Articles by Coach Frank
Reader, For many coaches around the world, a new year means the start of a new season. This got me thinking about how we ensure we blend physical development and conditioning with technical and tactical components going into a new season. For me, the concept of ‘The 3S’s’ has been really helpful in simplifying my view of the physical conditioning of young players. Speed, strength and stamina are fundamentals in the physical development of footballers. So how do we go about ensuring we can…
Reader, This week, we take a break from the technical, tactical and practical content of our weekly newsletter to acknowledge you, our PDP subscribers. Whether you’re a long-term PDP member, someone who has undertaken our coaching courses, a subscriber to our weekly email, or you’ve only just discovered our community, we massively appreciate your support. The purpose of the Player Development Project platform is to support coaches globally with a huge range of content and connection to our…
Reader, Recently, I was fortunate enough to reconnect with Mick Beale through an online workshop. Mick is a coach who has had an amazing career in both development and performance contexts in England, Brazil and Scotland. Mick presented a collection of ideas heavily focussed on the technical development of individual players across the age groups, with a heavy emphasis on 1v1 ability and mastery. I first interviewed Mick in 2015 for Player Development Project, and I was also lucky to spend a…
Reader, One of the hardest parts of working in professional football is the reality of ‘retain and release’ meetings. At the end of every season, players are given an indication as to how they’re tracking and ultimately if they will be retained, or released from the club the following year. This can be a brutal process with young players. In amateur football, we have the luxury of more time with players, not constrained by systems where players have to ‘make it’ at a certain age. Over the…
Reader, Recently, I was fortunate enough to observe a world-class leadership expert who is supporting a team in a mentoring role. He works with multiple sports to assist in bringing to life the team’s shared values. His role is to facilitate discussion, supporting them in understanding how their values are lived, on and off the pitch. He shared a quote, “Strong teams and weak teams have the same things written on the wall.” He then went on to speak about how “behaviours are values that are…
Reader, Coaching can be a lonely place when all of a sudden your best-laid plans start turning “pear-shaped” right in front of your eyes on the grass. When we plan our sessions, often ideas can look good on paper, but when it comes to bringing them to life, this can be a different story. When the practice fails, sometimes it’s hard to know where to go next when the players are confused, the session is failing and you have a mental block on how to fix it. This is even worse when parents or…
Reader, This week I saw a quote from Arsene Wenger which stated, “Between the ages of 5-12, it’s better to have no coach at all than a bad one.” I’m not sure when Wenger said it, but I know it’s been floating around for a while and when it popped up in my feed it got me thinking about, why? It’s likely, this quote comes from a place that suggests poor coaching could stifle creativity, create poor habits, or simply take away from the football experience leading to disengagement. In my work…
Reader, I was recently listening to a podcast with a health and fitness expert who when asked about goal setting, she replied, “Set standards, not goals.” This really resonated with me in a coaching sense given that most teams will have the same goal – to win a game, win the league or to win the tournament. Every team wants to win, but this quote got me thinking about the importance of culture, expectations, values and processes that will support in delivering outcomes. Without a doubt,…
Reader, Every week I hear from PDP members, football parents and coaches around the world via our community or platforms like LinkedIn. One of the common threads that continues to emerge from these interactions is that families often need help understanding how to navigate ‘pathways’ or the systems that players find themselves in that seem (at times) overly complicated and riddled with stress and anxiety. What can start out as a love of a game can quickly become an obsession for kids, and…
Reader, I have recently been discussing the subject of parents in football with coaching colleagues, and issues relating to parental involvement seem to be on the rise in sports in general. Without a doubt, family plays a critical role in player development. Navigating the youth football system and various “pathways” (for want of a better word) is something that seems to create a lot of anxiety in parents. Pay-to-play models the world over, often lead to parents asking for transparency. Clubs…
Reader, I was on the grass this week with a coaching colleague, and we had an interesting conversation about the role of unopposed or isolated practice in our programmes. To be clear, I believe in football training sessions including realistic information that ensures players have to make decisions based on tasks that are representative of the game. This is especially important in amateur and grassroots settings where we may only have limited contact with players. It’s also important to…
Reader, I’ve been speaking with a lot of coaching colleagues in recent months about what the appropriate amount of football is for youth players in a week. I currently coach in a system where players play in multiple environments, from clubs, to schools and socially. The volume of football some players are exposed to can include (at times) 6-10 contacts per week – and frankly, I don’t think the players are better for it. I also experienced the same challenge when coaching in Australia where…