Knowledge AND Wisdom — You Actually Need Both

There's a quote from Einstein that does the rounds on social media every so often: knowledge is knowing the street is one way, but wisdom is looking both directions anyway.

It's a good one. And the more time I spend in this coaching world, the more I think it describes exactly where most coaches get stuck.

The knowledge trap

Knowledge, in our world, is the formal stuff. Licenses. Courses. Conventions. Symposiums. The pathway from Grassroots to D to C to B to A. And that pathway matters — if you want to coach at a certain level, you need certain credentials. That's not going anywhere and I'm not here to argue against it.

But here's what I've seen over and over. Coaches go through a license, perform to the standards of that course, and then drive away and go back to doing exactly what they were doing before. Just like passing your driving test and then immediately rolling the window down and doing 90. The course is done, the box is ticked, and the learning stops.

Collecting licenses without applying them is just paperwork.

The wisdom trap

On the other side, you've got the coach who says "I've been coaching for 20 years" like it's the answer to every question.

And honestly? There is real value there. Twenty years on the grass builds something you can't get in a classroom. You develop instincts. You read players. You know when to push and when to put an arm around someone. You recognize the moments in a session that need to change, and you feel it before you can even explain it. That's genuinely valuable wisdom.

But when that coach hasn't engaged with any new methodology, hasn't collaborated with other coaches, hasn't challenged their own thinking in years — that wisdom starts to calcify. You're not building, you're just repeating.

Neither one alone is enough. You need both.

What we're doing at the Vikings

At SF Vikings, we've set a standard that every coach is expected to move to the next license level every two years. But here's the piece that makes it actually work: our Director of Coaching doesn't coach any teams. His entire role is to support coach development — observing sessions, mentoring coaches, helping them connect what they learned in their last course to what they're doing on the field every week.

That second part is what most clubs skip. They get coaches through the license and then leave them to figure it out. Our DoC is there to bridge the gap between the knowledge from the course and the wisdom coaches are developing in real time.

We also built a common language across the club — five keywords that every coach uses, every player understands, and every family has been told about. Because you can ask families to stay quiet on the sideline and they won't. They want to support. So instead we give them the language. Here's how you support — use these five words. Now the whole environment is speaking the same language, from the training field to the car ride home.

The Internal A License

Here's the framing I use with my coaches: regardless of what your official license says, the goal is to become an internal A license coach. Not the official one — the internal one.

An internal A license coach speaks the same language as everyone else in the club. They uphold the communication standards we've set. They plan their sessions. They connect with families. They show up early, ready to coach. They are the best coach for their players, their team, and the culture we're building — and that's what actually matters.

We pay our coaches for 30 minutes before every session. That sounds small, but it changes everything. It means we can legitimately expect session plans, early arrivals, and weekly family communication. You can't ask for accountability without resourcing it.

And here's the perspective I always come back to: when you step on the field, you're delivering the final 25% of that session. The other 75% — the game analysis, the planning, the preparation, the thinking about your players — all happened before you got there. Pay coaches for that work and watch what happens to the quality of your sessions.

Knowledge tells you what to do. Wisdom tells you how and when. Build both, deliberately, and everything else gets better.

Heads and Volleys Podcast, Episode 89

@LeeDunneSoccer

Organization is Everything

Organization is everything in a training session. I genuinely believe that.

And I don't mean have your cones in a bag and show up on time. I mean the difference between a session that produces something real and one that's just an hour of activity — is almost always how organized it was.

Let me give you three levels. Because I think about organization in three stages, and I use them every time I'm coaching or teaching coaches.

But before I get into them, here's the number one mistake I see from coaches at every level: they set up the session, they get the players going, and then they start coaching.

That sounds right. It isn't.

The first thing you should do when a session starts is nothing. Step back. Observe. Watch what's actually happening before you say a word. Because what you think is happening and what's actually happening are often two very different things. And if you start coaching a problem that isn't the real problem, you're wasting everyone's time.

Observation is the skill most coaches skip. Don't skip it.

Level one is the basic stuff. Are the cones in a straight line? Does the field look like a game — or does it look like a geometry exercise? Do you have enough balls? Are the goals in the right place? Does every player know what team they're on? Does every player know what to do when they win the ball?

That last one kills more sessions than anything else. You set up the activity, you say "go," the red team wins the ball and just... stops. They look at you. Because you told the blue team what to do, and you forgot to tell the red team. That's a level one fail. And it happens to good coaches all the time.

If you are brand new to coaching, level one is a massive win. Get that right and you're already ahead.

Level two is about whether your players are playing in the right positions for what you're trying to achieve. Is your striker at the top of the formation? Are your wingers wide? Is your center back in the center? Because if you're doing a 4v4 and your striker is drifting central and your winger is chasing the ball in the middle of the park — what exactly are you preparing them for?

Level two is where the dots start connecting. The position in training should be the position in the game. The demand in training should reflect the demand in the game. A 1v1 drill is fine. But can you build it into a 4v4 where there are multiple game-realistic 1v1s happening simultaneously? Now you're getting somewhere.

The tempo matters here too. Do you want them to play fast? Make the field smaller. Do you want them to play slow and purposeful? Give them more space. You are manipulating the environment to get what you want — and that's coaching.

Level three is where it gets really interesting.

Level three is when you're recreating what happened last weekend — or what you expect to happen next weekend. The opponent presses high? Great. Red team, your job is to press like crazy, win the ball high, make the blue team uncomfortable. Blue team — how are you going to break it? That's level three. You're not doing a generic exercise anymore. You're doing your game, with your players, against a problem you actually need to solve.

And here's the thing about level three: most coaches never get there. Not because they don't have the knowledge — but because the organization isn't right. The teams aren't clear, the positions aren't set, the players don't know their roles — and by the time you sort all that out, the session is over.

This is why I always say: run the same session at least twice.

First night — get through level one and level two. Players learn the structure, they learn their positions, they figure out the rules. It might feel slow. That's fine.

Second night — you come back to the exact same session. Now everyone knows what they're doing. Now you can push into level three. Now you can say "red team, press from halfway" and they understand it because the foundation is there. Now you're actually coaching.

By the third session of the same structure? You might feel like a million dollars. Your players are breaking a high press that your real opponent runs. They're doing in training exactly what you need them to do on Saturday. And that connection — training to game, Tuesday to Saturday — that's what makes a coach good.

Organization gives you that. Not the flashy session plan. Not the newest drill. Just getting the basics right, observing what's actually happening, and building up through the levels.

That's it. That's everything.

Heads and Volleys Podcast, Episode 88

@LeeDunneSoccer

Your Players Aren't Lacking Intensity. Your Session Might Be.

I was running a coach education class recently and a question came in at the end: How do I add more intensity to my training sessions? How do I demand it from my players?

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It's one of the most common questions I get. And every time I hear it, I hear the same thing underneath it — a coach standing on the sideline saying "come on, guys, let's go, lift it up, work harder" while the players kind of shuffle around looking like they'd rather be somewhere else.

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That's a tough place to be. And every coach who's been there has good intentions. But I want to give you the honest answer, even if it's not the comfortable one.

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It's probably not the kids.

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Before you do anything else, ask yourself: are these same players intense in games? Are they competing, fighting for balls, desperate to win? If the answer is yes — and for most youth players it is — then the problem isn't your players. The problem is that your training session doesn't look like the game.

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That's where I want to start.

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Session Design: Does It Look Like the Game?

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When players step into a match, they're competing. There's direction, there's an opponent, there's something to win and lose. The environment creates the intensity naturally.

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Now look at your training session. If you're doing isolated skill work, if you're running drills that have no opponent and no real consequence, if the game doesn't come until the last fifteen minutes — you've removed every element that creates intensity in the first place. And then you're standing there wondering where it went.

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Play-Practice-Play fixes this. Players arrive and go straight into a small-sided game. Not a free-for-all — a structured, coached, managed game with direction and competition built in. Then you coach through the game. Then you go back to the game. Intensity is present from the first minute because the environment demands it. That's the model.

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Meeting the Needs of Your Players

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Here's something coaches don't think about enough: when is your training session?

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Is it right after school, when the kids have been sitting in class for six hours and they need to run around before they can think straight? Or is it right after PE, when half your team just ran three miles and their legs are already gone?

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Is it a hot Thursday in July? Is it raining? Did these kids eat dinner yet?

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I'm not saying lower your standards. I'm saying understand your context. A training session plan you found online was written with no knowledge of your players, your schedule, your weather, or what was happening in their lives that day. You have to adapt.

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If your players come to you twice a week and don't touch a ball otherwise, that's different from a group that plays on the street every afternoon. If you're coaching boys who need competition to come alive, that's different from an older girls' team where the social element matters and you need to warm them into it — maybe they get five minutes with the ball at their feet in pairs before you ramp it up. Try it. See what happens. Didn't work? Try something else. That's coaching.

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Timers: The Real Magic

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Here's the one thing I'd put in every training session tomorrow.

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Timers.

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Not vague time pressure. Actual, out-loud, countdown timers. "You've got two minutes — go." And when it hits two minutes, stop it. Count down the last ten seconds out loud. Let them hear the clock.

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Here's why this works: before you use timers, you let the game go until the quality drops. You've seen it — someone falls and laughs, the ball goes out and gets jogged after instead of sprinted, players start grabbing each other's shirts and giggling. The intensity is gone. You let it go too long.

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The timer stops that. You watch the game, you find the sweet spot — that moment just before the quality starts to fall — and you stop it there. Now they want more. Now the player on the ball is getting a shot off even as the whistle blows, because they're not done yet. That's the moment you're looking for.

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And here's the flip side: it keeps you accountable too. A two-minute phase of play means you don't stop to check your phone. You don't pull a player aside for a five-minute conversation while the others drift. The clock is running for everyone.

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Then when you reset, you can tweak the constraint. Winners keep the ball to start. That's one of my favourites — reward the team that scored, don't punish the one that didn't. Suddenly the incentive to win is baked into the game itself.

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Read the Room. Have a Pivot.

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Sometimes you do everything right and the session still feels flat. The kids are exhausted, something happened at school, three players are injured and the game doesn't flow. It happens.

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The best coaches I've worked with don't fight that. They read the room, they adjust, they have a pivot. Not every session is going to be your best one. But if you understand who you're coaching, what they need, and what the environment is asking of them — you're going to hit the mark far more often than you miss it.

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Intensity isn't something you demand. It's something you design.

Listen to the full episode: Ep. 87 — Training Lacking Intensity?

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@LeeDunneSoccer

The Most Underrated Coaching Skill Is Watching

I say it a lot: observe, watch, see what's going on. But I realized I'd never really broken down what that actually means. What exactly are you looking for? When are the key moments? That's what this one is about.

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Let me walk you through the five things I'm looking at every time my players are on the field.

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1. Is It Organized?

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This sounds basic, but you'd be surprised. Players shooting the wrong way. Three different colors of bibs and nobody knows who's on which team. Not enough balls. Players in positions that don't match how you play on the weekend. You don't know any of this is happening unless you take a step back and actually look.

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Organization first. Every time.

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2. Are They Figuring It Out?

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Once the setup is right, you let them play — and then you watch. When you're in a game-realistic environment, this is where it gets really interesting, because your players are not just trying to win. They're trying to do it the way you've asked them to.

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Does your build-out look like your build-out? Are your center backs in the right positions? Is the six doing what the six should be doing? When you've worked through patterns ahead of time — on a tactical board, in a walk-through, whatever it looks like — now's the time to see if they've absorbed it.

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And here's the key thing: you have to let them figure it out. Don't stop every 30 seconds to correct. Let it run. Watch. Are they getting it? If not, why not? Is the field too big? Too small? Did you ask for something they don't understand yet? You only know if you watch.

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3. Are They Succeeding and Failing at the Right Rate?

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For me, roughly 50/50 is the sweet spot. If your players are succeeding every single time, the activity is too easy. If they're failing constantly, it's too hard, or the setup doesn't match what you're asking for.

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And here's where it gets more layered. When your build-out players are finding it too easy, you can pull the pressing team aside and give them specific instructions — press high, press to one side, mirror what your upcoming opponent is going to do. Now you've made it harder. Now you observe again. Can your forwards press the way you want them to? The whole cycle resets.

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Adjust, observe, adjust, observe. That's the job.

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4. The Nuances — Behaviors and Relationships

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This is the stuff that's easy to miss if you're not paying close attention.

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Is your striker being too greedy? At some point selfishness tips over into disrupting the whole training environment. Is there a player getting picked on when they make mistakes? Is the star player pulling focus away from everything else happening on the field? Is your ten ending up in your nine's space because they haven't figured out their lines yet?

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You only notice these things if you're watching. And I can't tell you how many times a parent has flagged something to a coach — "have you noticed that Johnny's having a rough time with a player in the group?" — that the coach had completely missed, simply because they weren't observing.

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The game is the teacher. But only if you're watching the lesson.

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5. Reflect — On Paper, Not Just in Your Head

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Carry a notepad. I know, it sounds old-fashioned. But having a pen and paper in your pocket during training changes your whole approach to observation. You write things down. You circle names. You put an asterisk next to a player who did something that caught your eye. You note when something didn't work the way you planned.

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When you get back in the car after training, you've got an accurate record of what actually happened — not just what you remember. And memory is selective. We tend to remember the things that confirmed what we already believed. The notepad forces you to be objective.

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On my A license, I prepared five scenarios I thought would come up in my training plan. Scenario two came up. The other four didn't. And then something else emerged entirely — an unintended consequence of an instruction I'd given one of my players that I hadn't anticipated. That's coaching. It always has consequences, planned and unplanned. The ones who grow are the ones who notice.

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Get Out of Your Own Way

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The last thing I'll say is this: when the game is running, stop talking. Step back. Don't drift over to chat with another coach. Don't check your phone. Don't get pulled into a conversation with a parent.

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Give yourself time to watch. The session plan is set. The game is going. Now your job is to observe — so that when you do step in, what you say is actually connected to what's happening, not just to what you assumed would happen.

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You can't coach what you haven't seen.

‍Listen to the full episode: Ep. 86 — When and How to Observe

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@LeeDunneSoccer

"Quicker" Isn't a Coaching Point

Quick, quick, quick, quick. Go, go, go. We need to play faster.

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I hear it every weekend. At ODP sessions, at club games, at parks where parents are coaching from the sideline. Coaches and parents absolutely convinced that the answer is to play quicker. And they're not wrong — speed of play matters enormously in soccer. But the way it's being asked for, and the way players are interpreting it, is causing more problems than it's solving.

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Here's what happens when you yell quicker: your players get the ball and go. Head down, direct, get it forward as fast as possible. And then they lose it, or they misplace the pass, or they take the touch that puts them under pressure instead of out of it. And you yell quicker again.

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Because that's not speed of play. That's rushing. And rushing only makes it worse.

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Speed of Play Is a Decision, Not a Speed

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Here's the thing that reframes this for me: speed of play is a key quality. And if you look at what US Soccer actually says about key qualities, it comes back to reading the game and making decisions. Not just going faster.

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Watch a Pep Guardiola team. Watch what happens when his goalkeeper gets the ball and a center back steps on it and stops play completely. Every youth coach on the planet would lose their mind. But that pause — two, three seconds — allows every player ahead of the ball to reorganize. To dismark. To interchange. By the time the ball moves, the team has completely reset its shape, and they're now in a better position than if they'd just played it quickly off the back line and hoped for the best.

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Speed of play can mean slow it down.

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Now, I know U14 players probably can't do that. Yet. But the understanding underneath it — that quick doesn't always mean fast, and that sometimes controlling the tempo is the most intelligent thing you can do — that's what we're trying to develop.

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Quick vs. Rushed

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Let me separate those two things, because they get confused all the time.

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Quick is a good first touch and an immediate intention. I know what I'm going to do before the ball arrives. I've already read my options. When the ball comes, I play it — fast, clean, in the right direction.

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Rushed is panic. The ball comes and I haven't read anything yet. So I just kick it, or I spin without knowing where I'm going, or I force the long ball because it feels like something is happening.

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Rushing comes from uncertainty. Players who don't know where they're supposed to be, what the options are, or what the word "quicker" is actually asking them to do. We haven't taught them. We've just yelled faster.

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Teach It Through Set Pieces

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One of my favourite ways to introduce quick play — especially with younger or less experienced players — is through set pieces. Specifically, those cheeky moments where the opponent isn't ready.

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The referee has given us a free kick. Two or three of their players are still arguing about the call. The rest of their team is wandering. My player knows: tap and play. We go. Now the opponent has to scramble.

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I don't shout anything from the sideline. Not "they're not ready!" Not "go, go, go!" That just tells the other team to get set. My players have to read it themselves. They have to learn to see the moment and make the decision.

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One or two players pick this up naturally. Those are the ones who take the quick free kicks. Over time, more players start to develop that read. That's the goal — not players who go fast because I told them to, but players who know when it's time to go fast and when it isn't.

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The 4v4 Four-Goal Game

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For developing quick play in a training environment, I keep coming back to the four-goal game. Each team has two goals to attack — placed wide on each side of the playing area. The game forces players to shift the ball quickly, because if the whole defense crowds over to protect one goal, the other side is wide open.

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Your player wins the ball, sees three defenders shifted left, makes a quick decision, and plays it right. That's speed of play. That's reading the game and acting on what you see.

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To reinforce it: if you can score within a set time frame of winning the ball, it's worth two goals. Quick transition, well-executed, earns a bonus. Not the only way to score — just like in a real game — but a really nice incentive for your players to be looking for that moment.

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And here's the piece I love about this: when you connect it back to the game on the weekend, you can say to your players and their families — "we scored that from the other side of the field six times today. That would have been twelve bonus goals." The actual score of the game doesn't define whether you played well. Whether you applied what you worked on — that's the measure.

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My key word for this is break. "We're going to break from here." When our players hear that word, they know: space in front, opponent out of position, get forward now. We train it, they recognize it in the game. The coach doesn't need to shout it — they've already gone.

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That's what speed of play actually looks like.

Listen to the full episode: Ep. 85 — What is Speed of Play Anyway?

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@LeeDunneSoccer

Before You Book That Tournament, Ask Yourself Why

Tournaments are a big business. If you've ever run one, or even just walked around one on a busy Saturday in August, you don't have to squint too hard to see why they're given such a high priority in the youth soccer calendar.

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Here in Northern California, the second-to-last weekend of every month has no scheduled league games. That slot exists so teams can go to tournaments. And whether it's your club making the call, the families pushing for it, or just the culture of your program — you're probably going to some of them.

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I'm not here to argue whether you should or shouldn't. That's a different conversation. What I want to ask is: why are you going?

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Not sarcastically. Genuinely. Why are you going to this specific tournament, with this specific team, at this specific point in your season?

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Two Categories — And You Can Only Be In One

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The way I see it, there are two types of tournament experiences: fun and performance.

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Fun looks like a Halloween tournament with younger players — costumes, trick or treat, a hotel with a pool, siblings hanging out, parents relaxing together. It looks like a play date format where you run three games and treat it as an extended training opportunity. It's a team-building trip where the soccer is the vehicle and the togetherness is the destination.

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Performance looks like Surf Cup. Like an ECNL showcase where scouts might be watching. Like ODP Arizona in January, where everything around the games is built to put the players in the best position to compete and win.

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Here's the thing: you can't be in both categories at the same time. You can't go for fun, win your first two games, and suddenly decide you're going to win the whole thing. And you cannot go to win, lose your first two, and tell your families "well, we were here for fun anyway." One has to be the priority. Choose it. Own it. Build around it.

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The ODP Example: Setting It Up to Win

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When I take our ODP group to Arizona, we go to compete. And everything around the tournament reflects that.

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Players are only allowed to wear ODP gear when they're out of their rooms — not because of ego, but because it keeps them mentally connected to why they're there. They are ODP players on an ODP trip, and wearing the gear is a constant reminder of that.

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We send tactical information in advance — formations, set pieces, positional responsibilities — because we only see each other once a month. Players know their role before they land. They have something to read on the plane.

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The schedule is mapped out: activation time, arrival at the field an hour early, meals, bed by 10pm. We can't control the referees, the fields, the opposition, or whether a national team scout is watching during warmups. But we can control everything inside our environment. And we do.

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You can take elements of this for your club team even if you're not doing ODP. If you're going to win, tell your families what that means before you go. Tell them what the nutrition looks like between games. Tell them the pool is available after the last game on Sunday, not Saturday night. Set the standard early so no one is surprised by it later.

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Setting It Up for Fun

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If the purpose is fun, flip the approach entirely.

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Book the hotel with the pool. Plan the team dinner on Saturday night. Go to the movies after the last game. Make the breakfast on Sunday morning a group event that everyone contributes to.

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The kids will still look at the standings. The parents will still be doing the math on "if we win this and that team loses by two, we're in the final." That competitive energy doesn't disappear — it just isn't the thing you've organised everything around. The underlying commitment is that everyone goes home having had a good time, and next year when tournament sign-ups open, they want to go again.

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Fun still has structure. It doesn't mean stay up all night and eat junk between games. It means the structure is designed around the experience, not the result.

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Communicate Before You Go

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Here's the part that gets skipped most often: communicating the purpose to your families before you leave.

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Families will show up to a tournament with their own expectations. Some of them think it's a win-at-all-costs competition. Some think it's a low-key team trip. Some have no idea what to expect at all. If you haven't told them what it is, they'll fill in the gaps themselves — and everyone fills them in differently.

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The coach who doesn't set expectations ends up managing five different versions of the same trip simultaneously. Don't do that to yourself.

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Send a message, run a quick Zoom, or just pull everyone together before you head off: this is what this tournament is for us. This is what we're going to do, this is what we're going to avoid, and here's what success looks like. Families will trust you to tell them. Most of them are just waiting for someone to set the tone.

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One more thing worth asking — and I genuinely mean this — try explaining the tournament to a non-soccer friend. Someone who's not immersed in the culture of youth club soccer. Tell them where you're going, how much it costs, how many days, what the goal is. Then listen to your own answer. Do you like it?

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If you do, great. Go build around it. If you hesitate, that hesitation is worth paying attention to.

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Why are you going? Answer that first. Everything else follows.

Listen to the full episode: Ep. 83 — Tournaments

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@LeeDunneSoccer

Every Training Session You Find Online Is Out of Context

It's one of the most common questions I get when I'm running grassroots education: where do I find good training sessions? I need help, I don't know what to do, I Googled it and I got thousands of results and now I'm more confused than when I started.

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Here's the truth: every session plan you find online — including the ones on my own website — is completely out of context for your players.

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The Bayern Munich build-out session with Xabi Alonso? Your U9s can't do that. The Barcelona rondo with a pivot six? Your team might not even have a player who understands what a six does yet. The session that worked brilliantly for a coach in England who runs training twice a week with a group of highly competitive fourteen-year-olds? It might be entirely wrong for your group of ten-year-olds who show up once a week and just want to kick the ball with their friends.

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None of that makes any of those sessions bad. It just means context is everything. So here are the five steps I use — and the five I'd recommend for you — to take any session and make it actually work for your team.

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Step 1: What Are Your Goals?

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Not the session's goals. The team's goals. For the year, for the season, for the current cycle.

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Are you trying to peak at State Cup? Are you working with young players whose number one goal is to come back next year? Are you in an academy environment where players are being prepared for something beyond just youth soccer? Or are you running a recreational team where the definition of success is that everyone had fun?

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These are not trick questions. They just need answers before you pick up a session plan. If your goal is that seven-year-olds come back wanting to play again — which is a completely valid and important goal — then your training sessions need to feel fun, competitive in an age-appropriate way, and achievable. A session that makes them feel confused or unsuccessful every week is going to cost you players.

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If you run a spring season and a fall season, set goals for each. Work backwards into your training cycles. It doesn't have to be complicated. But when you know where you're going, choosing a training session gets a whole lot easier.

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Step 2: Check the Roadmaps or your Game Model

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US Soccer publishes player development roadmaps. They outline what players should realistically be able to do at each age and format — 7v7, 9v9, 11v11. It's worth looking at them, and your club may have their own version.

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The reason this matters: the roadmap keeps you honest about what's actually appropriate. Shooting is on every roadmap, at every age. But a shot at 7v7 looks completely different to a shot at 11v11. A seven-year-old driving the ball with their laces and hoping it goes in the general direction of the goal — that's a shot. A sixteen-year-old cutting across a defender and finishing with the outside of the foot — that's also a shot. (I scored one of those last week. Not to toot my own horn, but it happened.)

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The point is: match your session to where your players actually are, not where you wish they were, and not where the session you found online assumes they'll be.

The same reference to a game model - it gives you your plan up front because you have already defined how you want to play. The sessions begin to write themselves. Especially when you repeat quality sessions!

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Step 3: What Makes Your Players Tick?

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I was recently asked by a coach — who had played Division One college soccer — how to light a fire under her players. She couldn't understand why they weren't competing the way she expected them to.

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Her players were seven years old.

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Her last experience of playing was ultra-competitive collegiate soccer where scholarships were on the line. That's the frame she brought to the field with her daughter's team. And those little girls just wanted to play and have fun with their friends.

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My question back to her: what was your fire when you were seven? Probably fun. Probably friends. Probably the fact that someone gave you a ball and said go.

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So does your session reflect what your players actually need? If you have older girls who need a few minutes of social time before they're ready to compete, build that in. Ten minutes of chatting with a ball at their feet isn't wasted time — for a fifteen-year-old girl, that connection might be what keeps her coming back. If you've got boys who need competition to wake up, give them winners. Reward the team that scores by letting them restart with the ball. Don't punish the losing team — just make winning feel worthwhile.

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Observe your players. Find the thing that makes them push, and build your session around it.

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Step 4: Combine — Make It Yours

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Now you take the session you found and you adapt it. Remove a player if the numbers don't work. Change the goals to change the behavior. Add a timer if you need competition. Add a monster — a coach or assistant running around in a bib — if you're working with young ones who need a villain to chase.

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What you see online will never look exactly the same on your field. Prepare for that. Your space is different. Your players are different. Your numbers might be off by two. That's fine. Tweak it. Make it fit.

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And if your players aren't ready for what the session is asking — if the Barcelona pivot six is a concept they've never heard of — that's okay too. Slow it down. Introduce the idea first. Add it in over time. You're not running a first-team training session. You're building a foundation.

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Step 5: Do It Twice

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This is the one people skip. They plan a new session every single night, and then they wonder why they never have time to observe, or why they're always spending the first fifteen minutes explaining rules.

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Run the same session again.

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The first time, your players are learning the activity. They're figuring out the rules, the shape, the purpose. By the end they're just starting to play well. Then you go home, reflect on it, maybe share it with parents so they know what to expect. The next session, your players already know the game. They arrive, they go, and now you get to actually coach — because you're not managing confusion, you're managing the game.

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Three or four times in a row might be too much. But twice? Almost always the right call. Change a constraint or two if you need to keep it fresh. Same environment, slightly different rules. They stay in the game, you stay in the coaching.

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Five steps. Goals, roadmaps, observation, combine, do it twice. Any session you find — online, in a coaching course, on my website — run it through those five. When it fits your players, it'll work. When it doesn't fit, you'll know exactly why, and you'll know exactly what to change.

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Context is everything.

Listen to the full episode: Ep. 84 — Context for Training Sessions

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@LeeDunneSoccer

If You Yell at Referees, You're Making It Worse for the Rest of Us

I want to talk about referees.

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Not in the way you're probably thinking. I'm not here to list every bad call I've ever seen or build a case against referees in general. My starting position is actually this: I don't care about the referee. And I mean that in the most respectful way possible.

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What I mean is — I know the referee is not there to spite my team. They're not trying to make us lose, they're not trying to endanger my players. They showed up on a Sunday, probably for the fifth or sixth game of the day, to do a job. That's it. So I go into every game with a certain peace about the referee, because I've already accepted that whatever happens, they're doing their best and I'm not going to change the decision.

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That said. Last weekend, two things happened.

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Incident One: The Finger

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I had a player arriving late. Before kickoff, I'd already told the referee — hey, I've got a player coming, he'll be here. No problem.

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The player arrived. He warmed up on the side. The ball went out of play. I called over — "Hey, ref!" — and he turned around, pointed a finger at me, said "Not now, coach," and turned away.

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That was it. That was the whole exchange. I wanted to sub a player in who I'd already flagged before the game started. And I got a finger.

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Could I have timed it better? Maybe. It was a throw-in and he wasn't sure which way it was going. Maybe my "Hey, ref!" landed at the exact wrong moment. I can own that. But the defensiveness was immediate. There was no curiosity about what I needed — just a wall.

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To be clear: it worked itself out. Next stoppage, I flagged it again, he let the player on, no problem. But the instinct — that instant, pre-emptive defensive posture — that's what I want to talk about.

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Incident Two: The Goal

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This one is the story.

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One of my U7 boys — I call them the babies, they're playing up in a U8/U9 division — kicked the ball back to the goalkeeper. Goalkeeper picked it up. Standing on the goal line. Referee blew the whistle.

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Fair call. That's a back-pass. Indirect free kick. I knew it, I accepted it. I started organizing my players around the goalkeeper to block the kick — just to teach them what to do in that moment, because they're seven, they've never been in this situation before.

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The referee said: "Coach, you can't do that. It's handball. It's a direct kick."

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He then made the goalkeeper stand to the side — not allowed to block a direct kick, apparently — and let a player stand one yard from an unguarded goal and kick the ball in.

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And I just stood there thinking — have you ever seen that happen before? In any game, at any level?

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I waited until half-time, walked calmly onto the field to bring my players off, and as we were walking, I turned to the referee and said: can you explain that to me? I think it's an indirect free kick. Am I wrong?

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That was the question. Not an argument. Am I wrong?

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He said "those are the rules, coach, don't talk to me" — and stormed off.

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What Happened at Half-Time

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He went and checked his phone. I talked to my players. We moved on — because at U7, none of this matters. The other coach was laughing, by the way. His team had just been gifted a goal from one yard out. Fair play to him.

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When my players went back onto the field, the referee came up to me.

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"Hey coach. I want to apologize. I was wrong."

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He shook my hand.

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And here's what I said — and I mean this: it's not about right or wrong. I didn't want an apology. I just wanted to have the conversation. Because next weekend he's going to referee another game. And if that situation comes up again and he still believes it's a direct kick, the next coach is going to absolutely lose their mind at him — and that coach might not be as calm as I was trying to be.

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I told him: I'm not here to fight you. I'm not here to change your decision in that moment. That's already done. I just want to make sure we've got it right going forward.

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The Real Point

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That referee had been beaten up by coaches. I don't know how many times, I don't know when, but it was obvious. He couldn't receive a question without bracing for an attack. He couldn't hear "hey, can you explain that?" without it feeling like a confrontation.

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And that's not his fault. That's ours.

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If you are a coach who yells at referees — who argues calls, who gets in their face, who makes the touchline hostile — you are making it harder for every other coach who just wants to have a calm, honest conversation. You are the reason a referee put his finger up at me when I was trying to sub a player in. You are the reason a referee told me "don't talk to me" when I asked a genuine question.

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We talk a lot about the environment we create for our players. The environment we create for referees matters too.

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After the game I pulled my boys together and asked if they'd had fun. They said yes. Then one of them asked: "Did we win, coach?"

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"That's all we need to worry about, boys."

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And off we went.

Listen to the full episode: Ep. 82 — Ref!!!

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@LeeDunneSoccer

Are You Getting 20 Years of Experience, or One Year Repeated 20 Times?

Quick question: how many hours did you coach last week?

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Count it up. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Practice sessions, games, small groups, one-on-ones — all of it.

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This week I'm pushing eleven hours of practice across small group and team environments. Add two games on Friday, two more on Saturday, and potentially more on Sunday depending on how the tournament goes — I'm looking at close to twenty hours of coaching. And this is on top of everything else going on.

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Now. Of those twenty hours — how many would you say are actually quality?

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"I'm Showing Up. Isn't That Enough?"

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Honestly? Sometimes it has to be. I'm grateful I have a wife who accommodates an evening-and-weekend coaching schedule. I don't know if my kids have opinions about it. I haven't asked. That's probably a sidebar for another day.

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But "I'm showing up" is the floor, not the ceiling. It's the bare minimum we can offer the players we coach. The question is what we bring with us when we show up.

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Are your hours planned? Are they a continuation of a cycle, building on what you worked on last week? Or are you turning up with a vague idea and figuring it out when you get there? Both happen. But only one of them compounds.

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20 Years of Experience — or One Year, Repeated?

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Here's the thing that bothers me. A coach with twenty years of experience doesn't automatically make a great coach. Not if those twenty years are the same year, repeated twenty times.

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Same session structures. Same approach. Same response to the same problems. No new education, no curiosity about what other methodologies might offer, no honest reflection on whether what you're doing is actually working.

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Compare that to a coach who takes each year seriously — who tries something different, who asks questions of other coaches, who reads, who watches, who is genuinely in a different place at the end of the year than they were at the start.

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When I finished my A license, I had this feeling of — right, done, checklist complete. I'd been working through the US Soccer license pathway and when I got to the end of it, I felt like I'd ticked the last box. And then something shifted. I realised that finishing the checklist was the beginning, not the end.

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Since then: an MBA. The Tovo coaching course. Looking into Raymond Verheijen's work. Planning to shadow a friend who runs an academy in Europe, just to see how they do things differently. Todd Beane — controversial for some, but I'm interested in both him and Verheijen.

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These aren't things I was supposed to do. They're things I wanted to do, once I stopped waiting for the next formal step to tell me what to learn. Where is your education coming from right now? When did you last try something genuinely new?

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The Wagon Coach

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I want to paint you a picture.

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A coach walks across the field pulling one of those big Jeep wagons. Poles hanging out the side. A mannequin in there. Different sizes of soccer balls. A rebounder wall. Tennis balls, cones in three different sizes, a speed ladder, a couple of flags. Looks incredible. They spend thirty minutes setting it all up and it looks like a proper professional training environment.

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And here's my question: can your players go home and do any of that?

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I'm not saying the wagon is wrong. I'm saying — what's the point of a training session if it only exists inside that thirty-minute setup? If the learning can only happen with those specific pieces of equipment, in that specific arrangement, with you managing every part of it — then the moment the session ends, the learning stops.

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I want my players to be able to take something home. That's always the goal. In small group training, I'll ask a player: what do you do when you train on your own? What does it look like at home? Then I try to build something into the session that connects to that — a turn, a way of breaking pressure, something they can practice off the wall in their room with a tennis ball. Parents might not love it. But they'll be working on soccer.

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What Did You Learn?

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At the end of every session, before you drive home, ask yourself: what did I learn today? What am I going to adapt, tweak, or do differently next time?

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Not what the players learned. What you learned.

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That question is what separates coaches who are accumulating experience from coaches who are just accumulating time. You are always the student too. The moment you stop believing that, your hours start becoming repetition rather than growth.

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I've coached in 105-degree heat in Northern California with forty kids at lunchtime. I've done six-hour days, five days a week, through entire summers. Those hours taught me a lot — about managing energy, about reading groups, about handling the chaos that comes with all sorts of ages and abilities in the same space. But I was also learning something every single time, or trying to.

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That's the standard worth holding yourself to. Not just how many hours, but what you're bringing to them — and what you're taking away.

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How did you maximize yours?

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Listen to the full episode: Ep. 81 — Maximizing Hours

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@LeeDunneSoccer

The Minibus That Won Us a Game

Let me ask you a question before we get into anything else.

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The training session you're running tonight — would you want to play in it?

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Not "is it organised?" Not "does it have a clear objective?" Those things matter. But I'm asking something different. Would you actually want to be a player in that session? Would it be fun?

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Because here's what I keep coming back to: fun is not the opposite of learning. It might be the environment where the best learning happens.

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The ODP Arizona Story

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I just got back from the Far West Regional Championships with our ODP 2011 boys. Best players we have at that age group. Committed, driven, watching the game, understanding the bigger picture — the kind of group you'd pick from the entire Northern California pool if you could have anyone.

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We treated it as a performance environment. Everything was structured. Phones were handed in before bedtime, which I loved — one of my players averages nine hours of screen time a day, nine hours, and watching him actually engage with his teammates without a device in his face was remarkable. We had schedules, meal plans, activation sessions, set piece materials sent in advance. Everything controlled.

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We lost our first two games. Flat. Rigid. The soccer we'd seen these players produce in scrimmages — the reason we'd picked them — just wasn't there. Stage fright was part of it, sure. MLS scouts watching, regional and national team staff in the stands. But something else was off. We'd over-cooked the environment. We'd made it so performance-focused that the players couldn't relax enough to actually perform.

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Then came the lightning delay.

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Eighteen Players, One Minibus

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The field was cleared immediately. We had two minivans for eighteen players and three staff — one was parked on the other side of the complex. So all eighteen piled into one.

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We didn't plan anything. We weren't running icebreakers or reviewing footage. The coaches got out because, frankly, the smell inside was extraordinary. Twelve and thirteen-year-old boys, closely packed. One player had the misfortune of getting on first and spent fifteen minutes pressed against the window deeply regretting that decision.

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They were laughing. Telling jokes. Yelling at each other. Just being kids.

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Fifteen minutes of complete chaos. Not one coaching point delivered.

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When the lightning cleared and we went back on the field, something had shifted. It was hailing sideways, forty degrees in the Arizona desert, genuinely miserable conditions. Seven substitutes had every right to refuse to come on. But they played. The best they'd played all tournament. Scored late from a free kick to draw 1-1 against a team that expected to beat us.

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I can't prove the minibus did it. Maybe everything we'd worked on in the individual performance reviews clicked all at once. Maybe after two losses there was nothing left to lose. But I couldn't shake the feeling that those fifteen unplanned, uncoached, unstructured minutes were the catalyst. They got loose. And loose is how these players actually play.

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The Danger of Over-Structuring Fun

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Here's what I see in training sessions — and I've been guilty of it too. Coaches build in something they call a "fun game" that isn't actually fun. The ball keeps going out of play. There are five players in a line waiting for a turn. The rules are so complicated that when a defender wins the ball, they immediately look up and ask "what do I do now, coach?" The game-realistic feel is gone.

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Or the other version: players arrive, have a bit of unstructured time that's genuinely fun, and then the coach steps in and says right, that's enough, now we work. The fun gets turned off like a tap. And what you're actually saying to your players is that coaching is the serious part, and fun is the reward you get before and after.

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A quote I heard at a convention recently has stayed with me: be demanding without being demeaning. That switch from fun to serious is where coaches can accidentally cross that line — where demanding starts to feel like a punishment for the enjoyment they were just having.

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The U8 Warm-Up Experiment

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My U8 boys — they show up to games, they check their kit because we always have someone in the wrong socks, they get the balls out, and they play. That's the warm-up. That's it.

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Other coaches look at me like I've lost my mind. They've got structured rondos going on ten minutes before kickoff. Mine are just running around kicking balls and having a laugh.

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But here's what I know: when they cross the line, their minds are on, their bodies are warm, and they know what we're working on that cycle. Nothing changes once the whistle goes. They're already there.

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And yet — we've lost every significant game we've played. Finals, cup games, tournaments. Four of them. And I keep coming back to whether we change something for those games, whether the pressure of the occasion causes me to add structure to a warm-up that doesn't need it, whether they feel the tension from the coaching staff or the parents and it tightens them up.

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My plan: next big game, I'm doing the same thing. Nothing. Let them play. See if the results are different.

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Because the question I started with is the one I keep coming back to.

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Is it fun? Is it fun for your players right now, in this session, in this moment? Would you want to be out there?

If the answer is yes — you're probably doing it right. If the answer is no, that's worth sitting with for a minute. Not because learning doesn't matter. But because for the players you're coaching, fun and learning might not be as separate as you think.

Listen to the full episode: Ep. 80 — Is It Fun?

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@LeeDunneSoccer

Do You Know Why Your Players Are Playing?

When I was growing up, motivation was simple. How hard do you run? How much do you put in on the fifty-fifty? Nobody asked why you were playing. Everyone was swept up in it. Everyone wanted to be a pro. That was the answer.

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But when I look at the players I coach now — and think about my own kids starting to find their sports — I realise we don't ask the question nearly enough. Why are you playing? What's the motivation?

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Because the answer is different for every single player on your roster. And if you don't know what it is, you're coaching a group of kids you only half understand.

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The Mismatch Nobody Talks About

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Here's something that kills me when I'm consulting and directing: coaches whose motivation doesn't match the players they're working with.

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A new coach comes into a club. They're given a second team, third team, development group — players who are there because they love the game and want to have fun. But the coach is ambitious. They want to prove themselves. They want to win every game so they can move up and work with the top teams. Their motivation is to win. Their players' motivation is to play.

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Those two things can coexist. But only if you know the gap is there. If you don't, you end up demanding things from players that they were never really signed up for.

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I also have a set of twins in one of my groups this season. One plays soccer. The other plays football. They argue constantly about whose sport is better — genuinely, as siblings do, putting each other's preferences up against each other. And honestly? They might both continue playing their sports out of spite. Just to prove the point. That's motivation. Not conventional, but real. And if I know that, I can work with it.

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The Baseball Player

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I have a player who is a very serious baseball player. Plays shortstop. Smart kid, great at reading where the ball is going before it gets there — that anticipation is trained into him through hundreds of hours of watching hitters and fielding in competition.

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I caught him swinging an imaginary baseball bat in the middle of a rondo. Standing on the outside of the activity, completely in his own world, doing his swing.

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My first instinct was: don't disrespect my soccer like that. But I stopped myself. I had a conversation with him instead. Found out how serious the baseball was, what the skills involved are, what he loves about it.

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And then something clicked. The way he reads a mid-to-low press — hanging around the center circle, watching where the ball is going to come out, and then jumping on it — that's a shortstop reading the play. Same skill, different sport. I told him that. I said: you're not playing soccer and baseball. You're playing the same game in two different environments. The observation, the anticipation, the reaction — that's you.

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Something shifted for him. Because now his baseball wasn't a separate thing that had nothing to do with soccer. It was the reason he's good at soccer.

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I would never have known any of that if I hadn't asked.

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What I Do With Younger Players

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With my younger groups, I send a monthly email to families. It has a few things in it, and together they help me track motivation at both the player and parent level.

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The first is a juggling record. Just their name and their current score. That's it. Simple submission form. But what it tells me is: are they touching a ball at home? Is the score going up? And the parent response rate — how many families actually fill it in — tells me something about engagement at the family level too. If I've sent three emails and had no response, that's information.

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The second is family homework. This month I asked parents to share with their son what their own experience of youth sports was like — what it felt like, what their parents were like on the sideline. Then have the conversation about what the player wants from his parents at games.

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For me, growing up: my dad stood on the sideline and gave me a thumbs up. That was it. Never shouted. Just the thumbs up when I looked over. That meant everything. I shared that with my families and said — what does your son want from you? Because if he doesn't want you yelling, and you're yelling every weekend, that's a motivation killer right there. Some kids drop out of soccer not because they don't like soccer, but because they can't separate the game from the way it feels when their parents are on the sideline.

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Giving players permission to say what they actually want from the adults around them — that's powerful.

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Building the Profile

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What I'm doing across all of this is building a picture of each player. Who are their friends in the group? I know two of my players are close — so when I say "get into pairs," I'm not always separating them. Sometimes pairing them together is the coaching choice, because they'll push each other harder and support each other better than they would with a stranger.

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I have two Russian-speaking players. I put them together as much as I can. Not to isolate them — to build a green line. Connection is a motivator.

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When a player moves on — even if they leave the club — I write up a profile and pass it to parents to share with the next coach. Because that baseball shortstop kid's ability to read and anticipate a game is a gift. It deserves to be passed on, not lost in the transition.

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What This Is All For

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The desired behaviour — players who fight, don't give up, go home and practice, come back better — that's not something you demand. It's a byproduct of understanding what's actually driving each person in your group.

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You don't get there by running the same session for everyone. You get there by asking why they're here. And then actually listening to the answer.

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Do you know what motivates each of your players?

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Listen to the full episode: Ep. 78 — Motivation

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@LeeDunneSoccer

The First Ten Minutes Might Be Your Most Important Coaching

Quick question: how do you start your training sessions?

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Not the first drill. The first five minutes. When players are arriving, bags going down, someone's in the wrong socks again, another one hasn't got their shin guards — what does that look like, and what are you doing while it's happening?

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This is something I've evolved a lot over time, and it's become one of the things I think about most carefully. Because I believe the first ten minutes of training might be the most important coaching you do all session.

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Multiple Points of Contact

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My goal with every player, every training session, is at least two points of contact. One is a coaching moment — a position, a touch, a scan, something connected to what we're working on. But the other one is personal.

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How's your dog? How did the move go? You mentioned you were going to see your grandma — how was that?

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I know it sounds small. But I had a player once who was a chess champion. I had no idea until I actually talked to him. And once I knew, so much about how he played made sense — how he processed space, how he anticipated moves ahead of time, the way he understood cause and effect in the game before it happened. That conversation unlocked something for me as his coach. I couldn't have had it if I was setting up cones the whole time they were arriving.

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Let Them Play First

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My first group now turns up fifteen minutes early. Not because I told them to — they started doing it themselves. They're bugging their parents on the drive over. They're sprinting through the building to get on the field. They make their own teams and away they go before I've even finished setting up.

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I love that. That is the dream. When players are fighting to get more time with the ball before practice even starts, you've created something.

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I'm not always there fifteen minutes early — sometimes I hit traffic, sometimes I'm there right on the hour. And I've made a rule for myself: if players arrived early and started playing, we go for an extra five minutes. It's not their fault they weren't early if the other kids weren't. I'm not cutting their game short because someone else just got there.

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When I was a kid I used to get to school at 8am. School didn't start until 9:05. Every morning we played football on the blacktop. And we started getting there earlier and earlier because the games were good. That's what I want to create.

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The Huddle

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After the arrival game, I pull them together. Arms around each other. And here's the sequence.

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First, I ask for a reflection. It might be on the last game, or the last training session — thumbs up, thumbs down, or hands in: two hands in if you loved it, one hand if it was okay, no hands if it wasn't for you. And it's a safe space. No hand is the wrong answer. If you put no hands in, I want to know why — not to challenge it, but because that's useful. That tells me something I need to know.

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Then: chins on chest, eyes closed, three deep breaths.

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I'll be honest — when I first saw another coach do this, I smirked. I thought it was a bit much. But I started using it, and I kept using it, and now I won't run a session without it. What it does in those thirty seconds is settle things. These kids have come from school, from arguments, from traffic, from whatever their day was — and the three breaths are a signal. We're here now. This is what we're doing.

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Then I tell them what we're focused on today. Not a long speech. Just: this is the theme, this is what you can expect, here's what we're after. Then water break, get the balls, go.

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That whole sequence takes about ten minutes. And from there, everything else flows more cleanly.

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Not Laps

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When I run coaching education, I hear it all the time: "I send them on two laps to burn some energy off, to calm them down."

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It doesn't work. Running laps doesn't create focus. It just delays the problem. A purposeful huddle — where players feel seen, where the session has a clear intention, where they've had a minute to breathe and land — is a thousand times more effective than any lap of the field.

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Reading the Room

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The other thing the huddle gives you is the read. The player who's grumpy, who's whining, who's a bit off — you notice it in those first few minutes. And your response to that matters.

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I had a player just recently who was in a terrible mood. Complaining about everything, snapping at teammates. The old coaching instinct says get it together, stop whining, focus up. But I know this kid. Something was going on.

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Instead: "Hey — it's okay to have a bad day. What do you need right now? Do you want to play a bit more free? Be a plus one? Go in goal for a bit?"

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That's it. Acknowledge it. Meet him where he is. And nine times out of ten, that's all it takes. Because what he needed was just to feel like someone saw him.

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Think about it from his side. He's had adults telling him what to do and what he's doing wrong all day at school. His parents might have been stressed in the car. He shows up to practice carrying all of that, and the last thing he needs is one more adult demanding he perform on command.

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Your first ten minutes can change all of that. Or it can make it worse.

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So: how do you start? What does the first ten minutes look like for your players? And — honest question — are you actually using that time, or are you just getting through it to get to the session?

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I'm always stealing good ideas. Let me know what you do.

Listen to the full episode: Ep. 79 — Team Huddle

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@LeeDunneSoccer

Do You Know Why Your Players Are Playing?

When I was growing up, motivation was simple. How hard do you run? How much do you put in on the fifty-fifty? Nobody asked why you were playing. Everyone was swept up in it. Everyone wanted to be a pro. That was the answer.

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But when I look at the players I coach now — and think about my own kids starting to find their sports — I realise we don't ask the question nearly enough. Why are you playing? What's the motivation?

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Because the answer is different for every single player on your roster. And if you don't know what it is, you're coaching a group of kids you only half understand.

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The Mismatch Nobody Talks About

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Here's something that kills me when I'm consulting and directing: coaches whose motivation doesn't match the players they're working with.

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A new coach comes into a club. They're given a second team, third team, development group — players who are there because they love the game and want to have fun. But the coach is ambitious. They want to prove themselves. They want to win every game so they can move up and work with the top teams. Their motivation is to win. Their players' motivation is to play.

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Those two things can coexist. But only if you know the gap is there. If you don't, you end up demanding things from players that they were never really signed up for.

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I also have a set of twins in one of my groups this season. One plays soccer. The other plays football. They argue constantly about whose sport is better — genuinely, as siblings do, putting each other's preferences up against each other. And honestly? They might both continue playing their sports out of spite. Just to prove the point. That's motivation. Not conventional, but real. And if I know that, I can work with it.

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The Baseball Player

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I have a player who is a very serious baseball player. Plays shortstop. Smart kid, great at reading where the ball is going before it gets there — that anticipation is trained into him through hundreds of hours of watching hitters and fielding in competition.

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I caught him swinging an imaginary baseball bat in the middle of a rondo. Standing on the outside of the activity, completely in his own world, doing his swing.

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My first instinct was: don't disrespect my soccer like that. But I stopped myself. I had a conversation with him instead. Found out how serious the baseball was, what the skills involved are, what he loves about it.

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And then something clicked. The way he reads a mid-to-low press — hanging around the center circle, watching where the ball is going to come out, and then jumping on it — that's a shortstop reading the play. Same skill, different sport. I told him that. I said: you're not playing soccer and baseball. You're playing the same game in two different environments. The observation, the anticipation, the reaction — that's you.

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Something shifted for him. Because now his baseball wasn't a separate thing that had nothing to do with soccer. It was the reason he's good at soccer.

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I would never have known any of that if I hadn't asked.

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What I Do With Younger Players

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With my younger groups, I send a monthly email to families. It has a few things in it, and together they help me track motivation at both the player and parent level.

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The first is a juggling record. Just their name and their current score. That's it. Simple submission form. But what it tells me is: are they touching a ball at home? Is the score going up? And the parent response rate — how many families actually fill it in — tells me something about engagement at the family level too. If I've sent three emails and had no response, that's information.

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The second is family homework. This month I asked parents to share with their son what their own experience of youth sports was like — what it felt like, what their parents were like on the sideline. Then have the conversation about what the player wants from his parents at games.

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For me, growing up: my dad stood on the sideline and gave me a thumbs up. That was it. Never shouted. Just the thumbs up when I looked over. That meant everything. I shared that with my families and said — what does your son want from you? Because if he doesn't want you yelling, and you're yelling every weekend, that's a motivation killer right there. Some kids drop out of soccer not because they don't like soccer, but because they can't separate the game from the way it feels when their parents are on the sideline.

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Giving players permission to say what they actually want from the adults around them — that's powerful.

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Building the Profile

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What I'm doing across all of this is building a picture of each player. Who are their friends in the group? I know two of my players are close — so when I say "get into pairs," I'm not always separating them. Sometimes pairing them together is the coaching choice, because they'll push each other harder and support each other better than they would with a stranger.

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I have two Russian-speaking players. I put them together as much as I can. Not to isolate them — to build a green line. Connection is a motivator.

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When a player moves on — even if they leave the club — I write up a profile and pass it to parents to share with the next coach. Because that baseball shortstop kid's ability to read and anticipate a game is a gift. It deserves to be passed on, not lost in the transition.

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What This Is All For

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The desired behaviour — players who fight, don't give up, go home and practice, come back better — that's not something you demand. It's a byproduct of understanding what's actually driving each person in your group.

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You don't get there by running the same session for everyone. You get there by asking why they're here. And then actually listening to the answer.

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Do you know what motivates each of your players?

Listen to the full episode: Ep. 78 — Motivation

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@LeeDunneSoccer

What Did You Do With Your Summer?

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.

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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?

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What I Did That Surprised Me

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I spent a meaningful chunk of my summer doing something I've long said I don't really believe in: isolated technical work.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Gift of Summer

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Here's what makes summer different from the season: there's no game on Saturday.

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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.

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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.

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So the question is: did you use the window?

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Reality-Based Learning — and the Extra Layer

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Two Teams, One Coach, Two Different Worlds

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This season I'm coaching two groups that couldn't be more different.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Pre-flection

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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?

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That shift in approach is the right one. And it applies to the summer too.

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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?

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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.

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How was your summer? What are you taking into the season?

Listen to the full episode: Ep. 77 — Summer Reflection

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@LeeDunneSoccer

Buy Your Players a Boot Brush

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.

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Before you do — what are you doing for your players?

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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.

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Here's what I do. I buy them all a boot brush.

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Why Boots Matter to Me

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Dollar Tree Argument

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Game Face

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Accountability is a Skill Too

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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One Last Thing

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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.

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A boot brush from Dollar Tree. Forty bucks for your whole squad. A conversation about what it means.

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That's the whole thing.

Listen to the full episode: Ep. 75 — Buy Your Players a Boot Brush

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@LeeDunneSoccer

Stop Arguing About Who's Best. Start Coaching From It.

England lost. It hurt. We played well, had our chances, didn't take them. Moving on.

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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.

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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.

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The Problem With the GOAT Argument

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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.

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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.

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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.

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What the Stats Actually Show

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I track this through Opta Analyst — here's some of what jumped out.

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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.

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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?

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Harry Kane: 3 assists, 5 chances created. Also, the penalty that went over the bar. We're not talking about the penalty.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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The Team Style Question

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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.

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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.

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Teams that barely built out: Uruguay, Wales, Iran, Tunisia. Most of them didn't go far.

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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.

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The Challenge I'm Giving My Players

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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@LeeDunneSoccer

The Scrimmage Isn't a Reward. It's the Best Coaching Tool You Have.

Walk around any youth soccer training session towards the end of the night and I'll tell you what you'll see.

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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.

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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.

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I think we've got this completely backwards.

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We're Creating Players Who Can Train But Can't Play

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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.

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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.

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Then we say: go out there and play a game.

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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.

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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.

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Your Players Don't Play Enough

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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.

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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.

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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.

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What the Scrimmage Should Actually Look Like

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Practice them in the scrimmage. Use what you have.

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You're Practicing Coaching in the Game Too

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Here's something coaches rarely think about: the scrimmage is also where you practice your job.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Keeping Every Player in the Game

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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At Least Half Your Session

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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.

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Your players need to play the game. You need to coach inside it. The scrimmage gives you both at the same time.

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Stop treating it like a filler. Start treating it like the point.

Listen to the full episode: Ep. 72 — Play 2: Scrimmages & Games

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@LeeDunneSoccer

Your Coaching Toolbox: Five Tools, and When to Actually Use Them

If you coach soccer, you've got a physical toolbox. The big trolley with the flags, the mannequins, 1,000 cones, 100 pinnies, the clipboard, the easy-up, the fold-out bench. That's the gear.

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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.

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Here are five I come back to, and some thoughts on when each one actually earns its place.

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1. The Freeze

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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.

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I have a complicated relationship with the freeze. I like it and I also really don't like it.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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2. The Tactics Board

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This is my favorite tool, and I don't think enough coaches use it well.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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3. One-on-One Coaching

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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4. Hot and Cold Feedback

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Two feedback moments that I think are underused by most coaches.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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5. Power Words

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This is one I come back to a lot, and it sounds simple but it's surprisingly effective.

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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The Notepad

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I want to add one more to the list, even though it's not quite the same category as the others.

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Write things down.

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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.

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But here's the other thing I use it for: writing down what I actually think of the referee.

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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.

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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.

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The notepad holds it. Nobody else needs to know.

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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

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@LeeDunneSoccer

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.

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That's not really me.

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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.

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Blank looks. What does that mean?

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It means believe. And it means effort. That's it. Just be — belief and effort.

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Let me tell you why those two things, in that context, matter more than most coaches realize.

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Forty Number 10s

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Belief Is Often Given, Not Built

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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.

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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."

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I said, "Your son is not going to play six in this group. But I think he can be a strong four."

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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.

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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.

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Can you go play center back? I can't, Coach.

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Can you try?

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That's the only question that matters.

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Pickup Soccer and the Freedom Experiment

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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.

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And they're fine. They figure it out.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Effort Part

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Belief is the internal piece. Effort is the external one — and it's more complex than it looks.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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What the Tryout Actually Measures

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Some can't get past what they've been told they are.

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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.

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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?

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That's a harder conversation to have at thirteen.

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Just be. Believe you can. Try. Show me the effort.

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That's the whole talk.

Listen to the full episode: Ep. 70 — Just Be

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@LeeDunneSoccer

Don't Ask a Club What They Have. Tell Them What You've Got.

I've been on both sides of this conversation.

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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?

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The honest answer, most of the time, is: not enough.

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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.

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The Cold Email Problem

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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?

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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.

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And that's the end of it. Not because the coach isn't good. Because the question only opens doors that are already visible.

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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.

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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.

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The Goalkeeper Coach

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Here's what the better version looks like.

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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.

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That's a completely different conversation.

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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.

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She created that. I didn't post that job anywhere. She made it exist.

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What Your Strengths Actually Are

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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.

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Think about what else you carry.

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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.

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That never would have happened if he'd just sent the initial email and waited for a reply.

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What else can you offer beyond the pitch?

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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?

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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.

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The Sacramento Republic Experience

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Write Them Down

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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.

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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.

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That's not a cold email anymore. That's a proposal. And proposals get read.

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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