A Half-Interview with Coach Tom

Coach Tom talks about how to get kids invested in the game, the different types of teaching methods within activities, and how recreational coaches can help their players develop technique.

Coach Tom has coached Division I college soccer, holds a Ph.D, in Curriculum and Instruction, is a professor in Ohio University’s M.Sc program for Coaching Soccer, and has spent the last 23 years as Technical Director for Ohio North Youth Soccer Association (which has now combined with the south to become Ohio Soccer Association).

Recently I managed to speak with Coach Tom who runs coach education for the entire state of Ohio. It was an enlightening conversation and he corroborated — as well as challenged — some of my beliefs about what high-quality youth coaching looks like.

Unfortunately though, my voice recorder didn’t work. So the following is a synthesis of the notes I took, and I do hope to get Coach Tom back on the phone in the future so you can get quality coaching insights straight from the source.

The Emotional Hook

Before interviewing Coach Tom, I heard him talk about the need to create an “emotional hook” for young players. Essentially an emotional hook is what gets kids interested in the sport. It’s what makes them excited about coming to practice and games — and eventually gets them playing during their free time.

This burgeoning love sets the stage for them to become lifelong participants, and when they’re old enough, decide to start practicing on their own for the sole purpose of self-improvement (and if we’re speaking honestly, is pretty much what every youth coach wants for their players).

I asked Coach Tom if he could give an example of an emotional hook that a coach could use and his answer was both surprising and (in hindsight) completely expected.

Coach Tom said that emotional hooks are created through the playing environment. And to understand the playing environments that children like, we need to look at what kids do when they’re left on their own.

When kids play with their friends they have full control over what they do and they’ll design games to maximize fun. They don’t concern themselves with skill development or character building; they just want to play. And it’s when they’re playing for fun that all of those other things that coaches care about will improve. But it’s never the guiding ethos.

So to learn from kids, you have to watch how they play sports during recess or after school. They divide up teams equally to ensure there’s parity. If there’s lots of players they devise a way to keep people from waiting too long. The score is always kept and – maybe most importantly – schoolmates of different ages play together

This age dynamic means that older players end up unconsciously helping the younger players improve (which is also a key part of Malcolm Gladwell’s argument in Outliers). These young players see new skills being performed and begin attempting similar things. There’s no formal instruction, it’s simply kids learning by seeing and practicing new techniques, and gaining experience from playing the game.

To create a playing environment with an emotional hook, coaches must use games and these principles of learning (observation, experimentation, experiential learning) to produce an athlete-centered experience. This means coaches need to run exercises that rely on these facets of player enjoyment and dial back what we traditionally think of as coaching that uses explicit teaching methods.

So how does a coach make those changes? What can they do differently?

Structured and Unstructured Play

These questions led to Coach Tom differentiating between three different types of “teaching methods” that coaches can use (“Teaching methods” is my own phrase to categorize the concepts Coach Tom talked about).

The first type is unstructured play. This is where players play the game without any constraints, limitations, or rules outside the norm. This would look a lot like kids playing together if there was no coach involved.

Unstructured play seems to be a bit messy. On one hand, it’s commonly accepted that we shouldn’t have kids stand in lines and run them through mind-numbingly boring drills. On the other hand, we are there to coach, so letting them play unhindered seems like a waste of an opportunity to teach them how to improve.

But remember! The big-picture future goal is to create players who will go out and practice on their own because they love the game and want to get better (and absorb all of the benefits that come from learning how to be disciplined, to set goals, to develop resilience, etc).

The preceding step to that end goal is to create players who enjoy playing soccer and will go out and play with their friends whenever they get a free moment.

And creating that type of person begins at the youngest ages. Players need to develop an affinity for the sport and learn fun new games that they’ll want to play outside of practice.

So, in that context, when players are young, maybe the most important thing a coach can do is teach games to kids who will then go play those game with their friends at recess and with their siblings at home. These can be games like barefoot soccer with shoes as goals, futsal, World Cup, juggling games, and of course regular soccer.

The goal is to help players develop a passion for the game and that means we must create an environment where kids are free to explore what they like most about soccer (the dribbling, the scoring, the passing, the running, the camaraderie, etc.), without it being told to them. Nobody ever finds their passion by being told what to be passion about.

The second teaching method is structured play. This is where games are designed to bring out a certain moment where kids will be exposed to the same (or similar) situations multiple times in a short time span. You can think of this as similar to constraints-based coaching.

This type of teaching method is created by altering field size, adding/moving goals, modifying rules, etc. However, Coach Tom made an interesting point about how using coaches or older players can also be used to achieve this same end. Involving older/more skilled players allows them to artificially re-create moments and help scaffold younger players’ learning, while still giving players the flexibility to play in regular games without the addition of unnatural rules.

The third teaching method is direct coaching. This is where coaches place demands on the players by using the imbalance of power to explicitly tell them what to do. An example would be a coach telling their players to only dribble the ball with their left foot or that the right centerback can only pass to the right outside back.

For young players who are beginning to develop their love for the game, this is the least helpful teaching category. But again, it’s also the method where coaches feel like they can “earn their paycheck” so it’s easy to do – and often parents reinforce this type of coaching behavior because they have their own preconceived ideas of what good coaching should look like (something that Coach Joe talked about too).

In short, with young players it’s best to rely on a series of structured and unstructured games to introduce and reinforce player learning. This means coaches must take a step-back from explicit teaching and instead create an environment where players are encouraged to attempt certain behaviors (tactical positioning, technical execution, decision-making) and then have their choices either be reinforced or extinguished by the nature of the game. But the most important thing is to use games that players enjoy playing and help them discover the joy of playing sports.

Technique & Parent Coaches

This part of our conversation segued into the different environments and types of coaches that exist in the US youth soccer system. Coach Tom differentiated between two different types of coaches at the grassroots level: parent-coaches who have experience playing soccer and parent-coaches who don’t.

We talked about the challenges facing both; how experienced parent-coaches will try to recreate the coaching they had and use direct coaching methods, and inexperienced parent-coaches who may be overwhelmed and attempt to do things that are too complex. But what stood out to me during this part was the topic of teaching technique.

Parent-coaches with no playing experience tend to shy away from teaching technique, which makes sense. Most “technical” coaches will teach technique by using explicit, top-down approaches. Their coaching points will focus on how to shape the foot, which part of the foot should make contact with the ball, where the ball needs to be struck, etc.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it does have the potential to limit what a player is capable of. Examples of players who’ve honed an unusual technique at the professional level and consistently use it are Xabi Alonso, Luka Modric, and Ricardo Quaresma to name a few. So instead of players learning how to precisely hit the ball, technique can be taught by describing a situation as a problem that needs to be solved with better technique, not just better positioning.

The reality is that parent-coaches without playing experience cannot learn all of the necessary technical information during a single licensing clinic over the weekend. So instead these coaches should just stick to playing games. They don’t need to introduce or teach advanced skills, and if the games are created the right way – and kids are motivated to improve – then they’ll develop these technical skills themselves.

Wrapping Up

We did talk about more, but I don’t have the memory nor the necessary extensive notes to feel like I can write about Coach Tom’s ideas with justice. I appreciate everyone reading this and to Coach Tom for taking the time to chat. I hope this either reinforced or challenged you as much as it did for me and if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments.