18/09/2026
Gôl Football Centre, Cardiff taught me to coach the players who turned up, not the session I had written.
While I was at university, I coached Saturday morning soccer schools at Gôl Centres for boys and girls aged roughly four to eleven.
Welsh speakers and English speakers, different ages, abilities and different reasons for being there, often sharing relatively small five-a-side courts.
You could prepare beforehand, but you never completely knew what the session would look like until the children actually arrived.
The numbers could change, the balance of ability could be completely different from the previous week. One player might need a very simple challenge while another needed something progressively harder within the same activity.
That environment started changing how I thought about planning.
Earlier in my coaching journey, I had taken a lot of satisfaction from getting through the session exactly as I had written it.
At Gôl, that wasn't always possible.
I had to become more comfortable arriving with ideas rather than believing every part of the session had to happen exactly as planned.
Learning to simplify practices rather than constantly adding to them, give individual players different targets, use the assistant or co-coach more effectively and make decisions based on what I was actually seeing.
I became more comfortable stepping back, not every problem needed an immediate intervention.
Sometimes I needed to watch for longer, listen to the players and understand what was happening before deciding whether anything needed changing at all.
The objective remained fairly simple, I wanted every child to enjoy being there and, ideally, leave with at least one new piece of understanding, information or skill.
Looking back, that was one of the most valuable things Gôl taught me:
I had to stop coaching the session I had imagined beforehand and start coaching the players who were actually standing in front of me.
What usually tells you that it’s time to move away from the session you planned?
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