How we started the new season

The start of the season is always pretty hectic for football coaches. I wanted to share how we prepared for the new season this year - in the hope that it helps other community coaches, and that more experienced coaches will point out some tricks we missed!

A bit of context first. Paul Treadgold and I share the coaching of the Withdean Youth Under-11 Reds (MSL) team. This team went through a bit of a transformation this summer, as we stepped up from Under-10 to Under-11, a new group of players joined existing ones, and we switched from the Sussex Sunday Youth league to the Mid-Sussex Youth league. All of which made the start of the season even more exciting - but also reminded us of a few areas where we could improve, such as better explaining to parents what we do as coaches and why.

So here is how we approached the new season:

Finding out more about the players

Good football coaching needs to be player-centric. As coaches, there is a lot we can find out about players and their preferences during training sessions, matches and informal chats - but it seemed natural to speed up that process, in a way, by asking all of our players (both ‘old’ and ‘new’) a few questions.

So we shared this questionnaire for the new players to fill, and found the answers really valuable: it really informed our approach to planning the whole season.

Philosophy, formation and match rota

Next we reviewed and refined the core philosophy that we wanted to follow for managing the team. This included key principles such as equal play time and rotating players through several positions over the course of the season - and with an even greater emphasis on just making it fun for the boys to play football.

As we were progressing from 7-a-side to 9-a-side, we also had to choose a new formation and settled on 2-3-2-1 for two main reasons: creating more passing opportunities from having triangles, and making the future transition to 11-a-side easier.

Finally we decided on what rota to use for matches (due to having 15 players for 9-a-side games) - eventually deciding not to have a rota, but instead setting targets for how much time each player should be playing in attack, midfield and defense, with a simple spreadsheet to make this easy to manage.

Meeting the parents

While we had done this informally in previous seasons, this time we decided to also have a proper introduction session where Paul and I could explain how we were approaching the season, and for parents to fire off any questions they had. This was supported by this document, which summarised all the topics we covered in that meeting. Additionally, we shared a list of tactics and tips outlining the roles of each player in the new formation.

The feedback we have received from parents both ‘old’ or ‘new’ has been excellent. Like all good things, it just made us wish we had done this earlier, in previous years! So we’ll definitely do something similar next year.