I couldn't answer them then either.
The session plan culture in coaching education is that there's a right activity for every topic. Want to work on switching the point of attack? Here are three drills. Want to develop pressing? Download this pattern. And coaches — myself included for years — collect these things the way you'd collect recipes: maybe I'll need it one day, maybe it'll solve a problem.
But if you're working from a games-based approach — if the game is the teacher — sessions don't really work like that. The session comes from the game. Something breaks down on Saturday. You understand why. You build a game situation in training that creates the same problem and lets your players solve it. That's it. The session plan writes itself, because the source is your players, not a folder.
Play Practice Play — And Why It's More Than a Structure
Working through my application to become a US Soccer instructor, I've been deep in Play Practice Play. And while I've been using this approach for years in various forms, going through the evidence behind it has been clarifying in a way I didn't expect.
This isn't just a preference. There's data behind it.
The opening play — arrival games, players getting on the field and immediately playing — isn't just a nice way to start training. Research supports it. Players who arrive to a game environment are more engaged, more likely to stay invested in the session, and more likely to enjoy themselves. It also removes something that I'd never quite named before: the coaching dependency.
I work with ODP players. These are some of the best players from across Northern California — talented, experienced, competitive. I get on the field, and they stand there. Looking at me. Waiting.
Coach, what do we do? Coach, what do we do?
These excellent players have been trained — by years of coach-led sessions — to wait for instruction before they can function. The arrival game breaks that. They get out of the car, they see the game set up, they play. Nobody told them to. And now they're warming up, they're making decisions, they're arguing about a call from three minutes ago. They're soccer players, not students waiting for the lecture to start.
The practical side of it matters too. When I was coaching on a field in the far corner of a complex with ten other teams training at the same time, a 15-minute walk from the parking lot, I started using arrival games simply because I needed players to run to training. It worked. Now there's evidence telling me why.
The Practice Part — Nonlinear Is Not the Same as Unplanned
Here's where I think coaches get nervous about this approach. If sessions write themselves, and if the game is the teacher, does that mean you just let them play and hope for the best?
No. And this is important.
Nonlinear practice means you're not isolating a skill and drilling it. You're creating a game situation that requires that skill, and the skill develops through playing. That's different from throwing balls out and walking away.
Let's say your team is struggling to build out of the back. The classic approach is to stop everything and do a passing pattern. You line them up, you walk them through it, they repeat it. And then Saturday comes around and the press is on and it looks exactly like it did before, because the pattern didn't prepare them for the chaos of the real thing.
The nonlinear version: build a game that replicates the pressure they're facing. Set the defending team up to press the way your upcoming opponent presses. Make the reward for successfully building out into an end zone or to a target player — and make it count in the game. Now your players are solving the actual problem rather than practicing a version of the problem that doesn't exist in real matches.
Or take finishing. You want first-touch finishes. You've seen the data — over 70% of goals are scored with one touch. So you build a game where a first-time finish counts double. Suddenly every player is getting into positions to shoot first time, every player creating the killer pass is motivated to find the right moment, and the game is teaching the skill through the game. You didn't run a finishing drill. You created the conditions for finishing to matter.
That requires something from you as a coach. You're not controlling the session. You're designing the environment, watching what happens, and engaging with individual players inside the flow. The real coaching skill isn't the diagram. It's the observation — knowing what to look for, who to talk to, what to say, and when to say it without stopping everything to do it.
The Final Play — Not a Reward
The end of every session should be play. Not as a reward for working hard. Not as a way to fill time. Play as the completion of a cycle — the moment where everything you worked on in the practice phase gets tested in the closest thing you have to a real game.
Maximum roster. Game-like setup. Goalkeeper if you have one. Formation that mirrors how you play at the weekend. And you — the coach — still engaged. Not packing up cones. Not talking to parents. Still watching, still connecting with players, still tying the threads between what happened at the start of training and what you're seeing now.
This last part is where most coaches lose the session. The scrimmage becomes a reward and they check out. Which means the players check out too, and you've lost the most valuable twenty minutes of the whole evening.
What's Actually in the Folder Now
I kept a few things. Things that genuinely connect to my game model, that I come back to, that reflect the way I actually coach. The rest is gone.
And what I know now — more clearly than before — is that the session plan I used to look for never existed. The right session was always going to come from watching my players in the last game. From understanding what they need, not what a curriculum says they should be working on this week. From knowing the game well enough that when I look at eleven players on a field, I can see the problem and build the environment to solve it.
Coaches who collect sessions are preparing to coach. Coaches who know their players are coaching.
The folder can stay empty.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 66 — Play Practice Play
@LeeDunneSoccer
Four Ways to Connect With Every Player in Every Session
Film one of your training sessions. Then count how many times you say each player's name. I guarantee you're not saying all sixteen. The players you miss most aren't the ones who are late or the ones who are struggling — they're the ones in the middle.
Think back to your last training session. You had somewhere between twelve and eighteen players. Now think honestly about how many of them you actually connected with — not just coached at, but genuinely connected with.
My guess: fewer than you think.
Here's a simple test. Film a session and listen back to how many times you say each player's name. You'll say your best players' names a lot — coaching them, encouraging them, pointing them out as examples. You'll say your most challenging players' names a lot too, because they keep giving the ball away or making the same mistake. But work your way through the full squad and you'll find a large middle group that barely gets a mention.
Those players are still there. They still showed up. They're just invisible.
Here are four points of contact I try to have with every single player in every session.
1. The Personal Connection
This one sounds obvious but it's harder than it looks.
The players who arrive early are easy — you've got five minutes, you chat, you find out how their day went, whether they had PE, whether they played basketball this morning. You're relaxed, they're relaxed, the conversation happens naturally.
The player who arrives twenty minutes late is also easy. You pull them aside, you find out what's going on, you catch them up on what they've missed. That's a contact point.
The ones you miss are everyone in between. The twelve players who arrived in the middle of your warm-up while you were setting up the first activity. They came, they got in, they started playing — and you never actually spoke to them as people.
Be deliberate about it. "How was school?" is a simple question that tells you a lot. I had a player show up for a high-intensity session after running five miles for cross country at school that morning. Knowing that changed how I involved her in the session. It wasn't that she got a pass on working — it was that I was conscious of what she'd already done and adjusted my expectations and conversations accordingly.
Knowing your players as people is also how you know when something is off. The player who's quiet when they're usually loud. The one who's not tracking defensively and it's got nothing to do with their tactical understanding. Thirty seconds at the start changes the whole dynamic of what you can offer them.
2. Coaching for Improvement
In the flow of the session, you're going to coach. The question is who you're coaching.
Here's where the orientation method helps. Say you're working on building out against a high press. Your natural focus is on the team trying to build out — they're the ones you're trying to improve. But the pressing team also needs coaching. If you go to them first, and challenge them on their shape and their triggers and their positioning, you've just created a contact point with six or seven more players.
Then when you move to coaching the team building out, you've got another group. Both sides of the ball, coached genuinely, in the flow — that's twelve to fourteen players getting an improvement conversation in a single activity.
The ones you miss are the ones not directly involved in the topic. If your session is about building out through the thirds and your wide forwards aren't part of that phase, they need a different coaching focus. What are they doing while the back four and the midfield are working? That's where the fourth point of contact comes in — but first, the praise.
3. Praise and Encouragement
A lot of coaching defaults to improvement. Improve, correct, fix, adjust. And over time, without realising it, you create players who are waiting to be told what they're doing wrong.
Praise is a coaching tool. Not fake praise — not "great touch" when the touch was average — but genuine recognition of something a player is doing well or trying to do. The player who tracked back forty yards and didn't win the ball but was in the right position. The goalkeeper who communicated clearly even when the defence didn't listen. The wide player who made the diagonal run three times and finally got the ball on the fourth.
These moments happen constantly in sessions and most coaches let them pass. When you name them — out loud, specifically, directed at the player — you do two things: you reinforce the behaviour, and you make that player feel seen. And a player who feels seen gives more.
Same challenge applies here. Who gets the praise? Usually the players already performing well. Make it a conscious habit to find something real to praise in the players who are having a harder time that day. It changes the energy.
4. The Individual Challenge
This one is for the players who are stuck — and most squads have a few of them at any given time.
Stuck doesn't mean bad. It means they're repeating the same pattern, making the same choice, getting caught in the same moment, and nothing in the session is shifting it. The center back who plays the same short pass to the same player every time regardless of the pressure. The left back who cuts inside every single time because they've had success doing it and now can't see anything else. The wide forward who stands next to the touchline and waits for a through ball that comes once every twenty minutes.
For those players, I set a private goal. Before the next activity, I pull them aside: "In this block, I want you to try and distribute to at least four different players — not just the obvious one." Or: "I want you to check your shoulder before every touch in the next five minutes." Something specific, observable, and achievable within the session.
Then at the water break, I come back to them. How's it going? Have you tried it? What's stopping you?
This is the version of the Ollie Watkins approach — small, personal, individual goals that get a player hunting for something specific within the game, rather than waiting for something to happen to them. Done well, you build it into their IDP and it becomes a thread you can track across weeks.
Why This Matters Beyond Development
The stat I come back to is this: the overwhelming majority of players you coach will never play professionally. Some will play in college. Most will stop somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two and go build their lives.
But the ones who felt genuinely connected to their coaches — seen, coached, challenged, encouraged — are the ones who give back. They become coaches, volunteers, administrators, the parents on the sideline who actually understand the game because someone took the time to teach them. The players who felt invisible tend to drift away from the game entirely.
Sixteen players. Four contact points each. That's not a perfect session — that's the job.
Start with their name.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 65 — 4 Ways to Connect With Every Player
@LeeDunneSoccer
Make More Money.
The typical answer to 'I want to make more money as a coach' is coach more teams or do more private training. Both hit a ceiling fast. Here's a smarter way to think about it.
I have a friend who coaches five teams. Five. He goes from game to game to game on Saturdays and Sundays — during state cup season in Northern California that's ten games a weekend. I genuinely don't know how he applies himself professionally to any of them. But when you ask him why he does it, the answer is simple: he needs the money.
That's the ceiling most coaches hit. You get paid per team. You want more money. So you take on more teams until you're burned out, invisible to your own family, and giving every squad a version of you that's running on empty.
The alternative isn't easy, but it's smarter. Here's how I think about it: two categories of opportunity. Budget, and non-budget.
Budget: Work Already Being Paid For
Walk around your organization and look at who's getting paid to do what. Somewhere in your club's operating budget there are roles that either nobody is filling well, or that are being done by someone outside the coaching staff who has no relationship with the game.
Registration. Behind every well-run club is a good registrar. Player registrations often include a small per-player fee for whoever processes them. If you have the patience and the bandwidth, that's money sitting on the table.
Field operations. Someone lines the fields. Someone sets up goals for weekend games. Someone trims the grass around the posts that the big mower doesn't get. These are paid tasks, usually done by someone with no stake in the club. If you're there anyway, could it be you?
Player passes. Printing, laminating, and organizing passes for games and tournaments is time-consuming admin that usually falls on someone who doesn't really want to do it. Offer to take it on.
Referee assigning. This requires a course and a certification, but once you have it, you get paid every time a referee is assigned to a game through you. It also means you build relationships with referees — which is worth something on its own.
Social media. Look at your club's Instagram. If it's mostly trophy photos and blurry action shots, that's not a brand — that's a bulletin board. A club that communicates its philosophy, shows its coaches working, shares player development moments, and builds a genuine presence is more attractive to families than one that just posts results. If you can do that — collect content, write captions, build the story — there's a case for getting paid for it. Start by offering to do it for a month for free and show them what it can look like.
Age group coordinator. If your club has three or four teams in the same age group, those coaches are often working in silos. An age group lead who connects the coaches, coordinates the training concepts, runs occasional combined sessions, and creates consistency across the programme is incredibly valuable. It rarely exists because nobody thought to ask for it. Propose it.
College and high school guidance. Parents of older players have a lot of questions about what club soccer means for high school recruitment and college pathways. If you have experience in that world, or you're willing to build it, there's a role there — and it's the kind of thing directors know they should be offering but never have time to set up.
Non-Budget: Create What Doesn't Exist Yet
I sat with a director of soccer recently and in the hour we were together, he received forty emails. Forty. In one hour. That person is putting out fires from the moment they start until the moment they stop, and the things that could genuinely move the organization forward — the things sitting just outside what's urgent — never get touched.
Your opportunity is to see what they can't.
Holiday camps. Black Friday, winter break, spring break — parents need somewhere for their kids to be, and a well-run soccer camp fills that need. Most organizations know this but nobody's directing it. If you step up, you manage the curriculum, the logistics, the staffing, and you take a percentage of the registration revenue. The club doesn't have to front anything they weren't already going to spend.
Goalkeeper training. Every club knows it needs this. Most clubs don't have it. If you don't have goalkeeper-specific expertise yourself, you become the director — find the specialist, manage the programme, market it to families, and take a coordination fee. You don't have to be the goalkeeper coach. You have to be the person who makes it happen.
Refereeing. There's a significant referee shortage in most regions right now. In Northern California, they've opened crash courses to get more people certified quickly. If your game is at noon, you could referee the nine and the ten-thirty, earn the assignor fees, and still be in your coaching kit by kickoff. It's genuinely one of the most underused options available to coaches.
Game analysis. Clubs are buying Veo and Trace cameras and then not really using them well because the coaches are too busy. If you can film games, clip specific moments, and send coaches two to three minutes of relevant footage tied to what they worked on in training, you become invaluable. Coaches love having the evidence. They just don't have time to find it themselves.
Early-age programming. Most clubs start at seven or eight. Four and five year olds are already moving and playing and ready to learn. Saturday morning, eight to eight-forty-five, structured play and introduction to the ball — the club takes a registration cut, you take the rest. You're building the pipeline before it even exists anywhere else.
The Mindset Behind All of It
What I've seen kill coaching careers is the acceptance that this is just how it is. The director says there's no money in the budget. The club doesn't have extra roles. The only answer is another team.
It isn't.
Look at your organization the way a new investor would. Where are the gaps? What's being done poorly or not at all? What are parents asking for that nobody's providing? What would reduce stress for the director so much that they'd happily find a way to pay for it?
You don't have to wait to be offered a role. You can create the role, demonstrate its value, and then make the case for being compensated for it.
Coaching more teams isn't a career plan. It's a sprint toward burnout. The coaches who build real income in this industry are the ones who see the organization clearly and show up with solutions.
Find the gap. Fill it. Ask to be paid for it.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 64 — Make More Money!
@LeeDunneSoccer
Could They Do It At Home?
When you drive home after training tonight, ask yourself: how much of that session could my players have done on their own at a wall? Whatever the answer is, that's time you just lost.
Here's a question I want you to sit with the next time you drive home from training.
How much of what you just did — could your players have done at home?
Not with an opponent. Not in a game environment. Just with a ball and a wall and fifteen minutes before dinner. If the answer is a lot, you might have a problem.
Most sessions I watch follow the same structure. Players arrive, you spend ten or fifteen minutes getting them organized and warmed up. You run a technical activity — passing patterns, dribbling work, shooting reps. You introduce the practice, explain the rules, walk through it. And then with whatever time is left, you scrimmage. Maybe twenty minutes. And by that point you've done your coaching for the night, so you drift to the side, talk to parents, start packing up the cones.
That's ninety minutes. And if you're generous, maybe forty of them were irreplaceable.
The Technical Work
Here's the clearest version of the problem. You spend fifteen or twenty minutes at the start of training working on a technique. Ball control. Receiving on the back foot. One-touch passing. Whatever you've identified from the last game.
Now — could they have done that at home?
Yes. Obviously. A ball and a wall is almost everything you need for technical reps. If your player bounces the ball off the wall with one touch for one minute before dinner, that's sixty touches. Do that three times a day — before breakfast, before lunch, before dinner — and over a week you're looking at over a thousand touches on that specific skill. Touches you didn't have to supervise. Touches that didn't eat into your session time. And touches that actually matter more because they were earned through habit rather than compliance.
I know what you're thinking. My players won't do that. They're not committed. They're too busy.
Maybe. But set the expectation and involve the parents. You don't need them to do an hour. You need one minute before dinner. Every family can find one minute before dinner. And when you frame it that way — not as extra homework but as the habit that makes training better — most families get on board.
Now when players arrive, they've already got those reps in their legs. You skip the technique intro. You go straight to the game.
The Warm-Up
This one is simpler. If your club has an organized warm-up — a FIFA 11+ protocol, a specific mobility routine, a pregame sequence — your players should know it well enough to start it without you.
What does that look like in practice? Players arrive ten minutes before you take the field. They know the routine. They start it. By the time you're setting up cones and the group before you has cleared the field, your players are already warmed up and ready to play.
Instead, what usually happens? Coach walks out, players stand there waiting, coach leads a warm-up that takes fifteen minutes, and it's now 6 o'clock before anything meaningful starts.
I've written about pregame routines before. The principle is the same in training. If players know what to do when they arrive — really know it, have it internalized, could do it without being told — you don't have to spend precious field time supervising it. Better yet, you find out quickly who your leaders are. Because the player who gets there early and organizes the warm-up without being asked — that's your captain.
Introducing the Practice
This is the one most coaches don't think about, but it's where I think the biggest gains are.
If I'm running a four-goal game focused on switching the point of attack, I can spend five minutes explaining it on the field — demonstrating, adjusting, answering questions. Or I can send a thirty-second animated clip the night before via Tactical Pad, or tag players on Instagram, or drop a YouTube reference in the team group chat.
When players arrive having already seen the game, the rules, the direction of play — you do a thirty-second reminder and you go. No confusion. No standing around. The learning started before they even got in the car.
This matters more for younger players than coaches often realize. The game is the teacher — but only if they understand the game well enough to be in it straight away. When they've already visualized what the session looks like, they play at a higher level from the first minute. And that means you get more coaching moments, more decision-making, more learning in the time you have.
What's Left When You Remove All of That
Think about it honestly. Technical work they could've done at home: fifteen to twenty minutes back. Warm-up they could've arrived knowing: ten to fifteen minutes back. Session introduction they could've seen on their phone the night before: five minutes back.
You just found thirty to forty minutes in a ninety-minute session. That's not a marginal gain — that's nearly half your training time reclaimed for the stuff that only happens on the field, with teammates, with resistance, with a coach who's watching and responding in real time.
The things players can't do at home are the things you should be spending your session on. Decisions under pressure. Reading teammates. Playing in transition. Solving problems in a game environment that changes every second. That's the irreplaceable stuff. And right now, for a lot of teams, it's getting forty-five minutes instead of ninety.
The Question to Ask After Every Session
Next time you're driving home, run through it. What did we do tonight? Could they have done the first part at home? Yes — set it as homework. Could they have arrived knowing the warm-up? Yes — make it a routine. Could they have watched the game on their phone last night? Yes — send it tonight for next session.
Whatever you're left with — the things only a field and a coach and teammates can create — that's the session.
Build backwards from there. Every time.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 63 — Could They Do It At Home?
@LeeDunneSoccer
Green Lines
Your players already understand this concept. They use it every time they build a squad in FIFA. The question is whether you're using it too — or just hoping the chemistry builds itself.
If your players play FIFA — and most of them do — they already understand exactly what I'm about to say.
When you build a squad in Ultimate Team, every player on the pitch is connected to their teammates by a line. The color of that line depends on how much those players have in common: same club, same league, same nationality. Strong connection? Green line. No connection at all? Red line. And everyone understands intuitively that a team of green lines plays better than a team of red ones.
Now close the game and look at your actual squad.
Who are the green lines?
What the Lines Actually Represent in Real Life
In FIFA, the lines are determined by club and nationality. In your team, they're determined by something much more interesting. What school do your players go to? Who hangs out together outside of training? Are there siblings, cousins, neighbors in the group? Which players were on the same team last year?
These connections existed before you ever coached these kids. Your job is to see them, map them, and then figure out how to use them.
I think about it alongside Tuckman's stages of team development — forming, storming, norming, performing. When you first put a group together, you're mostly looking at red lines. Players are figuring out where they stand, who they trust, who they'd rather not be paired with. That's forming into storming. The green lines start to appear as you move through norming — as habits and trust develop, as players figure out each other's rhythms. Performing is when most of the team is green.
The problem is most coaches wait for that to happen naturally. It doesn't have to.
Reading the Room
Here's the simplest observation in coaching that almost nobody does deliberately. Next time you're in training, tell your players to get into pairs and watch what happens in the first five seconds.
Some pairs form instantly. These are your greens. Those players don't hesitate — they're already moving toward each other before the instruction is finished. Then there are the players who look around, assess their options, and settle. Yellow or orange. And then there's usually one or two who stand still for a beat too long, waiting to see who's left.
That's your map. Right there, in five seconds, you can see the chemistry of your group.
Now the question is what you do with it.
Using the Lines Tactically
If your two strongest green-line players happen to be your center back and your center forward, you have a few options. You can put a player between them who can connect them — a defensive midfielder who plays both directions — so that connection runs through the spine of the team. Or you adjust the formation so those two players interact more often naturally.
What you don't do is ignore it, line them up in positions dictated by a template, and wonder why the chemistry isn't clicking.
I use a simple exercise to see how connections build in small groups. Split into pairs first, and let them find their own partner. Then merge pairs into groups of four. Now watch. The pair that was already a green line will often anchor the group — but how they bring the other pair in tells you everything about the next layer of connections. Do they include them? Do they naturally connect? Or does your group of four have two tight pairs and a gap down the middle?
That gap is where your coaching focus goes.
Building Green Lines Off the Field
Here's the thing about training twice a week — it's not enough to build real cohesion through drills alone. The green lines that hold a team together through a difficult run of results, through losing, through a storming moment when someone gets dropped — those get built away from the field.
Gareth Southgate took the England senior team to train with the SAS. Not because they needed to learn survival skills. Because throwing people into a completely different environment, where their usual roles don't apply, is one of the fastest ways to build connection.
You don't need the SAS. But a team volunteering at a food bank before Thanksgiving, or running a session for the club's youngest age groups, or going hiking together — these create the kind of shared experience that laps around a training field never will. When teenagers lead a session for six-year-olds, you find out very quickly who the natural leaders are. And often, it's not who you expected.
Team events away from the game also expose the players who are isolated. The kid who stands slightly outside the group at the pizza party is showing you a red line situation you might not have noticed on the field. Now you know who needs more deliberate connection-building in training.
Building Green Lines On the Field
In training, the easiest lever to pull is the bonus goal.
If your team builds from the back, works through midfield, and scores — that goal is worth two. Or three. Or it wins the game outright. Whatever the rule is, the reward is for playing through the lines, not just from winning a loose ball and finishing. This isn't just a coaching point — it's an incentive structure that rewards connection.
A word on punishments here. I've watched coaches use physical punishments — push-ups, sprints — when the losing team fails to defend. And in a group with strong chemistry, some older players tell me they actually respond to it. Fine. But in a group that's still forming, physical punishment often targets your weakest player, because that's who the group blames for losing. That player is already the red line. Punishing the group for their weakness doesn't turn it orange — it turns everyone against them faster.
Fetching the balls is a consequence. Push-ups are a shaming mechanism. Know the difference.
Why This Actually Matters
I've seen players quit soccer because they said they didn't like it. In almost every case, what they didn't like was specific teammates who made their experience miserable for a season or two, or they lost a good friend from the team. They blamed the game instead of the environment, because they were twelve and that's how twelve-year-olds process things.
The green lines you build this season might be the reason a player is still in the game at nineteen.
That's not an abstract idea. It's the reason we pay attention to who's pairing with who when you say "get into pairs." It's the reason you notice the player who's always waiting to be picked last. It's the reason you design your formations around relationships as much as attributes.
Map the lines. Move them from red to orange to green. And use the ones that are already green to pull the rest of the team forward.
Your players already know how this works. They just call it their Ultimate Team.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 62 — Green Lines
@LeeDunneSoccer
Keep The Ball In Play
I ran a session, timed everything on my watch, and the ball was in play for 66% of a 90-minute session. I thought I was running a tight, efficient practice. I wasn't.
A friend of mine coaches at a club that has a simple rule baked into their training philosophy. The ball must be in play for 70% of every session.
Not 70% of the time approximately. Seventy percent, measured, tracked, reflected on.
When he told me that, I genuinely hadn't thought about it. I knew I ran efficient sessions — or at least I thought I did. I keep things moving. I use small-sided games. I don't do laps. But I'd never actually timed it.
So I did. And here's what I found.
The Audit
In a recent 90-minute session, I tracked every minute the ball wasn't moving. Here's what I logged:
Water breaks: 10 minutes. We train in California, it was close to 95 degrees when we kicked off at 5:30pm. That's understandable.
Explaining and clarifying: 4 minutes. What happens if the ball goes out here? What do you do if this happens? That kind of thing — necessary but it adds up.
Moving goals: 7 minutes. The coach on the other side of the field was using the goal we needed, so we had to wait and then shift it halfway through the session. I sent 14-year-old boys to move the goal. If you've ever sent teenage boys to move a goal, you know exactly how that went.
Fetching balls: 3 minutes. They end up all over the field. Someone has to go get them.
Coaching stoppages: 4 minutes. Two freezes across the session, about two minutes each.
Total dead time: 31 minutes.
Ball in play: 66%.
I thought I was running a tight session. I was losing a third of it.
What the Number Means
The target that UK academies typically use is 70 to 80% ball-in-play time. Not because the number itself is magic — but because it forces you to be honest about what's actually happening when you're with your players.
Two training sessions a week is already a small amount of time to develop anyone. If you're losing 30 or 35 percent of it to logistics, explanations, and dead time — and you have no idea that's happening — you can't fix it.
One important clarification on what counts: I don't count the ball "in play" when one player is doing a drill while twelve others stand and watch. A drill where one player at a time dribbles through cones is not ball-in-play time in the sense that matters. The metric only means something when the game environment has a demand on every player — everyone has to be ready, everyone has to make a decision. A 7v7 with the ball rolling, a four-goal game, a possession exercise with pressing triggers — that's what counts. If the ball is moving but your players aren't all involved, you haven't really gained the time.
The Simple Fix
The easiest place to start is with the mechanics.
Every player brings a ball. I have sixteen players — that's sixteen balls on the field. I'm never stopped waiting to retrieve them. That alone cuts a few minutes per session.
Water bottles go at the side of the field, not in a bag by the bench. When the interval ends, players grab a drink and come straight back. The break is productive because it was designed to be. They know what to do in the minute because you told them at the start: in this break, you drink and then reset for the next round.
Set up five minutes early and have a game running when players arrive. They come off the car park, they see a game, they join in. You're already playing before the session officially starts. That's not nothing — that's five minutes of ball-in-play time you didn't have to plan.
Use injured players and the odd parent volunteer to retrieve balls. They're there anyway. It's not about free labor — it's about not pulling ten players out of a game to chase down three balls that rolled to the corner flag.
The Freeze Is Costing You More Than You Think
Coaching stoppages are the trickiest one. The freeze — stopping play to recreate a moment, show the group what happened, coach the decision — is one of the most valuable tools you have. I'm not saying stop using it.
But be honest about what it costs. A well-run freeze takes about two minutes: stop, show it, recreate it, go again. Do four of those in a session and you've used eight minutes. That's nearly 10% of a 90-minute practice, and you may not have noticed it happening because each individual stoppage felt brief.
I averaged two freezes in that session. Four minutes total. That's manageable. If you're coaching actively through every activity with multiple stoppages per game — you may be well under 60% without realizing it.
The goal isn't to stop coaching in your sessions. It's to make your coaching moments deliberate so you know exactly what they cost and you're getting full value from each one.
Try the Stopwatch
The most useful thing you can do before your next session is find someone to track it for you. An assistant coach, an injured player, a parent — give them a phone with a stopwatch and one instruction: start it when the ball is in play, stop it when it isn't. At the end, you'll have a number.
That number will tell you more about the quality of your session than your subjective read ever will. Most coaches feel like training went well if the players were engaged and things ran smoothly. But you can have a session that felt smooth and still be sitting at 55%.
Once you know your number, you can work on it. Move the water bottles. Tell the players the structure before you start. Build the ball retrieval into the rest interval. Arrive early. All of these things are small and they compound — and the difference between 60% and 75% in a 90-minute session is nearly 15 minutes of additional play time, twice a week, across a full season.
As coaches, we all wish we had more time with our players. This is one way to take some of it back — without adding a single extra session to the schedule.
What's your number?
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 61 — Keep The Ball In Play
@LeeDunneSoccer
Summer Of Love And Opportunity
I recorded this on a Sunday morning in California, England playing later that day, Argentina having just won the night before. And I thought — this is the window. This is the moment. Are we using it?
When I was a kid, I was Tony Yeboah. Every time I got the ball, every time I shot, I was trying to replicate that goal — bar and in from outside the box, Leeds United, mid-nineties. I didn't do it on purpose. It just happened because I'd watched the man play and somewhere in my brain I decided I could be him.
Do your players do that? Is there a player on your team who arrives to training walking like Messi, or who chips the goalkeeper in the rondo because they saw somebody do it on Instagram? That moment — where a kid sees something in the professional game and tries to bring it onto their field — is one of the most powerful forces in player development. And it happens most naturally in the summer, when the big tournaments are on and the game is impossible to ignore.
The question is whether we're using it.
Part One: Participation
Summer camps are where most of your players spend their soccer hours in July and August. Every club runs one. Some run several. Two to six hours a day, five days a week — it's the most concentrated contact time you'll have with players all year, and a lot of it is wasted on drills and cone patterns that nobody will remember by September.
The easiest win in any summer camp is a Camp World Cup. Split the kids into countries, give each team a flag, and before the games start — ask them who they know from that country. Who are the players? What do they know about the national team? If your team is Scotland and nobody knows a single Scottish player, that's your job. Tell them about a player. Show them a clip. Give them someone to be.
This is how you grow soccer culture in the US. Not through coaching clinics or federation initiatives — through a kid wearing an Argentina shirt at camp because Messi just scored in a tournament the night before. That's the door. Once they've identified with a player, everything else follows.
Camp jerseys matter too. If your players show up to a soccer camp in basketball shorts and a baseball jersey, you've already lost something. The culture of the game should be present from the moment they arrive. Soccer kit, soccer conversation, soccer everywhere they look for a week. It sounds like a small thing. It isn't.
And then take it off the camp field. After a Copa America game, after a Gold Cup game, after a Euros match — can you text the parents and say: get outside after this one, have a kickaround on the street. Watch parties where the kids play in the garden at halftime and then come back in to see the second half. This is how pickup culture gets built — not by lecturing players about street football, but by creating the conditions for it to happen naturally.
Part Two: Getting Them to Watch
This is harder. A tight international final — one goal, tactical, two organized defenses — is genuinely difficult for a twelve-year-old to appreciate. The highlights show the assist and the finish. They don't show the press that forced the turnover that led to the passage that led to the goal. You can't blame kids for watching the highlight reel version. That's where the excitement is, visually.
But you can help them see more.
Watch parties work because the social environment changes the experience. A group of players watching together are going to react, debate, argue — and that's actually engagement with the game, even if it's chaotic. Let it be chaotic. The point isn't that they watch it like analysts. It's that they watch it together.
A good challenge for older players: watch the first half and write down three things you noticed. Not "we scored" or "they missed" — three tactical or positional things. Where did the press start? Who tracked the runner? When did the fullback overlap? It doesn't need to be submitted or graded. It's just a framework that turns passive watching into active watching. Done well, it doesn't feel like homework. Done badly, it definitely does.
You can also give them timestamps. Watch the replay and mark the moments that connect to what you've been working on. Send it to the group: watch 38:15, watch 62:40. Two minutes of homework. Total engagement with what you've been coaching.
The TikTok and Instagram clips players are already watching are actually useful here. If you're on those platforms — even briefly — showing the nuances of the game that highlights skip over, you become a filter between the noise and the knowledge. What does a press trigger look like before the ball is won? What's the movement of the nine before the pass arrives? These things happen in the game. Most clips don't show them. You can.
Part Three: Support What's Local
This is the one coaches don't want to hear.
If you're a coach in the US — especially if you're from somewhere else, as many of us are — it's very easy to compare MLS to the Premier League and find it lacking. It's easy to dismiss the US national team, talk about the closed pyramid, explain at length why the youth development system is broken.
And when you do that in front of your players, you've just told them the game they love isn't worth watching at the highest local level. You've undermined USL. You've undermined the national team. You've made it harder for them to care about the game that's actually on their doorstep.
The comparison kills the culture. And the culture is the thing we're trying to build.
Go to a local game. Take your team to a USL match or a college game or whatever is accessible to you. It doesn't matter that it's not the Champions League — the energy of being in a stadium watching live soccer matters. The chip that goes over the goalkeeper. The tackle that saves a goal. The atmosphere when the home side scores. These things are formative.
If you've been skeptical about local soccer in front of your players, this is the summer to stop. Not because MLS is perfect, but because your job is to build a generation of people who love this game enough to keep playing it, coaching it, watching it, and supporting it. That doesn't happen if the message they get from their coach is: the stuff near you isn't worth caring about.
I'm from England. I don't plan to go back. But I miss the culture — the way the whole country slows down when a major tournament is on, the way school start times get pushed back the morning after a big game, the way it's impossible to avoid it. I want that for the kids I coach here. I want every player to feel the way I feel when England are in a tournament.
We are the ones who can create that. Not by coaching more. By caring, out loud, about the game in all its forms — and making sure our players see us doing it.
This summer is the window. Use it.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 60 — Summer of Love. And Opportunity
@LeeDunneSoccer
No Absolutes
I asked a group of campers if you can use your toes in soccer. Almost all of them said no. But if the ball is just out of reach, you are going to use your toes. We taught them that rule. And it's not really a rule.
There are exactly two absolutes in soccer. Score more goals than your opponent, and play within the rules.
That's it. Everything else — how you pass, how you shoot, which foot, which surface, how many touches — is context. The game changes constantly, and the player who can solve whatever problem is in front of them is more valuable than the player who executes one approved technique in one approved situation.
But walk onto almost any youth training field and you'll hear absolutes everywhere.
Don't use your toes. Always use your laces. Never dribble backwards. Always play it simple. Two touches, then move.
Some of these are good heuristics. None of them are rules.
The Toes Conversation
I was running a summer camp session themed around creativity. Not a passing day, not a shooting day — creativity. The opening question was simple: how can you be creative? What does that look like to you?
The kids lit up. They talked about Rabonas and rainbow flicks and step-overs. One wanted to know if he could try a backheel in a game. Exactly right. That's the creative thinking you want firing before the session starts — players already imagining themselves doing something unexpected, something individual.
Then I asked: can you be creative with your toes?
Almost every player in the group said no. You can't use your toes. They'd been told — probably multiple times, by multiple coaches — that toes are for bozos. Toes are wrong. Don't use your toes.
Now think about that for a second. If the ball is a half-step out of reach and you need to keep it in, what do you use? Your toes. If you're stretching to poke a shot past the goalkeeper, what connects? Your toes. Is it the preferred surface for a twenty-yard pass? No. But does it work, in certain situations, more than you'd expect? Yes.
We taught them an absolute that isn't absolute. And in doing so, we removed a creative option before they ever got to explore it.
What the Technical Reports Don't Say
UEFA and FIFA release technical reports at the end of every major tournament. I read them. They're useful — they show formation trends, set piece statistics, where goals were scored from, disciplinary patterns.
What they never tell you is how the goals were scored. Not in the technical sense. They'll say open play or set piece, header or foot. They won't tell you whether it was struck with the laces or toed in. Whether it was a clean finish or a deflection off a shin. Whether the winning pass was an outside-of-the-foot disguise or a simple give-and-go.
Because none of that is tracked, because it doesn't matter. Goals count regardless of how they go in. Passes count regardless of what surface delivered them. The outcome is the only measure, and the outcome is served by whatever decision the player made in that moment with the information available to them.
That's what we're developing. Decision-makers. Not technique executors.
Creativity and Unpredictability as Themes, Not Topics
At camp, we worked the whole week on themes instead of techniques. Monday was unpredictable. Wednesday was creative. The question wasn't "how do you pass the ball?" — it was "how were you unpredictable today?"
That question lands differently. A player who passed when everyone expected a dribble was unpredictable. A player who checked their shoulder and switched direction three times before finding the pass — unpredictable. A player who played it with the outside of the foot to disguise the direction — creative, and unpredictable.
None of those are a technique to be taught in isolation. All of them emerged from the game environment we created, because we gave players permission to try them.
The small-sided game was the space. The theme gave them something to hunt. The technique — when it needed addressing — came from what we observed in the game.
The Flip Argument
I know the counterargument. Some coaches believe you need to teach the technique first so the player has it available when the game demands it. You need to build the library before you can use it.
I understand the logic. I don't think it works for most players, most of the time.
Here's why. When you isolate a technique — two players ten yards apart, standing foot beside the ball, inside of the foot, follow through — you're teaching the skill without the problem. The player learns the motion. They don't learn why it matters, or when to use it, or how to choose it over any of the fifteen other options the game might present.
When the game creates the problem first, the technique has meaning. My center midfielder can't get the ball wide quickly enough because the opponent is already shifting. Now I have a conversation with her about how to strike the ball with disguise — outside of the foot, or a driven ball early before the block — because she's experienced the problem in real time. She knows what she's trying to solve. The technique is the answer, not the starting point.
Then the development loop closes. She goes home, I give her a specific task: put a cone thirty yards away, get the ball played to you, get your first touch out, strike the cone. She comes back on Thursday. Same environment. Same game. Did it get better? Where is she now?
That's a development cycle built from a game-identified need. Not a session plan I designed in advance for a fictional player.
Position-Relative Training
One more version of this. The face-up 1v1 is the most common individual training exercise in youth soccer. Coach plays the ball, player receives, defender comes at them, they try to beat them and score.
Fine. But not every player faces that 1v1 in the game.
Your goalkeeper doesn't. Your holding midfielder, anchoring a midfield three, shouldn't be winning 1v1s in the middle of the pitch — they should be receiving on the half-turn, shielding, recycling possession. Training them in a face-up 1v1 doesn't develop their actual game demands. It develops a skill they rarely need.
When you remove the absolutes, you start asking better questions. What does this player actually face in the game? What's the technical demand for their position, within the game model we're playing? That question produces different training environments. And those environments produce players who are prepared for what the game actually asks of them.
I Dare You to Try It
The thing I've noticed about coaching absolutes is that they mostly come from fear. Fear that the center back tries something and loses the ball and we concede. Fear that the wide player tries a Rabona and it fails and we lose possession. Fear of the mistake.
But the player who is afraid to try things because their coach told them not to isn't learning to play the game. They're learning to avoid punishment.
The center back who tries an outside-of-the-foot pass and loses it — I want them to try it again. Do it better. Figure it out. That's development. The one who plays it safe and pings it long to avoid criticism — that player is protecting themselves, not growing.
There are no absolutes. There are better options and worse options in specific situations. Our job is to give players enough experience inside the game that they learn, over time, which is which — and the courage to try, fail, and try again.
"I dare you to do it" is more useful than "don't worry about it."
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 59 — No Absolutes
@LeeDunneSoccer
Change Your Questions, Change Your Results
Three questions I stopped asking: 'Do you have any questions?' — 'Does that make sense?' — and 'Why are you late?' Here's what I ask instead, and why it changes everything.
Most coaching questions don't work. Not because coaches aren't smart — but because the questions are structured in a way that either answers themselves, or leave no room for a real response.
Here are three I stopped asking.
"Do you have any questions?"
You've just delivered a coaching point. You've explained the shape, the moment, the decision you want to see. You look around at the group and say: any questions?
Silence.
It's not because they understood everything. It's because you've given them too much at once, and they want to get back to playing, and nobody wants to be the one who holds up the game by asking something. So they nod and go.
If you're coaching in the flow — talking to individuals while the game continues — this question becomes almost obsolete. The game is answering most of their questions in real time. The players who need to understand something more deeply get that through the individual conversation you're already having with them.
"Does that make sense?"
Yes or no. Usually yes. Tells you nothing.
If you want to know whether a player understood what you just said, ask them to show you. That's the question I come back to more than any other: Can you show me?
It's not confrontational. It's an invitation. Can you show me how you're going to support the player on the ball there? Can you show me where you think you need to be? Can you show me how you'd get into the space behind the defender?
When a player shows you, you know exactly what they've understood and what they haven't. You don't have to guess. And the act of demonstrating something — physically moving into position, pointing to the space, walking through the moment — reinforces it in a way that nodding along never does.
"Why are you late?"
This one's about something different. The player who arrives flustered, five minutes into training, already knows they're late. Every second they've been sprinting across the car park they've been thinking about the fact that they're late. They know it. They're stressed about it. And your first words being "why are you late?" just compounds all of that.
It's also rarely their fault. They're twelve. They don't drive. They're at the mercy of a sibling's schedule, a parent's work meeting, cross-town traffic. Even if it was their fault — you asking why, in front of the group, doesn't fix anything. It just creates shame.
What I ask now: Are you okay? Are you ready to play?
If they need a minute, they get a minute. If they can jump straight in, I give them a role immediately — feeding balls into the game, stepping in as a floater on the next rotation, anything that gets them connected rather than stood on the outside watching. One player I had recently arrived and immediately asked how many laps he had to run. The answer was zero. Get your boots on, here's what we're doing, you're going to feed for two minutes and then rotate in. I could see him relax in real time.
Making late players run laps has never warmed anyone up for soccer, and it never changed anyone's arrival time. Engaging them immediately, with compassion and a job to do — that works.
Questions That Actually Work
The shift is from group questions to individual questions, and from closed questions to open ones that require a real answer.
In the flow of a game, while play is continuing, I'm moving around the field and asking individual players things like:
"Where should you be right now to support the number four on the ball?"
"What does our game model demand of you here?"
"What problem is that team creating for us?"
"If the goalkeeper steps out and the number four steps into midfield, what does that open up for you?"
These questions are position-specific and moment-specific. They're not directed at the group — they're directed at the individual whose body is in that situation. Which means the answer they give you is genuine. They can't just nod. They have to think about what's in front of them right now.
And when they give you an answer — even if it's unexpected — that's a coaching moment. I had a right back tell me they thought they needed to be deeper. My first instinct was to correct it. But when I looked at the situation, they were seeing something I hadn't noticed — the opponent's winger had checked away and left space in behind. Their answer wasn't wrong. They were seeing the game.
That's the goal. Players thinking for themselves, not waiting to be told.
The False Nine Example
I ran a training session recently where I asked one player to operate as a false nine — dropping into midfield to receive rather than staying as a focal point up top. I didn't announce this to the defending team. I just set it up and let it run.
After a few minutes I stopped the center back. "What was the problem for you in that last block?"
They saw it straight away. The striker was dropping into a space they weren't used to tracking. We talked about two possible solutions — drop with them or let the midfielder step. Then we played again.
A few minutes later I went back to the attacking player. "They figured you out. What do you do differently now?"
That question puts the problem back on them. Not "here's what to do next" — but "what would you do?" And they came up with something. We played. It developed. By the end of the session, both sides had been through three or four cycles of problem-solving without a single team-wide stoppage.
That's game IQ being built in real time.
The Review Moment
When an interval ends — say a four-minute block of play — I have a brief window before the next one starts. That's not dead time. That's the review.
"Did it work?" — simple, yes or no, but now you can expand. Why did it work? What helped? What got in the way? What are you going to do differently in the next four minutes?
It takes thirty seconds. It closes the loop. And it connects the work they just did to the work they're about to do, rather than letting each interval be its own isolated event.
Beyond the Field
The last piece is easy to overlook but worth using: tools outside of training. A short Zoom call. A video clip in the team chat. A screenshot from the game at the weekend with a question attached.
"Watch 2:35 of this clip. What does the center back do to deal with the pressing forward? What would we do in that situation?"
You're not asking for an essay. A voice note back. A quick reply. Something that proves they watched it and thought about it. The field time is precious and often surrounded by noise. A five-minute conversation over video, where you can show something and ask about it, gets you a quality of tactical exchange that's hard to achieve on the sideline while twelve other teams are training around you.
Change the questions. Change what you learn about your players. Change what your players learn about themselves.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 58 — Change Your Questions, Change Your Results
@LeeDunneSoccer
Punishments
I've done all four of these things. And having done them — and now doing things differently — I think the behavior we call 'discipline problems' is mostly the environment we created.
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
Optimize Your Training Environment
When I was younger I had issues outside of soccer. I went into the sport I loved and found the same environment there — a coach who didn't ask questions, didn't listen, just told me what to do. I think about that a lot when I'm on the field.
When I was coming through my own soccer experience as a kid, I had things going on outside the game. Personal stuff. And I went to soccer — the sport I loved — looking for somewhere to feel okay. What I found was a coach who never asked me a question, never listened to anything I had to say, and mostly just told me what to do.
That stayed with me. And I think about it every time I'm on the field.
The training environment is not just the cones and the small-sided games and the constraints. It's everything about how players experience being coached by you. Whether they feel safe there. Whether they feel known. Whether they'd choose to come even if their parents didn't make them.
Here are five areas where I think we can all do better.
Ask Better Questions
"How are you?" is not a question. Not really. It's a social reflex that gets a one-word answer and nothing more. I do it too — we all do — and nothing useful ever comes from it.
The questions that build a training environment are the ones that are actually specific to the person in front of you. Why do you play? Where do you want this to take you? What do you want to achieve this season — not for the team, for you? Do you want to go to college? Do you want to be a pro? Do you just love playing with your friends and that's enough?
If you do IDPs with your players, you already have the raw material for real questions. You know their goals, their favorite player, the areas they're working on. "Did you see Messi in the Clásico last weekend?" is a different conversation than "how are you?" — and if you know that Messi is their player, it opens a door.
The in-session version of this is just as important. Not "good job" when a player does something right, but: "Why did you make that choice? What were you seeing? What were you thinking when the ball came to you?" These questions build game understanding in a way that instructions never do. And they tell the player that you're watching them specifically, not just the game in general.
Listen to What They Actually Say
This is the harder part. Asking the question is easy. Staying quiet and actually taking in the answer — and then responding to what was said, not what you expected to hear — is the skill.
My two go-to responses when a player tells me something: "Tell me more" and "How can I help you?"
"Tell me more" keeps the conversation open. It signals that I'm not in a rush to give my coaching point. What they say next is often the thing that actually matters.
"How can I help you?" changes the dynamic. It puts them in charge of what they need, rather than me deciding what they need. Sometimes they need tactical support. Sometimes they need individual training suggestions. Sometimes they're struggling with something that has nothing to do with soccer. I don't know unless I ask and then wait.
One thing to watch: listening can't only happen around problems. If every player conversation is about what's going wrong or what they could be better at, you create a relationship built on deficit. Find what they're doing well and challenge them further on that. "You juggle really well — can you get your heel in every five touches? Can you do it with your weaker foot?" Push the strength upward, not just the weakness forward.
Challenge Players Specifically
The challenges that stick are individual ones, not team-wide ones.
Not "score more goals this season" — but "you're a central midfielder, and based on your position profile, the challenge for you today is to combine with the nine to break the midfield line. How many times can you do that? What does success look like to you when the final whistle goes?"
This resets what success means. A team can only win about a third of their games. If winning is the only measure, every player is failing most of the time. But if a midfielder came into the game with a specific challenge tied to their profile — and they executed it four times — that's a success, regardless of the scoreline.
I always add one more question to whatever challenge I set: "What happens if it doesn't work?" Not because I want them to plan for failure, but because a player who has thought about the contingency is better equipped when the game gets difficult. They're not panicking. They have an answer already prepared.
Guide — Don't Just Give the Answer
Rolling substitutions in youth soccer are one of the most underused coaching tools available to us. When a player comes off, that's not a rest — that's a coaching moment. They can see the game from outside it. They're still in the heat of it emotionally. And you have thirty seconds to thirty minutes with them, depending on the situation.
The temptation is to tell them what's not working and what you want them to do differently. Resist it. Ask first. "Why do you think that's happening? What would you try?" Listen. Then offer your perspective if they need it: "Do you want to know what I think?" And if their answer is reasonable: "Why don't you go and try that when you go back on?"
Players who solve problems themselves in training solve problems themselves in games. Players who wait to be told what to do keep waiting, even when the coach can't reach them.
Celebrate More Than You Think You Should
We have a tendency to only celebrate outcomes. The goal. The win. The clean sheet. But those things happen a third of the time at best, and they depend on the opponent as much as they depend on us.
There's a lot more worth celebrating than we usually acknowledge.
A player who tried to execute on their positional profile and lost the ball in the attempt — that's a celebration. You tried it. That's the thing we're working on. Now let's understand why it didn't work and try again. Spotlighting that attempt, out loud, in front of the group, changes the culture around risk-taking.
In training, when the ball goes out of play and you're resetting: "Just want to point out what Liam did there — look at the pass he tried to play, right into the channel, exactly what we've been working on." That takes ten seconds. It means everything to Liam. And every other player in the session just learned what the target looks like.
Celebrate all of it. Did everyone show up? Celebrate that. Did they all wear the right kit? Worth a mention. Did someone who's been struggling finally attempt something they've been avoiding? Say so.
We just came out of a year where nobody played at all. Coaches were fighting on sidelines the first weekend back after lockdown — one got sent off. First game back. After a year of nothing.
That's the opposite of celebrating. The field is the thing we all said we missed. The players in front of you chose this sport and showed up to practice tonight. That's already worth something.
Make sure they know you see it.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 56 — Optimize Your Training Environment
@LeeDunneSoccer