Coaching 101: The Youth Football Coaching Basics
Coaching 101 collects the practical basics every new youth football coach needs: how to communicate, how to run a warm-up that matters, how to motivate young players, and how to design sessions around principles instead of numbers. Nine short essays, each one a habit you can carry onto the pitch this week.
FA Coach Learning Developer Conor Murning discussed a topic many coaches overlook in a podcast episode: what makes you a good coach isn't how much tactical knowledge you have, but whether you can build relationships with players, whether you can adapt when things go wrong in training, and whether you can say something after a match that makes a child want to come back next week.
Inspired by the concept of "information simplification" from evolutionary psychology, this article introduces two powerful keywords for youth football coaches: "Going Crazy" for managing behavior in under-8s, and "Team Task" for building teamwork in over-8s. By replacing lengthy explanations with simple, shared keywords, coaches can streamline training, reduce information overload, and help young players self-manage.
FA coach developer Emily Senior shared a simple but highly effective method on a podcast: imagine you have 10 one-pound coins in your pocket, and every time you speak during a session you spend one. Once the 10 are gone, you can only observe for the rest of the time.
Katie Sorensen, Head of Learning Experience at The FA, shared a core philosophy for session planning on the England Football Learning podcast: don't design training around how many players show up, design it around training principles. What 16 players can practice, 6 players can practice too, as long as the principles stay the same.
A grassroots coach without a professional football background uses a play-based approach to coach kindergarteners and first graders, only to face criticism from peers. This article gathers real perspectives from multiple coaches, exploring the relationship between play-based initiation and football training, and how to stay the course amid skepticism.
Kindergarten is a zone that makes many early-childhood teachers feel like they have entered the devil's domain, and a mysterious pitch that makes many coaches feel they need way more training. This article shares practical tips for coaching kindergarten football from seven angles: Coach Centered, Encouragement, Stand on the Line, Code of Conduct, Context, Be the Boss, and Be Funny.
Managing kids is an art. As coaches, we need to know some tricks to fully motivate children in football. This article covers 10 aspects: setting clear discipline, one-on-one conversations, playing is a privilege, avoiding collective punishment, no running laps, team spirit, mixing things up, setting role models, nurturing leaders, and not rushing to correct mistakes.
PDP co-founder Dave Wright and coach-consultant James Coutts break down why pre-game warm-ups are one of the most underused coaching opportunities of the week, and how to design them for every age group, from grassroots to elite level.
Todd Bean worked alongside Cruyff for 14 years before founding Tovo Academy. In a podcast interview, he raised a topic that makes a lot of coaches uncomfortable: we spend enormous amounts of team training time having kids line up and dribble around cones, but this has almost nothing to do with the real game.