Let’s talk about about fixing that. It’s about designing small-sided games with intention! So that what happens in your 4v3 on Wednesday actually shows up in your 8-a-side on the weekend.

We’ll look at what separates a transferable SSG from one that’s just fun, the design variables you can manipulate, and because nobody ever talks about this, when you should not use an SSG at all. Plus two fully worked training examples you can steal and adapt.

Let’s get into it…

TL;DR

Small-sided games only transfer to match day if they’re designed with clear coaching intentions. The magic isn’t in the game itself — it’s in the constraints you set: space, numbers, rules, scoring conditions, and the behaviours those constraints provoke. A well-designed SSG forces players to solve the same problems they’ll face on Saturday. A poorly designed one just makes everyone sweaty. This article walks through the design principles, gives you two ready-to-use examples, and explains when SSGs aren’t the right tool.

This article draws on insights from these coaching voices on The Hockey Site:

• Lisa Letchford — Basic Skills through Small Sided Games

• Andreu Enrich — Small Sided Games

• Tin Matkovic — The Evolution of Creativity & Balancing Skill Gaps

• Fede Tanuscio — From Game to Training

What Makes an SSG Transferable (vs Just Fun)

Let’s get real for a second. We’ve all run a 4v4 where kids are smiling, moving, scoring goals — and we think that was a great session. And maybe it was… for fitness and fun. But did it actually teach anything?

Andreu Enrich puts it bluntly: if the game doesn’t force players to solve problems that look like the real game, you’re just running a kickabout with cones. His ecological approach to learning says that players develop by interacting with an environment that demands specific responses. Not by being told what to do — by being placed in situations where the right decision is the only one that works.

So what does “transferable” actually mean? It means the SSG recreates the decision-making context of the match. Not just the physical space, not just the technical demand, but the cognitive load. The moments where a player has to read, decide, and act under pressure.

Here’s a quick test for any SSG you’re running: Can you name the specific game behaviour this SSG is designed to improve? If the answer is “general play” or “getting touches on the ball,” you don’t have a coaching intention. You have a warm-up.

Lisa Letchford’s approach nails this. She starts every SSG with a clear target behaviour — say, receiving on the back foot to create forward momentum — and then builds the game around it. The game isn’t the point. The behaviour is the point. The game is just the vehicle.

And here’s the thing: transferable SSGs don’t always look pretty. Sometimes the game breaks down. Sometimes it’s messy and players make mistakes. That’s not a problem — that’s the learning. As Tin Matkovic reminds us, creativity comes from permission to fail. If your SSG is so structured that there’s only one right answer, you’ve built a drill and put bibs on it.

The Design Variables That Matter

Every SSG is built on the same raw materials. The difference between a good one and a forgettable one is how you manipulate these variables. Think of them as dials on a mixing desk — turn one up, and the whole feel of the game changes.

Space

The most obvious lever, and the one most coaches default to. Smaller space = more pressure, quicker decisions, tighter technique. Bigger space = more time, more running, more scanning required.

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That’s the thesis. And if you’ve been coaching long enough, you know it’s true in your bones. Even if the day-to-day demands of training sessions, selection headaches and match preparation don’t always give you the time to act on it. You know that the team with the better pressing structure doesn’t always win. You know that the team that plays for each other usually does.

In this third article in our series drawing on the wisdom of basketball legend Coach K and the field hockey experts in The Hockey Site’s catalogue, we’re going to dig into the very important, often neglected, and most misunderstood word in coaching: culture. What it actually means. How you build it deliberately rather than accidentally. And, crucially, how you know when you’ve got it.

We’ll look at where culture starts (values — and not just words on a wall), how it becomes operational (standards — the lived, daily expression of those values), what it looks like when it’s working (the jealous-free zone), and what threatens it and how to respond. Along the way we’ll draw on Coach K’s values framework and championship stories, on Adam Commens’ remarkable perspective from inside two of the greatest team cultures in hockey history as well as his earlier insights on Values Based Coaching, and on Theo ten Hagen’s practical work on team dynamics.

Values: The Foundation Nobody Fully Builds

Coach K opens his lesson on core values with a simple image: a fist. Five fingers — communication, trust, care, collective responsibility, and pride. Each meaningful on their own, but only truly powerful when they come together. “The five values working together create a powerful unified team, like fingers forming a fist.” The framework is simple to understand, he says, but not necessarily simple to execute.

That gap between simple and easy is exactly where most team cultures either take root or wither. Because the values conversation in most sports environments looks like this: a coach writes three or four words on a whiteboard at the start of pre-season, asks players if they agree, everyone nods, and by match three of the season, nobody mentions them again. Coach K is blunt about this:

“Don’t just give values to your group. Involve them in discussing and defining what the values mean. Team members must own the values. They’re not just words but ways of life.”

Adam Commens makes the same point with equal force. As Belgium’s High Performance Director, he has spent years building and sustaining values-driven cultures at the highest level. First as a player and coach with Australia’s Kookaburras, then as a key architect of the Red Lions’ Olympic and World Cup gold. His verdict on values that live only as posters: “A lot of companies or federations or sporting clubs, they have values. But quite often, you see them just as words on the wall, and there’s not much underneath that. With every value, you try to go into depth about what does this mean, what are the behaviors that would demonstrate that particular value on the pitch, how would that work on or off the pitch.”

This is the shift that separates high-performance culture from high-performance theatre. Belgium’s youth national programme, for example, uses the acronym TYPE: Team, You, Passion, Excellence. But what makes it work isn’t the acronym. It’s the painstaking work of unpacking what each word means in practice, in training, in a tough match, in how you treat a teammate who is struggling. Commens describes the process: players and staff work together to name the observable behaviours beneath each value.

What does “excellence” look like in the first five minutes of training? What does “passion” look like when you’ve just conceded the lead with ten minutes to go? Those conversations and what you do with these are the culture. The words on the wall are just the shorthand.

For your own programme, the practical takeaway is this: don’t skip the depth. However you choose your values, whether you generate them collaboratively, propose them to the group, or inherit them from your club’s history, spend significant time defining what they look like in action. Make them behavioural, not aspirational. Excellence” is too abstract. “Excellence means your first touch is at international speed, every repetition” is something a player can actually live.

From Values to Standards: How You Actually Live Them

Coach K draws a distinction that’s worth sitting with. Values, he says, are the guiding principles that drive a team. Standards are the ways you live those values — “how you do things all the time.” And then he says something that changes the frame entirely:

“You never own a rule. You obey or disobey it. But a standard is yours.”

That ownership distinction matters enormously. When the USA Basketball team gathered for the 2008 Olympics — arguably the most talented team ever assembled, with Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Chris Paul in the same squad — Coach K didn’t walk in and hand them a rulebook. He met individually with key players beforehand and then asked the group to build their own standards together. LeBron proposed “no excuses.“ Others added looking each other in the eye and telling the truth, never being late, and never having a bad practice. Fifteen standards in total. All of them player-generated, all of them owned.

“Not asking players to play for the United States, but to be United States basketball. To own it.” That shift from external obligation to internal identity is the engine of culture. And it didn’t just apply to practices and games. When the coaching staff placed Olympic uniforms on each player’s bed, Kobe Bryant reportedly cried. That’s what ownership feels like.

Commens describes exactly the same mechanism in his values-based coaching approach. The moment he knew values were genuinely embedded wasn’t when the coaching staff referenced them. It was when the players did. “They’re only gonna do that if you as a coach do it. I remember when I first started using this, I was working with a psychologist or a mentor that watched the way that I was presenting, and he said to me: when you call the team in, I want you to talk about one of the values.” The behavioural prompt from the coach creates the habit; the habit becomes the culture; and eventually the culture polices itself. When you hear your players using the language of values with each other — not to you — you know it’s real.

A practical tool Commens recommends for coaches is what he calls a balance check between “results” focus and “values” focus in your communication. Most coaches, if they’re honest, spend 90% of their communication time on the results axis — what to do tactically, what went wrong, what needs to change. Values barely feature. The invitation is to audit that balance, and to deliberately build values language into every session, every team talk, every debrief. Not as a replacement for tactical thinking, but as its constant companion.

The No-Jerk Zone

Shane Battier, four-year starter at Duke and one of the most influential culture carriers Coach K ever coached, describes the environment at Duke in one pithy phrase: “It was a no-jerk zone.” Negativity and ego didn’t last, he explains, because they “sucked energy from our group.” This wasn’t a formal policy. There was no clause in the player handbook. It was simply what the culture did not tolerate and it was enforced not primarily by the coach, but by the group itself.

Every team has its version of this test. The question is whether the culture is strong enough to self-police, or whether it requires constant intervention from the coach. Coach K is clear: culture requires active maintenance. Bad behaviour or cultural problems must be addressed immediately. “Bad can grow faster than good.” Don’t let it fester.

Commens speaks to this with particular clarity when it comes to players who are talented but less committed. It’s a situation every coach encounters, and the temptation is always to default to the more committed player. The one who ticks every box behaviourally even if their ceiling is lower. Commens pushes back on this instinct: “I wouldn’t suggest that you take the more committed player. I would suggest that you take the talented player and try to create an environment where they’re challenged, to bring that creativity and talent to the team.” The answer isn’t to lower your cultural standards. It’s to make the environment compelling enough that talent wants to commit. That’s a harder ask of the coach, but it’s the right one.

Theo ten Hagen’s work on team dynamics adds a crucial layer here. Using personality profiling tools like Lumina Spark, ten Hagen’s approach is to create “one language” for behaviour that allows squads to discuss differences — including difficult ones — productively. In his experience, diverse teams are stronger teams, but only if the diversity is acknowledged and worked with rather than smoothed over. The no-jerk zone is not a monoculture. It is an environment where different people can coexist, challenge each other, and bring different qualities. Provided everyone is playing by the same basic rules.

What Championship Culture Looks Like: Common Themes at the Top

Commens has a rare vantage point. He was inside two of the most successful team cultures in the history of field hockey: the 2004 Australian Kookaburras and the 2021 Belgian Red Lions and has spent years analysing what they shared. The results are less tactical than you might expect.

The first common theme is commitment and proactivity. Both teams had players who arrived well before the start of official training, not because they were told to, but because they wanted to. The Kookaburras had a phrase for it: “If you’re half an hour early, you’re late.” Not because of a rule, but because the culture made arriving early the obvious thing to do. When you trained alongside Jamie Dwyer every day, you understood very quickly what world’s best looked like and you adapted accordingly. The Red Lions had the same pull: their training ground became a second home.

The second common theme is something Commens calls unique quality or what he sometimes refers to as a player’s “superpower.” At elite level, he argues, hard work is simply the entry requirement. It is not a differentiator. “At the top level, everybody works hard. Hard work is a given. But really what makes a difference is the quality of everything that you do.”

Every player who stays in a high-performance squad needs to bring something specific that the team cannot do without. Identifying that quality and designing an environment that develops and celebrates it, is one of the coach’s most important jobs.

The third common theme is what Commens describes as mateship and connection. Not team-building exercises and trust falls. Real, durable, off-pitch relationships. “There was that culture of caring. And that also existed with the Red Lions. Everybody had each other’s back. Even when you look at the Red Lions, when they go on holidays, usually they go on holidays with each other.” This is not something you can manufacture. But you can create the conditions for it. And Commens is equally clear about what drives it: spending time learning why each individual is there. Not their tactical role. Their actual motivation.

“Both teams that won gold spent an enormous amount of time learning the why behind each individual. You form a bond, you form a connection and then you also get to understand what are the types of things that that particular player wants to hear in the key moments.”

This is Commens’ central claim, and it’s a bold one:

“Connection is more important than tactics.”

All teams at the elite level are technical and tactical experts, he says. The differentiator is the depth of understanding between coach and player, and between player and player. If you nail that, you’ve gone a long way to becoming a really high-level coach.

Protecting the Culture: When Adversity Hits

The most revealing test of a culture is not what happens when things are going well. It’s what happens when they aren’t.

Coach K tells the story of the 2001 Duke championship run, the one that nearly didn’t happen. Midway through the season, their best player Carlos Boozer broke his foot. On senior night. Duke lost the game. The next morning, Coach K called practice, and the team came in mentally absent, their minds clearly elsewhere. He stopped it. “Come back when you’re ready to practice. Come back when you’re ready to be Duke.”

The senior captains took the team back to the locker room. Shane Battier wept. He reminded his teammates that this was the end for the seniors, there was no next year. When they returned to practice, Coach K presented a new plan and made a promise: if they believed in it, they would win the national championship. The team didn’t mourn what they’d lost. They adapted to what they had.

What followed — the three-point blitz against Carolina, the run to the Final Four, the championship against Arizona — is well documented. But the key moment, the one that mattered most, came in the championship game itself. Mike Dunleavy had been struggling badly. His shots weren’t going in. And yet, when the ball needed to move, it moved all the way around and back to Dunleavy in the corner. He hit it. Then another. Then a third. Coach K called it proof of the “jealous-free zone” : teammates who took extreme, genuine delight in each other’s success, even when their own form was poor.

That is what culture looks like under pressure. Not a system. Not a tactical adjustment. A group of people who genuinely want each other to do well, who will move the ball to the corner even when they might want it themselves.

Commens describes the same quality in his work on values under pressure. It’s the hardest moment to maintain culture, he says. When there’s scoreboard pressure, when you haven’t beaten a team in months, when everything is on the line. “The most difficult moment is when your players are under pressure. At that moment, it’s the most difficult time for them to keep the values at top of mind.” His response is to redefine success before those moments arrive. Not “win or lose,” but “did we live our values?” When players can walk off the pitch having demonstrated their behaviours fully, regardless of the result, that is genuinely a success. And paradoxically, that reframing is what gives teams their best chance of winning. Freed from the fear of the outcome, they play with exactly the kind of freedom that makes champions.

Build something worth passing on

The invitation for every hockey coach, at whatever level, is this: build something worth passing on. Not a system of play, though that matters. Not a set of results, though those matter too. A set of values, behaviours, and standards that players carry with them when they leave your environment and that make the next environment they enter fractionally better because of it.

Coach K has a phrase for the cultural ask he makes of his players: “Unpack your bags.” Don’t treat this like a rental. Don’t play with one eye on the exit. Be fully present, because this environment — right now, this group of people — is worth the investment.

That’s the jealous-free zone. And it’s yours to build.

In summary: Culture doesn’t happen by accident. It starts with values. Not words on a wall, but behaviours you can see, recognise, and reinforce every single day. It becomes operational through standards that players own rather than rules they obey. It reveals itself most clearly in the moments of adversity and competition, when teammates move the ball to the corner for someone else, when they define success as living their principles rather than just winning the game. And it perpetuates itself, long after you’re gone, when the players you shaped start shaping others. Build the jealous-free zone. Build something worth passing on.

Some of the sources used:

Keep your eye out for the other articles on fun, talent & our next one on legacy 😉

That is the line I keep coming back to after sitting with this masterclass. You can spend a month drilling shape, another month on outlet patterns, another on set piece structure, and it will all leak away the moment you watch the game back and see midfielders receiving with their heads flat. The midfield is the engine of the team, and the engine only runs when the driver is looking at the road. Everything that follows below is built on top of that one habit.

The three principles that define the role

The first lesson for us as a coach is that a midfielder’s job description has to be simple enough to say in one breath. Connect the lines. Support the ball. Keep the balance. Connecting the lines means your midfielders are always the bridge between defenders and strikers, never a lonely island in between. Support means you are available for the player on the ball whether that player is comfortable or swallowed by pressure. Balance means you attack with a conscience: one or two players stay behind every wave forward, because the rest defence has to exist before you lose the ball, not after. None of these ideas are new. The coaching gain comes from insisting on all three in every phase, not just when the video camera is rolling.

The technical toolkit

The technical lesson is that a midfielder needs a slightly different toolbox from a striker or a back, and we should train it that way. Short, repeatable push connections sit at the top, because most of their distribution is crisp under pressure. Next to that, dynamic overheads matter more than static ones, because the modern game does not give you time to set your feet. Sweep passes deserve a place in the weekly plan, both as receive-and-hit and as a line-skipping option when the press gets tight. One-handed carrying is worth rehearsing, particularly on the right side where the body naturally shields the ball from the inside defender. And sitting above all of that, open receptions. A midfielder who can only take the ball square is a midfielder who quietly turns every attack into a sideways one. As a coach, you want at least one drill per week where receiving open is the only way to score.

The tactical behaviours

The tactical lessons are where the coaching craft really lives. Press-scanning is the baseline, but the next layer is mobility. A static midfielder is a marked midfielder, and you cannot coach decisions into a player who is not creating passing lines in the first place. On top of that sits the behaviour I found most valuable in the whole session: the ability to accelerate and decelerate with purpose. The best midfielders are not the fastest. They are the ones who know when to slow the game down, scan, and then go. This is the hardest thing to coach, because you are teaching reading, not execution, and it only comes from video review plus plenty of small-sided minutes where the right answer is sometimes to wait.
Alongside that, two more habits are worth building into your sessions.

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Sources

1. The Evolution of Creativity (Tin Matkovic)

2. 1v1 in Game Situations (Robert Noall)

3. Off Ball Principles

4. Third Man Combinations (Russell Coates)

5. From Game to Training (Fede Tanuscio)

6. Small Sided Games (Andreu Enrich)

7. Teaching Kids About Running the Ball vs Passing

The Talented Kid Who Plays Alone

You know this player. Every youth coach does. They are the best individual on the pitch by some distance. Quick hands, low body position, the ability to beat a defender from a standing start. In a 1v1 they are devastating. In a drill they make it look easy. And in a game, they do extraordinary things that produce... nothing.

They beat the right back, accelerate into the circle, and run straight into the covering defender because they never looked up. They receive the ball on the left baseline, eliminate two players with a beautiful piece of skill, and then have nowhere to go because the moment to release the ball was two touches ago. They score a brilliant solo goal once every few games, but the other fifty minutes, the team plays as ten.

The parents love them. The opposition fear them. But the coach sits on the sideline watching a player whose talent is disconnected from the team around them.

This is not about skill. The skill is there. This is about something harder to coach and easier to get wrong: helping a young player understand that individual quality only becomes truly dangerous when it is connected to the movement, timing, and intelligence of teammates.

Why Individual Brilliance Doesn’t Automatically Become Team Play

There is a temptation to assume that if a player is good enough individually, the team game will come naturally. Give it time, we tell ourselves. They will figure it out. And sometimes they do. But more often, what happens is that the player develops habits around their individual strength that actively work against team play. They learn that carrying the ball gets them past the first defender, so carrying becomes the default. They learn that they are faster and more skilled than most opponents, so they stop scanning for teammates because the solo option is usually the best one. The individual success reinforces individual behaviour.

The problem is not that they are selfish. Most of these kids are not. The problem is that everything in their development has rewarded the individual action, and very little has rewarded the collective one. If every time you beat a defender the coach cheers and the parents applaud, why would you look for the pass?

Robert Noall frames this well in his masterclass on 1v1 in game situations. He talks about elimination not as an isolated act of brilliance but as a three-phase process: ball position, acceleration, elimination. But here is the part that matters for this conversation.

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You’ve seen it happen. A player comes into a trial or a new season, and something catches your eye. Not a flashy skill, not a goal, but something quieter. The way they check their shoulder before they receive. The way they read where the press is coming from before it arrives. You make a note. And six months later that player is one of the most important in your squad, while others who looked more impressive on day one are still roughly where they started.

That moment, noticing something others missed, and then doing something with it, is the start of talent development. It’s not magic, and it’s not luck. It’s a set of skills you build.

In this article we’re going to look at what to actually look for when you’re assessing players (and why your criteria might need updating), how to grow the players you have beyond their current ceiling, how to read development in the moment and across a season, how to give feedback that genuinely moves people forward, and why the four most powerful words in coaching might just be I believe in you. The thinking draws heavily on Coach K’s masterclass on values-driven leadership, translated into the field hockey context and backed up by some of the best development thinking from The Hockey Site’s own experts.

By the way the lessons from Coach K come from his masterclass here.

What Are You Actually Looking For When Scouting For Talent?

Coach K has a deceptively simple framework for what he looks for when recruiting: talent, balance, and character. Three things, in that order. But he’s quick to point out that talent, in the narrow technical sense, is the least interesting of the three.

For field hockey coaches, this is worth sitting with. Technical talent is the entry ticket. You need players who can receive under pressure, execute a pass in tight space, defend one-on-one. Without a certain technical floor, none of the rest matters. But technical talent is also the thing most of us already know how to assess. We watch it, we measure it, we compare it. The problem is that we often stop there.

Balance, in Coach K’s terms, means a player who has a life outside hockey. Interests, curiosity, a sense of self that isn’t entirely defined by whether they played well on game day. This sounds counterintuitive. Shouldn’t the most committed players think about nothing but the game? Not necessarily. Players with a broader sense of who they are tend to handle adversity better, stay engaged longer, and bring a kind of intelligence to their play that purely single-minded players often lack. The psychological buffer matters.

Character is the hardest to assess and the most important to get right. Coach K talks about watching how players respond when a teammate does something well. Do they celebrate it, or do they go quiet? How do they carry themselves when they’re on the bench? What does their body language say in a team talk when the coach is giving critical feedback? These are the signals that tell you whether a player will add to the environment you’re trying to build or quietly corrode it.

None of this means recruiting for niceness. It means recruiting for honesty, accountability, and the kind of resilience that doesn’t fracture under pressure.

But here’s a layer that coaches rarely talk about and when they do, it tends to shift how they see their whole squad.

The Pygmalion Effect, as Andreu Enrich explained in his masterclass with Ric Charlesworth and David Harte on the topic at The Hockey Site, traces back to a landmark experiment by Rosenthal and Jacobson, in which a randomly selected group of students were described to their teachers as being on the verge of a real leap forward. Those teachers gave them more challenging work, more constructive feedback, and more genuine attention. The students outperformed their peers — not because they were more gifted, but because someone believed they were. The parallel for field hockey is, as Andreu puts it, obvious: if you truly believe in the potential of every squad member, not just the stars, your training, your feedback, and your attention will reflect that belief, and it will drive real outcomes.

The mechanism is subtle but powerful. When you’ve quietly written a player off, you stop investing in them at the level they need. You give them fewer reps in the demanding exercises. You offer less detailed feedback. They sense the withdrawal. Development stalls. And you conclude that your original assessment was correct. It becomes self-fulfilling. Not because you were right about the player, but because your diminished belief shaped the environment they were developing in.

Ric Charlesworth, one of the coaches who joined Andreu for that masterclass discussion, put the coach’s responsibility plainly:

“Your job as a coach is to comfort the troubled and trouble the comfortable. The athletes who are struggling need to be supported.”

His point is worth sitting with. The Pygmalion Effect doesn’t just lift the players you believe in — it damages the ones you’ve stopped believing in, often without you even realising it’s happening. Charlesworth added something that reframes the whole coach-player relationship:

“When you’re a coach, you never change anybody. You create an environment where they can change, but they have to change themselves.”

Which means your expectations don’t change players directly. They change the environment you create, and that environment either enables development or quietly forecloses it.

David Passmore, head coach of the USA women’s team and former lecturer in coaching science at Dublin City University, makes a closely related point in his masterclass on a research-based approach to talent development. The trap he identifies is short-term thinking: selecting the biggest kid for corners, running adult-style tactics with U14s, optimising for the weekend result. These things feel productive and they might win this weekend. But they produce players who are decision-poor, risk-averse, and built on a limited skill set designed to solve short-term problems. As Passmore says:

“You need to have long-term aims and methods and not be short-term focused. The success will rarely have a direct effect on where they end up. There are a lot of kids who will be super good because they grow early or they’ve been more exposed when younger… and that won’t necessarily transfer into senior level.”

Put the two ideas together and they point at the same conclusion: how you see your players and how far into the future you’re looking when you see them, shapes what you get from them more than almost any tactical or technical decision you’ll make this season.

Growing What You’ve Found

Once you’ve got the right people in, the developmental work begins and it’s more nuanced than most coaches give it credit for.

Coach K’s clearest principle here is one that coaches often resist: the players with the most ability require the most demanding coaching. Not the easiest. The most demanding. Top performers disengage when they plateau. When training stops stretching them, the best players start going through the motions or, worse, drift toward habits that work at the current level but will fail them when the competition gets harder.

Coach K describes a moment during an Olympic training camp when he noticed Kobe Bryant taking a specific kind of shot. A shot that worked with a big lead in the regular season, but that wouldn’t win a gold medal against the best defensive teams in the world. He addressed it privately, with video evidence, and framed it not as criticism but as a straightforward conversation between two people who shared the same goal. “Those are shots you can hit with a big lead. These are not the shots that win gold medals.” Bryant agreed immediately and made his own decision to stop taking those shots. The conversation deepened the relationship rather than damaging it. Precisely because it came from a place of genuine investment in his success.

Jon Bleby, in his masterclass on developing elite hockey players, cuts straight to the heart of it: “the best players have the best basics — skills that work again and again and again.” Repeatability is the mark of real quality. A 3D skill that only works 30% of the time because it’s the defender’s first read isn’t a weapon. It’s a habit. And habits, unlike weapons, can’t be put away when the situation demands something else.

Tin Matkovic, in his work on balancing skill gaps, frames it in terms of what the best players actually need from their coaches:

“Keep evolving their superpowers, but also build on what they are yet not good at. You have to develop the whole player.”

He uses an engine analogy that is hard to argue with: “In order for the engine to work, you have to have small parts working perfectly.” The 3D skills are the headline — the cylinder that fires loudest. But if the first touch is inconsistent, if the scanning is late, if the body shape gives the skill away before the stick even moves — the engine misfires. You’re not developing a complete player; you’re patching around a weak foundation.

This is what the work on balancing skill gaps addresses directly. Developing the whole player, not just reinforcing existing strengths, is one of the harder things to do as a coach. Partly because players resist it, and partly because you’re asking them to go through a period of feeling worse before they feel better. The skills they’ve always leaned on suddenly feel less available. The new ones aren’t automatic yet. That middle period is uncomfortable, and some players won’t push through it without a coach who holds the line.

Mark Bateman makes the point that this capacity — to sit in the discomfort of development and keep going — is itself the thing you’re trying to identify in talented players. It’s not the highlights that separate the ones who plateau from the ones who keep climbing. It’s “their ability to learn quickly and adapt.” Talent gets you noticed. Adaptability determines how far you go.

Matkovic draws the line between training and competition clearly: “In the game and competition, playing by your strong side is perfect. But in training, you want them to evolve everything.” That’s the deal you make with players who have genuine potential. Compete with what you have. Train to become more than you are. The development conversation with that attacker isn’t about taking the 3D skills away. That would be both unnecessary and counterproductive, those skills are genuinely valuable, and players know it. The conversation is about sequencing. Lead with the body first. Create the space. Make the defender commit, so that the 3D becomes a counter-punch rather than a first resort. The skill doesn’t disappear from the game plan; it gets elevated to what it should always have been, a weapon held in reserve, deployed at the right moment, from the right platform.

This is precisely what the work on balancing skill gaps addresses directly. Tin Matkovic, talking about developing players across mixed-ability environments in his work in Germany, frames it in terms every coach will recognise. He talks about the importance of players understanding their “superpowers” — the things they do naturally well — but insists that a coach’s job doesn’t end there.

“Keep evolving their superpowers, but also build on what they are yet not good at. Delivering this news to a player who has never been told ‘you’re good at this and you potentially need to be better at that’ is really difficult. You have players that just don’t agree with you, players that are not on board with this. So it’s a process that takes time.” — Tin Matkovic

You can explore his full thinking on this challenge in his masterclass on balancing skill gaps.

Matkovic uses an engine analogy to describe what a complete player actually looks like: “In order for the engine to work, you have to have small parts working perfectly to align with the big parts, and all together they create a perfect machine.” A striker who can only use one gear, however impressive that gear looks in isolation, is not a complete machine. At higher levels of the game, incomplete machines get found out.

Mark Bateman makes a related observation when talking about how England’s development pathway distinguishes players who progress from those who plateau. He notes that high-potential players are often set apart less by raw talent than by “their ability to learn quickly and adapt.” That adaptability — the willingness to add something new and unfamiliar to your game, to work on the uncomfortable parts — is one of the markers coaches at elite development level use to project a player’s ceiling. The attacker who insists on playing only to their 3D strengths isn’t demonstrating confidence. They’re demonstrating a limit.

Developing the whole player, not just reinforcing existing strengths, is one of the harder things to do as a coach — partly because players resist it, and partly because you’re genuinely asking them to go through a period of feeling worse before they feel better. Matkovic is candid about this friction: “In the game and competition, playing by your strong side is perfect. But in training, you want them to evolve everything.” The training ground is where the new skills get built. The match is where you use what you have. The skill — as a coach — is in holding that tension without losing the player’s trust along the way.

Coach K captures it well: “People need to know they’re doing well before they can be pushed to do more.” The sequence matters. Genuine recognition first, challenge second. You can’t skip the first step and expect the second to land.

And then, and this part is non-negotiable, the new skill needs real repetition. Not occasional exposure. Not a drill done twice in a session and then left alone. Coach K is blunt: “You don’t get a new move from an app.” Physical skills are built through hundreds of quality repetitions. There’s no shortcut, and pretending otherwise is a disservice to the player.

The Art of the Individual Read

One of the more underrated coaching skills is the ability to notice individual development in real time. Not just in the performance review at the end of the season, but in the moment it’s happening.

Coach K draws a distinction between what he calls quick reads and longer reads. A quick read happens during a session: you notice something changing in a player’s game: a small adjustment, a new habit, a moment of unexpected quality and you respond to it immediately. A longer read happens across a block of training or a run of games: you track an arc of development and make strategic decisions about where to push next and where to give space.

He describes a training session where he spotted his centre back Mark Williams getting a rebound well outside his usual defensive zone, showing a lateral mobility that hadn’t been visible before. He called it out immediately, in the moment, in front of the group. Not effusively, just clearly. “Did you see that?” That single acknowledgement told the player that the coaching staff were watching, that the development was real, and that it was worth building on. It’s a small thing that carries a disproportionate weight.

In field hockey terms, this might be the moment a defensive midfielder — one you’ve been working with on their scanning habits — suddenly makes a third-man run that suggests they’ve genuinely internalised a new way of reading the press. You can let it pass, or you can name it. Naming it costs you nothing and tells the player something important: I see you. The work is paying off.

Jon Bleby and Mark Bateman, in their masterclass on developing elite hockey players, go into the long arc of this kind of development with real depth. Their work on elite development pathways shows that the coaches who consistently produce the best players aren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated systems. They’re the ones who pay close individual attention across time, who know where each player is in their development journey and adjust their coaching accordingly.

The individual read isn’t just a nice touch. It’s the mechanism through which development actually happens.

Feedback That Lands

Recognition beyond star players is one of Coach K’s recurring themes and it applies just as directly in field hockey as it does in basketball.

In any squad, the players who score the goals and make the headline passes get noticed. The problem is that the players who make those contributions possible: the midfielder who wins the ball back in the press, the defender who carries out of trouble to relieve pressure, the forward who makes the dummy run that opens the channel, often go unseen. Or rather: they’re seen by coaches who are paying attention, but they’re rarely named out loud. Coach K is deliberate about this. He looks for the contribution behind the contribution, and he names it specifically. “That screen was the reason the shot was possible.” In field hockey: “That dummy run was why your teammate had room for a powerful shot” These moments build the culture of a squad in ways that tactical sessions can’t.

On the harder side of feedback, Andreu Enrich’s work on intelligent players raises a challenge for coaches: are you developing hockey intelligence alongside technical skill? Players who understand why they’re doing something, who can read the game, make decisions under pressure, and adapt when the plan changes are fundamentally more valuable than technically capable players who can only execute instructions. And developing that kind of intelligence requires a different kind of feedback. Questions rather than answers. “What did you see before you received it?” instead of “You should have turned.”

The most demanding feedback conversation Coach K describes is the one with Kobe Bryant about “Lakers shots” versus “Olympic shots” — the private, video-based, direct conversation where the standard was raised without the relationship being damaged. In field hockey terms, this is the conversation with your best player about the habit they’ve developed that will cost them, and your team, against better opponents. It’s the conversation you can only have if the relationship has real trust built into it. And having it, done well, almost always deepens the relationship rather than straining it.

“I Believe in You”

Coach K tells a story about Shane Battier during a summer internship, long before Battier had established himself as one of the great players in college basketball history. Coach K called him and asked a direct question: was he ready to be ACC Player of the Year? Battier hesitated. Coach K hung up. Then he called back and asked again. He kept calling until Battier said yes. Not out of politeness, but because he actually believed it.

That’s the Pygmalion Effect in action. Not the research version. The real version, with a phone call and a hanging up and a calling back. The point is that Coach K didn’t just believe Battier was capable of it. He communicated that belief repeatedly, persistently, and in a way that required Battier to own it himself. “I believe in you” said once is a nice thing to hear. Said consistently, in ways that demand a response, it changes what a player believes about themselves.

For field hockey coaches, this is worth thinking about carefully. Which players in your squad have you quietly decided have a ceiling — and how would your coaching change if you decided you were wrong about that? Which players are playing well within their capability because somewhere along the way they got a signal, real or imagined, that stretching wasn’t safe? And what would change if you treated them, consistently and specifically, like someone who was about to bloom?

The four most powerful words in coaching are not “good press, well done.” They’re “I believe in you.” And the difference between saying them and meaning them is everything.

What This Comes Down To

Talent development is not a programme. It’s not a curriculum or a matrix or a set of competencies on a spreadsheet. It’s a set of habits:

1. the habit of looking beyond the obvious,

2. the habit of challenging your best players hardest,

3. the habit of reading individual development in real time,

4. the habit of giving feedback that names what others miss,

5. and the habit of expressing genuine belief in the people you work with.

Coach K’s framework — talent, balance, character; coach the best the hardest; quick reads and longer reads; feedback with trust — translates directly to the field hockey context because it’s built on something universal. People develop when someone pays close attention to where they actually are, challenges them in the right direction, and makes them feel that the journey is worth taking.

That’s what you’re doing every time you run a session, review a game, or have a conversation with a player about where they’re heading. You’re not just developing a squad. You’re deciding, one interaction at a time, what these players are capable of becoming.

Some of the sources used:

Keep your eye out for the other articles on fun, culture & legacy 😉

Our “Coaches Clipboard” is a collection of quotes, pertinent phrases, knowledge and wisdom. Shared every now and then on a Sunday. It’s our "thinking menu" with some bits and pieces we came across…
#sharetheknowledge 🙂

Read. Enjoy. Think. Share.

1. Choose one thing to finish, not five.

2. Sometimes slowly is the fastest way to get to where you want to be.

3. Not every battle shows up on the scoreboard. Not every struggle appears on a balance sheet. There are silent battles we are all carrying.

4. The older you get, the more you realize life isn’t asking you to be impressive. It’s asking you to be honest and real.

5. The best gift you can give someone is “opportunity.”

   Thanks for reading The Hockey Site! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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6. Your peace is worth more than people’s approval. Don’t trade your inner harmony just to fit into someone else’s expectations.

7. Be quick, but don’t hurry.

8. Don’t wait until the day is perfect to look up and watch the sunrise.

9. Successful people learn something new every day. The most successful people relearn something old every week. They understand that just because something was true once doesn’t mean it’s still true today.

10. Don’t sell your vision. Share where you’re going and ask: Will you join?

Hope you enjoyed these… happy coaching!

Have you seen ? ↓

I want to walk through a few of the observations that stood out to me, leaning heavily on insights from Todd Williams, the former Australian international and current Reading head coach, who reviewed the tournament with a defender’s eye and a coach’s curiosity. As he put it himself, “these are observations and insights. By no means am I stating rules. Quite the opposite. One of the great things about coaching are the conversations you have.”

So consider this an invitation to that conversation.

Bridging the Gap: What Watsonians Can Teach Us All

One of the most interesting storylines of the tournament came right at the beginning. Watsonians opened with a convincing 6-1 win over Railway Union, showing excellent circle entries, strong numbers around the ball, and clinical finishing. Then, as they moved up through the bracket and met Gantois, the script flipped. The same patterns they had used to dominate Railway Union were now being used against them.

This is a scenario most of us have faced. Your team can beat teams at a certain level comfortably, but when you step up, the same things happen to you that you just did to someone else. So the question becomes: how do you bridge that gap?

Williams zeroed in on something specific. In several of Watsonians’ attacking opportunities against Gantois, they had genuine numerical overloads, four on two and three on two situations, but failed to convert them into clear-cut chances. The issue was not a lack of opportunity. It was what happened with the opportunity.

“In a four on two, is the type of shot we want to create something where we end up on the outside of the circle, smashing it across and getting it more of a speculative deflection?” Williams asked. “My point is this: if we go back into the play, as we start to recognize that we have four on two, do we actually need to now start looking at an elimination of one of the last two, which is then going to create a much easier shot?”

The takeaway is clear. At the highest level, recognising the overload is not enough. You have to act on it earlier, commit to the elimination further from goal, and trust the interplay to create something more concrete than a speculative cross. Without that recognition and early action, the defenders simply recover, and the moment passes.

The Men’s Final: When Stats Tell One Story and the Game Tells Another

The men’s final between Gantoise and Kampong was a masterclass in why coaches cannot rely on dashboards alone. Thanks to data shared by The Secret Analyst, we could see that Gantoise dominated possession, created 21 circle entries to Kampong’s 10, and generated an expected goals figure of 4.8 compared to Kampong’s 0.4. On paper, that should have been a comfortable Gantoise win.

Kampong won 3-2. Shot conversion: 67%.

Williams made the point perfectly. “You can look at all of this from a coaching and team perspective and go, well, on that data sheet, on that dashboard, it is the game we wanted. On any other day that could look like a comfortable win. So at that point you can say, maybe it’s just bad luck, maybe it wasn’t our day. But that’s where I think, from a coaching perspective, am I going to take that as being the definitive story of the match, or am I going to look in more detail at some video?”

And when you do look at the video, the cracks appear. What Williams identified was a recurring theme in Gantoise’s defensive structure: a lack of cohesion around who should be pressuring the ball carrier, and when.

In several sequences, the nearest defender hesitated while a teammate further away committed. This left passing lanes open and allowed Kampong players, even from limited chances, to find just enough space to finish. And at this level, that is all it takes.

“At this level of hockey, you can’t be giving people uncontested or relatively uncontested passes in,” Williams warned. “What you see at this level is very, very little opportunity needed for people to finish extraordinarily well.”

One goal came from what Williams described as little more than a slight error from Alexander Hendrickx. “The trouble is, he’s giving it to someone of equal quality, Telgenkamp. And that’s as much as a sniff as people at this level need.”

Pressure on the Ball: Decision-Making Over Structure

This became the thread running through the entire review. Whether it was a free hit, an outlet, or a transition moment, the question kept coming back to the same place: who is responsible for putting pressure on the ball, and are they doing it quickly enough?

Williams was careful to point out that this is not about man-to-man versus zonal defending.

“It’s all still about decision making,” he said. “The biggest problem I have is when someone goes, ‘well, yeah, I’m doing my job, I’m where I’m meant to be.’ But actually, if someone’s running in and making a pass into the circle, we need that pressure put on the ball. And that’s about decision making, not structure.”

He even made the slightly provocative observation that teams playing with 10 players can sometimes defend better than with 11. “The great thing about being down to 10 is that it takes the pressures of structure and responsibility away and just says, deal with the danger. And that’s quite often why it’s so very, very difficult to break down a team that’s down a player, because they are using instinct and decision making and scrambling, which is very different to the more organized and structured type of defence.”

Training Overloads and the Counter-Attack Problem

A question from the audience about training these overload situations drew a practical response. Williams pointed out that small-sided games, while valuable, often lack the geography and speed needed to replicate real match scenarios.

“What makes those examples interesting is that the elimination needs to happen earlier. One of them is probably around 40 meters from goal, one about 30 meters. But if you can do that, and that’s where the technical risk is, the defenders get back. So what happens in a small-sided game is that you can’t replicate either the range of the play or the speed of it.”

The implication for training design is significant. If we want our attackers to recognise and exploit overloads on the counter, we need to set up sessions that mirror the distances, speeds, and decision windows of the real thing, not just the principles.

Williams also addressed the issue of depth in counter-attacks. When attackers run level with the ball carrier, defenders are happy to simply sprint back and reset. “Without actually making a pass, nothing’s going to change the defenders from what their current thinking is, just get back, get numbers around it and then see what we can get on it.” The solution? Engage defenders through early passes, force them to commit, and create the two-on-one situations that actually lead to goals.

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The Basics Still Win

When asked what a club coach training twice a week should take from the EHL, Williams brought it back to fundamentals.

“You can’t do any of this top end stuff without having the platform of the basics. You’ve got to be able to pass it.”

And then the patience piece.

“Everything takes time. You can’t just say it and expect it to be done. You’re going to have to walk through it. You’re going to have to do it over and over again to develop mind maps of players. And as a coach, you need to be patient with that. Definitely take away the good stuff, but just recognize the length of the road that you’ve got to walk to get there.”

That is perhaps the most honest and important message from the entire review.

Three Takeaways for Your Coaching

1. Recognise overloads earlier and act on them further from goal. Whether it is a four-on-two or a three-on-two, the elimination needs to happen before the defenders recover. Train your players to read the numbers and commit to interplay at 30 to 40 meters out, not just inside the circle.

2. Pressure on the ball is a decision, not a position. Regardless of your defensive structure, someone must take responsibility for closing down the ball carrier. When that does not happen, even the best-organised defence can be undone by a single well-placed pass. Coach your players to prioritise danger over role.

3. Trust the process and invest in the basics. The best teams in the EHL did not get there by copying highlight reels. They got there through relentless repetition of fundamental skills and game understanding. Take the inspiration, but be honest about the road ahead, and be patient enough to walk it.

Some bonus stuff here ↓

“The ball carrier’s first question is: ‘Is there a pass forward?’ If your press arrives as they’re checking, they’ve already lost a second.” — Andreu Enrich

We spend a lot of time coaching the press. And I mean a lot. Pressing triggers, pressing traps, pressing shapes, pressing intensity. We talk about sideline triggers, backwards-pass triggers, closed-receive triggers. We design small-sided games that reward turnovers and punish sloppy possession. We film matches, freeze-frame the moments our press broke down, and run sessions to fix it.

And here’s the thing... how much time do we actually spend on the other side of that equation? How much time do we invest in coaching our players to read the press, to recognise what’s happening, and to exploit it?

If you’re honest with yourself, the answer is probably: not nearly enough.

It’s a strange blind spot. Because every pressing system has weaknesses built into it. Every trigger that activates a press also creates space somewhere else. Every moment of aggressive commitment from a defender is simultaneously a moment of vulnerability. The best teams in the world don’t just survive pressure. They use it as fuel.

So let’s flip the lens. Instead of asking “how do we press better?”, let’s ask: how do we teach our players to read the press and turn it into opportunity?

TL;DR

Every coordinated press is built on triggers: sideline passes, backwards passes, poor first touches, closed body shapes. Once your players can recognise those triggers, they can avoid them, manipulate them, or deliberately spring them to exploit the space the press creates. Combine that recognition with structured scanning habits, a clear decision-making framework for receiving under pressure, and the team-level principles for playing through, around, or over the press. And pressure becomes your friend, not your enemy. Two session designs at the end put all of this into practice.

Sources used

This article draws on these previous videos and articles here…

1. Russell Coates — How to Train Pressing Triggers — Reveals the cues and patterns that activate a coordinated press, and the coaching language behind them.

2. The 3-Second Decision Framework for Receiving Under Pressure — A structured approach to the micro-moments before, during, and after reception.

3. Scan-to-First-Touch Under Pressure — Connects scanning, decision-making, and execution into one coachable framework.

4. Robert Noall — Outletting vs Man-to-Man — Team-level strategies for creating overloads and playing through organised pressure.

5. Andreu Enrich — Managing Transitions — What elite attackers think about in the critical seconds when possession changes hands.

Recognising Pressing Patterns and Their Weaknesses

If you want your players to beat the press, they first need to understand what they’re facing. And the best way to understand a press is to study how it’s built.

Russell Coates breaks pressing down into two distinct phases: the trap and the trigger. The trap is the setup — the lateral shifting, the closing of central passing lanes, the deliberate channelling of the ball towards a specific area of the pitch. The trigger is the activation — the specific cue that tells the entire pressing unit to commit. Common triggers include a pass to the sideline, a backwards pass, a player receiving with their back to goal, or a poor first touch. [1]

Here’s where it gets interesting for the team in possession. Every trigger that a pressing team relies on is, by definition, predictable. If you know that a sideline pass activates their press, you have a choice: avoid the sideline pass altogether, or play it deliberately and use the space their commitment creates.

Think about it this way. When a pressing team commits to a sideline trigger, they’re shifting as a unit towards the ball. That means the weak side opens up. The centre might become available. A quick transfer. What Robert Noall calls the “golden transfer”, can put you into an entirely different game on the far side of the pitch. [4]

The same logic applies to every trigger. A backwards pass triggers aggressive forward movement from the press, which means there’s space behind their pressing line if you can play through it quickly. A closed receive invites pressure, but an open receive with a pre-planned exit buys your player time and the presser arrives late.

And this is the fundamental shift in perspective. Most coaches teach their players to avoid triggers. The best coaches teach their players to use triggers, to spring them deliberately, knowing exactly where the space will open up when the pressing unit commits. Coates himself makes the point beautifully: pressing teams set traps before activating triggers. That means the trap is the tell. Once your players learn to read the trap, they can predict the trigger and prepare the escape before it even fires. [1]

The point is not to teach your players a rigid counter-system. It’s to teach them to see the press as a pattern with knowable rules. Once they see the rules, they can break them.

The Role of Scanning and Early Decision-Making

Recognising the press at a team level is one thing. But the individual player on the ball, or about to receive it, needs their own toolkit. And that toolkit starts well before the ball arrives.

Tin Matkovic’s work on pre-scanning reframes what “looking around” actually means. It’s not a generic habit. It’s mapping.

“Every time I turn my head and every time I focus that position in hockey, it’s trying to map one part of the field. So it’s like a puzzle for me. Every time that we turn around we have a new scenario and new part of the field that we unlocked.” — Tin Matkovic

Each shoulder check is one more tile in a live puzzle, building an escape route and a damaging route before the ball even gets there. [3] The best receivers don’t just scan, they scan with specific questions: where is the nearest pressure? Where is my safe exit? Where is my damaging exit if the defence is slow?

And here’s a detail that many coaches miss: scanning is role-specific. Wide players often operate in 180 degrees because the sideline defines one boundary. Central midfielders need the full 360 awareness. Coaching “scan more” as a blanket instruction actually under-serves your players. Coach scanning as a role skill, with specific information targets for each position. [3]

The 3-Second Decision Framework takes this further by splitting the receiving moment into three distinct phases. In the pre-reception phase (roughly two seconds before the ball arrives), the player scans, positions their body, and commits to a plan. At the reception moment (half a second), they execute a first touch that buys something: time, space, or protection. In the post-reception phase (another half-second), they either execute their plan or adapt it based on what’s changed. [2]

That last part is where elite players separate themselves. The scan can be perfect, the plan can be good, and the picture still changes late. A defender arrives from a blind side. A teammate changes their lead. The pass comes at a slightly different angle. The real question isn’t whether your players can make a decision. It’s whether they can make a decision and then change it without panic.

A practical coaching rule that works well here is the two exits rule: before receiving, the player should have a safe exit and a damaging exit already in mind. When the picture changes, they don’t freeze, they switch to the other exit. [3]

As Andrew Wilson puts it in the dynamic receiving work, many technical errors we see on the pitch are actually poor decisions made long before the ball even arrives. [3] If we’re only coaching the touch, we’re coaching the symptom. The cause is almost always upstream: in perception and decision-making.

Playing Through vs Playing Around vs Playing Over the Press

Once your players can read the press and receive under pressure with intent, the next question becomes: what do we actually do with the ball? And the answer depends on what the press gives you.

Read more

Enjoy the Ride! Did you know fun is the most underrated coaching tool in hockey?

Let’s be honest. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us started taking ourselves a bit too seriously. The sessions got more structured, the tactical boards got more detailed, and somewhere between the pressing patterns and the set-piece rehearsals, the laughter disappeared. Not completely, but enough to notice. And here’s the thing:

When fun goes, performance tends to follow it out the door.

Today, I want to make the case for fun as a genuine performance tool. Not the fluffy, participation-trophy kind of fun, but the real thing: the loose, energised, “I actually want to be here“ feeling that separates the environments where players grow fastest from the ones where they just go through the motions.

We’ll look at why a positive atmosphere is neurologically and behaviourally superior to a tight one, how your own emotional state sets the tone before you’ve said a single word, how to design sessions players genuinely look forward to, and how to keep the energy alive even when the scoreboard is against you. Along the way, I’ll draw on some hard-won wisdom from one of the greatest team builders in sport: basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski (aka Coach K) and from some of the best field hockey minds in our own catalogue here at The Hockey Site.

The Science of Loose vs. Tight

Coach K or Mike Krzyzewski, the most decorated coach in the history of college basketball, has a phrase that I keep coming back to. When one of his players was about to take a pressure shot late in a game, instead of loading them up with instruction, he said:

“I wish I was in your spot right now. What an opportunity.”

He said it with a smile. The player, loosened rather than tightened, stepped up and delivered.

That’s not luck. That’s a coach who understands something fundamental: a confident, loose atmosphere leads to better performance than a tight, fearful one. Coach K puts it plainly: “Creating a positive, loose atmosphere rather than a heavy one helps performance.” And he’s right. When players are anxious, their attention narrows, their decision-making slows, and they start playing not to lose instead of playing to win. When they feel safe, trusted, and yes, when they’re enjoying themselves, they play with the kind of freedom that actually unlocks their best hockey.

By the way the lessons from Coach K come from his masterclass here.

Performance psychologist Katie Warriner, who has worked with GB Hockey across multiple Olympic cycles, makes a similar point from a different angle. In her work on confidence, she draws a direct line between enjoyment and decision-making quality. When players are in a positive emotional state, the part of the brain responsible for good choices is simply more accessible. Fear and anxiety activate a completely different set of responses. The ones designed to keep you alive in a crisis, not to execute a well-timed aerial into the circle. As Warriner puts it, when players define success in ways within their own control rather than purely on outcomes, “you change everything around how your focus is, what you’re paying attention to, which in turn helps you make better decisions, which then helps you deliver a better performance.” You can explore her full thinking on this in her masterclass on confidence as a choice and a skill.

Fun, in other words, isn’t soft. It’s strategic.

It Starts With You

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you’re not enjoying your coaching, your players feel it. They might not be able to name it, but they sense the weight in the room the moment you walk onto the pitch. Coach K is emphatic on this point.

“Let emotion get the best out of you, not the best of you.”

He argues that leaders who embrace their own emotional energy — who bring genuine passion and enthusiasm to what they do — create a contagious environment. The ones who suppress it, or worse, who show up flat, create a different kind of contagion entirely.

This is something Mati Vila speaks to powerfully in his work on emotions, energy and team talks. The energy you bring into a team talk isn’t just background noise — it’s the message. Players pick up on your emotional state before they process a single tactical instruction. If you’re engaged, they engage. If you’re going through the motions, so will they.

So the first question to ask yourself honestly is: do I still love this game? Do I still love coaching? Do I still find the process interesting?

Tin Matkovic, in his masterclass on creativity in field hockey, makes the point that playfulness is the engine of creative play. But that engine has to be fueled by the coach first. The most creative players he’s worked with were not products of rigid systems. They came from environments where curiosity was valued, where trying something unexpected was celebrated rather than corrected. And that kind of environment doesn’t build itself. It gets built by coaches who are still genuinely curious themselves… and have fun every day on the field.

Coach K talks about making motivation a daily habit rather than saving it for pre-game speeches. He is always “on”, ready to seize the moment. That doesn’t mean being artificially cheerful or performing enthusiasm you don’t feel. It means staying connected to why you love this work… and letting that show.

Designing Sessions Players Actually Want to Come To

Practice design is one of the most direct levers we have when it comes to fun. And here’s where I’d push back gently on the idea that rigorous development and enjoyment are opposites. Coach K’s approach to practice is instructive: keep sessions short, quick, and game-like. Not because it’s easier, but because it’s more effective. When the training environment mirrors the competitive environment, with its unpredictability, its decisions under pressure, its moments of individual brilliance, players engage at a different level. They stop executing a drill and start playing hockey.

Andreu Enrich, in his masterclass on learning environments, goes deeper into what makes a training session genuinely engaging rather than just busy. The difference, he argues, lies in intentionality. Designing the session around specific behaviours you want to see, and then creating the conditions where those behaviours naturally emerge. It’s not about making things easy. It’s about making them meaningful. When players understand why they’re doing something, and when they can feel the connection between the training activity and the real game, the engagement is automatic.

Lisa Letchford, in her session on basic skills through small-sided games, makes a point on SSG’s that any coach working with any age group will recognise immediately:

“It’s really active, so people love it, it’s really enjoyable. Little kids, big kids, equally, I’m a big kid and I love playing gameplay more than I do running around a cone.”

The small-sided game format is fun by design. It puts players in constant contact with the ball and with each other, it creates natural pressure and natural release, and it allows the coach to observe and reinforce the things that actually matter. The skill development that happens inside a well-constructed small-sided game is often deeper and more durable than what happens in an isolated drill, precisely because the player is engaged, challenged, and enjoying themselves all at once.

The session that feels like work is rarely the session that produces the breakthrough.

Keeping the Fun Alive Under Pressure

This is where most coaches will push back. Fun is great in a development session on a Tuesday evening, sure. But what about the league decider? What about the tournament final? What about the away game when you’re a goal down and everything is tight?

This is exactly where Coach K’s Tone-Time-Place framework becomes useful. His point is that the approach has to be read from the situation, not predetermined. Sometimes a team needs firing up. More often than people think, they need to be loosened. He shares the story of a player who had stopped shooting. Stuck in his own head after a few misses, retreating from the game. His player wasn’t missing shots because he’d forgotten how to shoot. He was missing them because the weight of each miss had become heavier than the shot itself. Every subsequent attempt carried the baggage of the last one. That’s a confidence spiral every coach has seen and most of us have tried to fix it with technical feedback, encouragement, or extra reps in training. Coach K did none of those things.

Instead, he redistributed the psychological load. “Every shot you take is my shot.“ Six words that effectively said: this is not yours to carry alone. I’m in it with you. Miss it, that’s on me too. Suddenly the shooter is no longer a solo actor trying not to fail. He’s part of a partnership. And that shift, from isolation to connection, from individual burden to shared responsibility, is often all a player needs to get back to playing naturally.

In field hockey terms, think of the striker who stops arriving in the circle after a string of missed one-on-ones. Or the penalty corner drag flicker who starts doubting instead of flicking it. The technique hasn’t gone anywhere. What’s gone is the freedom. And you can’t coach freedom back into someone by adding more instruction. You coach it back by taking something away: specifically, the fear that the next mistake is theirs alone to own.

That’s the environment Coach K is describing. Not one where mistakes are ignored, but one where they are shared. Where the coach’s relationship with the player is strong enough that the player knows: I won’t be abandoned when I’m struggling. That level of trust doesn’t come from one good line at the right moment. It comes from dozens of smaller moments across weeks and months where the coach has consistently shown up the same way. That’s emotional intelligence applied to performance and it’s the kind of move that only works in an environment where the player trusts that mistakes are part of the process.

Katie Warriner makes a similar point about confidence under pressure: it’s a behaviour, not just a feeling. Players can choose to behave confidently, to carry themselves, communicate, and act as they would when they’re at their best. Even when the internal experience doesn’t quite match yet. “The behaviors are way more in our control than the feelings. And the feelings might come after behaviors.” That’s a skill coaches can actively develop, but only in environments where it’s safe to practise it. Environments, in other words, where fun has been protected long enough to become a foundation.

The coach who screams at every mistake doesn’t just damage confidence. They make it impossible for players to develop the loose, decisive boldness that good hockey requires. Conversely, the coach who reads the room, who knows when to ease the tension with a well-timed word or a genuine laugh, creates the conditions for their players to perform when it actually counts.

What We’re Really Talking About

Let me bring this back to where we started. The best coaches are not just tacticians. They are environment builders. And the most effective environment isn’t the most intense one, or the most disciplined one, or even the most structured one. It’s the one where players want to be. Where they feel energised when they arrive and leave having genuinely enjoyed the work.

Coach K, reflecting on decades at the top of his sport, distils it simply:

The goal is for your team to “enjoy achieving the goal enough that they want to do it again.” That’s sustainability. That’s the coaching that compounds over years rather than burning out in a single season.

So here’s the recap, from one coach to another. Fun matters for performance! The neuroscience is clear, and the best coaches in multiple sports have built entire cultures around it. Your emotional energy sets the tone before a word is spoken, so bring something real. Design your sessions to be game-like and meaningful, and let the engagement take care of itself. And when the pressure is highest, remember that loosening the grip is often more powerful than tightening it.

Enjoy the ride. Your players will too.

Keep your eye out for the follow up articles on talent, culture & legacy 😉

Some of the sources mentioned:

Our “Coaches Clipboard” is a collection of quotes, pertinent phrases, knowledge and wisdom. Shared every now and then on a Sunday. It’s our "thinking menu" with some bits and pieces we came across…
#sharetheknowledge 🙂

Read. Enjoy. Think. Share.

1. Step into the arena, lay it on the line, care deeply, make yourself vulnerable, and fully live your one and only life.

2. Magic always moves towards souls who are no longer negotiating with fear.

3. Forgive yourself for not knowing earlier what only time could teach.

4. No farmer ever digs up the roots to make sure they have embedded into the soil. They trust their methods, support their seeds with nourishment, and never rush their work. Their support is what develops their crop.

5. Silence is more powerful than trying to prove a point.

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6. Nothing in life is of any value unless it is shared with others.

7. The confidence and comfort of sharing your story comes from knowing that impact always outweighs opinions. Judgment never prevails. Your vulnerability will.

8. Believe you can, and you’re halfway there.

9. Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.

10. If I were less afraid of others’ opinions, what would I say?

Hope you enjoyed these… happy coaching!

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Connection is more important than tactics
- Adam Commens, high performance director for Hockey Belgium

You can have the most detailed game plan in the world. Press triggers mapped to the second. Set pieces rehearsed until players could run them blindfolded. A structure so well drilled that every position on the pitch has a name, a number, and a responsibility matrix to go with it. And then the whistle blows, the opposition does something you did not expect in the first five minutes, and everything you prepared starts to unravel. Not because the tactics were wrong, but because the players executing them did not truly know each other.

Adam Commens has coached at the highest level of international hockey, including his role as High Performance Director with the Belgian Hockey Federation during the Red Lions’ rise to the top of the world game. When he reflects on what separated the teams that won gold from the ones that fell short, he does not start with formations or pressing patterns. He starts with connection. “Connection is more important than tactics,” Commens says. “Both teams that won gold spent an enormous amount of time learning the why behind each individual.” His top three priorities as a coach? Connection with players first. A culture where innovation flourishes second. Understanding what the world’s best looks like third. Tactics did not even make his top three.

That is a provocative claim, especially for coaches who have invested thousands of hours in video analysis, tactical periodisation, and game modelling. But Commens is not saying tactics do not matter. He is saying that without genuine human connection between the people on the pitch, even the best tactics become fragile. And when connection is strong, tactical execution follows naturally, because players who deeply understand each other make faster decisions, take better risks, and recover from mistakes without the whole system collapsing.

TL;DR

The best tactical plan in the world falls apart when players do not genuinely know and trust each other. This article explores why elite coaches like Adam Commens put relationships before game plans, how connection shows up in small on-pitch moments that win matches, and what you can deliberately do in your training environment to build the kind of trust that makes tactics actually work. With insights from coaches and experts across international hockey, this is a challenge to the assumption that more tactical detail always equals better performance.

Sources

This article draws on insights from the following content on The Hockey Site:

1. Common Themes of Top Teams — Adam Commens

2. Values Based Coaching — Adam Commens

3. 3 Rules for Building Better Team Connections

4. Team Dynamics — Theo ten Hagen

5. The Power of a Clean Ego — Iain Shippey

6. Tactics, Trust and Team — Graham Reid

7. Diversity Is a Superpower — Rein van Eijk

What “Connection” Actually Means at the Elite Level

Let us be honest about what we are not talking about. Connection is not a team dinner. It is not a ropes course. It is not even the barbecue after preseason camp, as enjoyable as that might be. Those things have their place, but they are not what Adam Commens means when he puts connection at the top of his coaching priorities.

At the elite level, connection means something far more specific. It means that when a midfielder receives the ball under pressure, the forward on the opposite side of the pitch has already started a run, not because a coach drew it on a whiteboard, but because that forward genuinely understands how the midfielder thinks, what that body position means, and what option will be created in the next two seconds. It means a defender covering a space without being asked, because knowing a teammate’s tendencies is so deeply embedded that the response is almost unconscious. It also means a forward sprinting back when needed because he has the back of his teammate, even when his dedicated role is to stay upfront as the target striker.

Commens describes it this way: “You need to really understand each of the individuals that you’re working with and form a connection with them. You don’t have to be best friends, but you need to understand where these athletes come from.” That distinction matters. This is not about forced friendship. It is about genuine understanding. Where does this person come from? What drives them? How do they respond when things go wrong? What do they need from the people around them to perform at their best?

Theo ten Hagen, who has worked with some of the top clubs and national teams in Dutch and Belgian hockey, puts it in behavioural terms. Through his work with personality profiling, he discovered that players on the same team often have fundamentally different preferences for communication, feedback, and stress management. “Some people like to have quite tough feedback,” ten Hagen explains. “And some people have to be a little bit more careful because they have another preference.” The teams that succeed are not the ones where everyone is the same. They are the ones where people know each other, understand and respect those differences.

This is what connection means in practice. Not a vague sense of togetherness, but a precise, working knowledge of the people you share a pitch with.

Why Connected Teams Make Faster and Better Decisions

Read more

The thoughts below is about that player. More specifically, it is about what we as coaches miss when we let volume dictate visibility, and what changes when we start coaching for personality, not just performance.

If you have ever watched a quiet player drift to the edges of the group and wondered whether you could be reaching them better, this one is for you.

TL;DR

Most coaching environments unintentionally reward extroversion. The players who speak up, react visibly, and demand attention tend to get more feedback, more game time, and more belief invested in them. Introverted players process information differently, not less effectively, but through observation, reflection, and internal rehearsal rather than external expression. When coaches adjust how they communicate, structure feedback, and design training environments, they unlock the potential of players who may already be among the smartest readers of the game on the team. These thoughts draw on five different masterclasses with world renowned experts, to explore why quiet players get overlooked, what that costs the team, and what practical changes coaches can make starting this week.

Sources

In case you want to more in depth, these were the sources we looked at:

1. The Pygmalion Effect, featuring Ric Charlesworth 🇦🇺 , Andreu Enrich 🇪🇸 , and David Harte 🇮🇪.

2. Diversity is a Superpower, featuring Rein van Eijk 🇳🇱 🇩🇪

3. Team Talks: Emotions, Energy, and Engagement, featuring Mati Vila 🇦🇷

4. The Cognitive Process of Coaching, featuring Henk Verschuur 🇳🇱

5. Values Based Coaching, featuring Adam Commens 🇦🇺 🇧🇪

The Coaching Culture That Rewards Volume

Let’s be honest about something. Most coaching environments, at every level, are built for extroverts. The players who talk the loudest in the circle get seen as leaders. The ones who celebrate the hardest after a goal get noticed. The ones who demand the ball, call for switches, and shout instructions are the ones we tend to describe as “having presence” or “showing character.”

None of that is wrong. Those players matter. But here is the question worth sitting with: what happens to the players who lead differently?

In The Pygmalion Effect, Andreu Enrich presents four findings from research on how teacher and coach expectations shape outcomes. When a coach believes in a player, that player receives a warmer climate, more content, more opportunities to respond, and more constructive feedback. The reverse is also true. When a player does not register on a coach’s radar, because they are quiet, because they do not demand attention, they gradually receive less of all four.

Now think about your squad. Who gets more of your words during a session? Who do you naturally gravitate toward in a break? It is usually the player who engages you, who asks questions, who reacts. The introvert standing three metres away, absorbing everything, often gets less. Not because you have decided they are less talented. But because the feedback loop between coach and extroverted player is faster and louder, and over time that gap compounds.

Ric Charlesworth puts it plainly: “Almost the worst thing you can do with a player is sit them on the bench and not use them, because the message then is, I don’t believe in you.” The same principle applies to communication. When a quiet player consistently receives less feedback, less eye contact, fewer individual moments, the unspoken message lands the same way. You are not seen.

Different, Not Less

One of the most damaging assumptions in coaching is that quiet equals disengaged. It does not. Introverted players are often doing enormous amounts of cognitive work. They are watching, mapping the game, running mental simulations. They just do it internally.

Henk Verschuur explains this beautifully in The Cognitive Process of Coaching. He describes how players process information differently depending on their cognitive state, their attention level, and even the pace at which a coach delivers a message. “If this coach is talking slowly,” Verschuur notes, “possibly their attention level or heart rate will go down a little bit and therefore they perceive more.” In other words, the speed and volume of communication directly affect how deeply a player can process it.

For an introverted player, a loud, high-energy team talk can actually reduce comprehension. Not because they are not listening, but because the environment does not match their processing style. They need a beat longer. A quieter space. A moment to organise their thoughts before being asked to respond.

This is not a weakness. This is a different cognitive pathway. And if you watch closely during matches, you will often find that the players who process most deeply are the ones making the best decisions under pressure. They have already rehearsed the scenario internally before the ball arrives.

Adjusting How You Give Feedback

So what changes? It starts with how you communicate.

Read more

Our “Coaches Clipboard” is a collection of quotes, pertinent phrases, knowledge and wisdom. Shared every now and then on a Sunday. It’s our "thinking menu" with some bits and pieces we came across…
#sharetheknowledge 🙂

Read. Enjoy. Think. Share.

1. I trust you, make the call.

2. Let people surprise you. Some will disappoint you, yes — but some will show up in ways you never expected.

3. Leadership isn’t forged in one defining moment—it’s built in the everyday decisions we make about how we listen, how we invest our time, and the standard we choose to live by.

4. Choose people over positioning. Titles change. Relationships carry you when the room empties.

5. Leadership is not built through slogans (like this one). It is developed through shared challenge, disciplined preparation, sound decision-making, and collective ownership.

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6. Leadership question: Can you see potential before it’s obvious?

7. Leadership question: Can you create belonging in high-pressure environments?

8. Leadership question: Can you develop someone beyond your own skill set?

9. Leadership question: Can you put those you lead in the best position to excel?

10. The real question is not: Are you in leadership? The real question is: Are people rising around you?

Hope you enjoyed these… happy coaching!

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Why the Upright Hit Still Matters

Today’s field hockey is heavily dominated by push passes, sweeps, flicks, and overheads. This has led to the near-extinction of the upright hit as a primary skill in pivotal moments. Especially post build-up, breaking lines, and structured counterattacks. Despite statistics showing 70% of passes are pushes and only a handful of hit passes outside shooting or corners, the upright hit offers solutions no other technique can provide at speed when executed correctly.

The hit pass, done well, is more than nostalgia. It’s a tactical weapon. It allows teams to skip defensive lines, introduce variety, and add unpredictability, particularly against compact or well-drilled zonal blocks. Modern teams that embrace this, like the Indian women’s team, manage to manipulate opposition defensive structures not by chance, but by intent.

How to Implement This in Day-to-Day Training

• Include It in Your Drills: Integrate upright hit passes into warm-ups and small-sided games. Let athletes play ‘mini-golf’ style hitting games, or only award points for hits that reach a target zone. This introduces the skill in a “no-pressure” context.

• Purposeful Scenario Training: Specifically coach hit passes in build-up phases, counterattacks, and ball entries into the circle. Start with low-pressure scenarios, as “if you use that, we have big chances to get successful,” as Fede Tanuscio highlights.

• Emphasize the Short Grip: The modern evolution of the technique, the short grip upright hit, is faster and doesn’t force players to break their stride, making it more compatible with present-day hockey tempo. “If I have to pick one, I will take one of that,” Tanuscio said regarding technique selection.

• Decision-Making Cues: Teach your ball carrier to assess time, space, and numbers before opting for a hit. Ask, is there a link or ‘chest’ player available, and what’s the defensive structure ahead?

This “missing chest,” or link pass, is the essence of the upright hit. Using it to break lines when opportunities present, not just as a relic of slower tempos.

Read more

That experience is what this article is about. Not midfield dominance in the highlight-reel sense of a spectacular solo carry, but the quieter, more decisive kind: the team that consistently wins the transition zone, connects pressing recoveries to forward play, and creates problems for the opposition before they have time to organise. The kind of control that does not always show up on social media but absolutely shows up in the result.

What follows draws on insights from several coaches who have explored these ideas in depth through The Hockey Site masterclasses and workshops. We will look at what midfield dominance actually looks like when you watch a game closely, how numerical superiority through the middle is created and exploited, why off-ball movement is the real currency of midfield control, how pressing recoveries connect to attacking play, and — critically — how you can train all of this into your team through session design. Along the way, there are a few practical training ideas you can steal, adapt, and make your own.

TL;DR

Midfield dominance is not about having the most talented players in the middle of the park. It is about transition speed, off-ball intelligence, and the habits your team falls back on when time and space disappear. The best teams win the midfield by connecting defensive recoveries to forward play through principles like third-man runs, diagonal movement, and disciplined rest defence. This article unpacks how that works tactically and gives you session ideas to train it. Read on if you want the detail.

Sources

The following content from The Hockey Site was used to inform and shape this article:

→ Managing Transitions — Andreu Enrich

→ Counter Attack — Fede Tanuscio

→ Defensive Transitions — Russell Coates

→ Third Man Combinations — Russell Coates

→ Off Ball Principles

→ From Game to Training — Fede Tanuscio

→ Rest Defence in Field Hockey — Fede Tanuscio

What midfield dominance actually looks like

Let us start by getting specific, because “dominating the midfield” is one of those phrases that gets thrown around in team talks without anyone really defining what it means. Here is what it looks like when you actually see it in a game.

The team that dominates the midfield is the one that controls the transition zone — that messy, chaotic strip of the pitch where possession changes hands and the next five seconds determine whether you are attacking with purpose or scrambling to recover. Fede Tanuscio puts it well when he breaks the game into four phases: off-ball, defensive transition, offensive transition, and on-ball. And then he says something that should make every coach sit up: the magic happens in the transitions, not in the structured phases. That is where the outcomes live. Everyone more or less knows how to set up a standard press or run a structured outlet. The hard part — the part that separates good teams from the rest — is what happens in those in-between moments.

When you watch a team that owns the midfield, you will notice a few things. First, when they lose the ball, their midfielders react before the opposition can organise. Russell Coates talks about reaction time being one of the most important principles in defensive transitions — not just physical speed, but how quickly a player’s brain switches from “I was attacking” to “I need to press, cover, or track.” Second, when they win the ball back, they do not just secure it — they immediately look to play forward through central channels or switch the angle of attack. There is an urgency without panic. And third, their off-ball movement creates a web of passing options that makes the ball carrier’s decisions easier, because the picture ahead of them is already arranged.

That last point is worth dwelling on. A masterclass with Ben Bishop on off-ball skills put a number on it that always sticks: roughly 97% of the game is played without the ball. So when we talk about midfield dominance, we are mostly talking about what players do when they do not have possession — their positioning, their leads, their communication. That is the engine. The ball movement is just the output.

Creating and exploiting numerical superiority through the middle

If midfield dominance is the goal, numerical superiority is the mechanism. The question is how you create it in a sport where everyone is marking someone and space is at a premium.

One of the most powerful concepts here is the third-man combination. Russell Coates dedicated an entire workshop to this, and the idea is elegant in its simplicity: when two players combine, a third player uses that moment to break into space that the combination has opened. The first pass draws attention. The second pass exploits the gap that attention created. What makes this relevant to midfield play is that third-man runs are how you manufacture overloads without needing to commit extra players from the back. A midfielder receives, plays a short combination with a forward or a wide player, and a second midfielder times a run through the channel that just opened. Two players became three in the space of a second, and the opposition’s midfield is suddenly outnumbered.

Coates emphasises that this only works with pre-scanning. The third-man runner has to know the space exists before the ball arrives. That means heads up, a quick check over the shoulder, and the discipline to hold the run until the right moment. When he shows video of it working at club level, the pattern is always the same: the player who makes the decisive run has already scanned, already identified the gap, and is moving into it as the combination unfolds. It looks instinctive, but it is trained.

Fede Tanuscio approaches the same problem from the transition angle. His four-step counter model starts with identifying where you recovered the ball, then how you recovered it, then spotting the free space, and finally playing what you see. What is interesting about this framework is that it puts the recovery zone front and centre. If you win the ball centrally through an interception, the opposition tends to be stretched wide, leaving vertical space through the middle. That is when you go direct and fast. If you win it through a duel on the flank, the opposition tends to be compressed centrally, so the space is wide. The midfield’s job is to read that picture instantly and choose the right route — and that choice is made in the middle of the pitch, in the transition zone, in a fraction of a second.

Tin Matkovic adds another layer when discussing one-up situations. Even when the numerical advantage is structural — the opposition has been carded — the principle of creating a domino effect through the midfield still applies. You find the two-versus-one somewhere on the pitch, you make the opposition shift, and then you exploit what that shift leaves behind. Matkovic talks about making the opposition move at least twice before putting the ball in the circle. That patient, probing approach through midfield — finding the overload, forcing the adjustment, then attacking the space that adjustment creates — is the essence of using numerical superiority intelligently rather than just running at people.

The role of off-ball movement and timing

This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable for a lot of coaches, because off-ball work is genuinely hard to coach and even harder to measure. But it is the single biggest factor in midfield control.

Think about it this way. When a midfielder receives the ball under pressure,

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“Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.” — Prof. Angela Duckworth

👉 (Passion + Perseverance) x Long Term Goals = GRIT

In U12 hockey, coaches rarely lose players because they cannot dribble or hit hard. They lose players because the game starts to feel like a judgement. A mistake becomes something to hide. A tough opponent becomes a reason to switch off. A louder teammate becomes a reason to stop asking for the ball. In other words, the constraint is psychological, not technical.

According to Angela Duckworth, professor in psychology and a MacArthur Genius Grant winner for her research, GRIT is not a synonym for being “tough.” It is a combination of passion and perseverance toward a goal that takes a long time to achieve. [1]

That matters in U12 field hockey teams because a lot of what we call “quitting” is not actually a lack of character. It is often a lack of interest (the passion side), a lack of skills to recover (the perseverance side), or a situation that makes trying feel too costly. Duckworth also distinguishes grit from self-control or discipline. Self-control is the everyday ability to resist impulses and do the small things, like going to bed on time or doing the boring rep. Grit is the longer arc of staying committed to something that matters to you.[1]

So for U12s, grit is not about demanding adult-like resilience. It is about helping players find reasons to care, teaching them what to do next when it goes wrong, and designing an environment where they keep choosing to try again.

Duckworth makes a crucial point for coaches here: before you ask children to “work hard,” you have to help them choose easy — the version of the task that feels doable and worth engaging with. In her words:

“Choose the easiest one. Choose the one that you want to think about. Choose the one that you’re good at. Yeah, work hard, but first choose easy!”

When you start there, you create early “I can do this” moments, which keeps motivation alive long enough for perseverance to form. In U12 hockey terms, that means designing first reps and first games where success is frequent (not just scoring, but winning the ball back, getting a clean receive, offering again after a mistake), and then gradually turning the dial up. Grit, for children, is built step-by-step — not by throwing them into the deep end and calling it resilience.

Field hockey adds a particular twist. The sport has lots of micro-failures. First touches bounce, tackles miss by a stick length, and decisions have to be made under speed. If the coaching environment makes those moments feel costly, players protect themselves by playing safe, hiding, or disengaging. If the environment makes those moments feel informative, players stay brave, and bravery becomes the visible face of grit.

This article draws on the following from The Hockey Site:

• Lisa Letchford: “Basic Skills through Small Sided Games”

• Henk Verschuur: “Coaching! The Cognitive Process”

• Mati Vila: “Emotions, Energy, and Engagement: Building Better Team Talks with Mati Vila”

• Andreu Enrich: “Learning Environments”

• Tin Matkovic: “The Evolution Of Creativity”

What “grit” looks like on a hockey pitch at U12

If we keep grit abstract, it becomes motivational wallpaper. In U12 hockey, grit is a handful of behaviours you can see. A player who gets tackled and immediately offers again. A defender who concedes a free hit and then resets body shape instead of arguing. A goalkeeper who lets in a soft goal and still communicates. A team that is losing and keeps attempting the same brave solutions, but with slightly better choices each time.

This is why I like to treat grit as a training outcome, not a personality trait. It is something the group does, not something a child either “has” or “doesn’t.”

Henk Verschuur’s point about the cognitive process of coaching matters here. In pressure moments, players can only take in so much information, and the coach’s tone and timing determine what actually lands. The same is true in children’s hockey, just with a lower threshold. If a coach overloads the moment with criticism, the child learns that pressure equals threat. If a coach reduces the moment to one clear cue and a calm reset, the child learns that pressure is manageable.

Grit is built through interest, commitment, and situations that help

“We need to be gritty about getting our kids grit.” — Angela Duckworth.[2]

If you want a practical coaching translation of Duckworth for youth, it is this. Grit grows when young people are allowed to sample widely at first, find what genuinely sparks their interest, and then, over time, commit more deeply to the right hard thing.[2][1]

This is important in U12 hockey because the aim is not to make every child “specialise” in gritty suffering. The aim is to help them build a healthy relationship with hard things. Duckworth’s “hard thing rule” for kids captures this nicely:

Children choose a hard thing themselves, they do not quit halfway through a season, but they are allowed to quit at the end if it is not the right fit, and try a different hard thing instead.[2]

That framing keeps grit from turning into stubbornness. It also protects joy. The coach can hold standards for effort and commitment inside the season while still being curious about whether the child is in the right place long-term.

A second youth insight from Duckworth is that grit is often forged in a crucible of challenge plus support. Challenge on its own can break confidence. Support on its own can produce comfort without growth. The combination is where children learn, “This is hard, and I can handle it.”[1]

U12-specific reality: motivation is fragile, attention is narrow, and meaning is social

At U12, players do not persist because a coach explains the value of long-term goals. They persist because the next repetition feels safe enough to attempt and meaningful enough to care. In practice that means three things.

Read more

Our “Coaches Clipboard” is a collection of quotes, pertinent phrases, knowledge and wisdom. Shared every now and then on a Sunday. It’s our "thinking menu" with some bits and pieces we came across…
#sharetheknowledge 🙂

Read. Enjoy. Think. Share.

1. You are not supposed to carry everything alone.

2. Not all unfinished things are failures. Some are future chapters.

3. Comparison steals the joy you already earned. Walk your path, not someone else’s highlight reel.

4. Give yourself permission to restart, reset, and refocus— as many times as necessary. Growth isn’t linear.

5. Learning requires the humility to admit what you don’t know today.

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6. When we’re adding someone new to the team, the question isn’t only Can they do the job? but Can they help us grow?

7. Today I will prioritize intentional quiet time

8. “Do your job” is a wonderful slogan if you completely understand what the job requires.

9. If your peace depends on everything going right, it’s not peace. It’s control.

10. What am I doing about the things that matter most in my life?

Hope you enjoyed these… happy coaching!

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Got some urgent coaching questions? ↓

“Aerials are at the moment right now, in my opinion, like a normal passing skill. In the future, I think that this should be done already with under-12s, 14s, with a normal passing. Like, we learn how to hit as soon as possible. As soon as we have an individual capable of doing a high ball, that’s the soonest that we can play on.”

That quote from Tin Matkovic, currently coaching in Germany and working with the Polish national team, should probably make a few of us stop and think. Because if we are honest, most coaching programmes still treat the aerial as a specialist trick rather than a foundational skill. And yet here is a coach operating at a serious international level telling us that the high ball belongs in the same toolbox as the push pass and the hit. Not as a last resort, not as something you only let your strongest player attempt, but as a core part of how your team moves the ball.

The crucial lesson here is simple but maybe uncomfortable for many coaches: if you are not integrating aerials into your training from a young age, you are already behind. The game is evolving, players are getting smarter and more creative with how they use height, and the teams that treat the aerial as just another way to pass are the ones creating problems that defences simply cannot solve.

Why You Should Watch the Full Masterclass

This article captures the key insights from Tin Matkovic’s masterclass on The Hockey Site, but the full session goes much deeper. Tin walks through video clips from international matches, breaks down specific tactical scenarios in real time, and shares his screen to illustrate landing zones, defensive structures, and creative aerial execution in ways that are hard to do justice in written form. If you are a paid subscriber, the full video is available behind the paywall and it is well worth your time. Seeing the clips alongside Tin’s analysis gives you a completely different level of understanding compared to reading about it. The interactive Q&A with coaches watching live also adds a layer of practical discussion that you will not want to miss.

Takeaway 1: Know Your Landing Zones and Read the Opposition

“You imagine that you have an NFL match where every meter counts. So this is what we want. We want to sometimes skip the game.”

One of the most valuable parts of Tin’s presentation is how he breaks down the concept of landing zones. Rather than just lumping all aerials into one category, he explains how the choice of where to land the ball changes completely depending on what the opposition is doing defensively.

When playing against a zonal defence, Tin prefers landing zones on the outside of the field rather than through the middle. The reason is tactical and quite elegant. If the zonal team wants to intercept or contest the ball within the five-metre rule, they have to shift and stretch their shape. That movement opens up space through the middle of the field for a flat pass, a “Flach” as Tin calls it. So the aerial to the side is not the end goal, it is the trigger that forces the defence to react, and that reaction creates the real opportunity.

Against man-marking systems, the game changes. Here it is about momentum and speed into empty space. You are trying to manipulate your marker and then exploit the gap that opens when they cannot keep up. The landing zone is less about fixed positioning and more about timing your run to arrive in space before the defender can recover.

The takeaway for coaches is that aerials are not a one-size-fits-all solution. You need to prepare your team to read the defensive structure they are facing and adjust their aerial targets accordingly. Training sessions should include scenarios against both zonal and man-marking setups so players learn to recognise which landing zones to target in the moment.

One practical way to build this recognition is through freeze-play scenarios. Stop the game just before an aerial might be an option and ask your players: what is the defence offering? Where would the ball land? What would the next action be? Then, after matches, map your aerials onto a simple field grid with your players, marking where successful deliveries landed versus where turnovers happened. When the team builds that picture together over time, the landing zone concept stops being the coach’s idea and becomes the team’s shared language.

Takeaway: Train your players to identify the opposition’s defensive system and choose their aerial landing zones accordingly. The aerial itself is only the first action in a chain, what matters is the space it creates and how your team exploits it.

Read on for the full breakdown: how to manage the player who overuses the aerial, why there is no “golden technique” for teaching it, and what to bring to training on Monday. Exclusive for paid subscribers.

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“A good tackle is a moment. Good defending is the five seconds before it.”

Youth coaches are brilliant at teaching how to tackle. Stick down. Two hands. Get low. Time the jab. And yes, those details matter.

But here’s the pattern most of us have seen a hundred times: a young defender can tackle perfectly in a technical drill, then completely freeze in a game. Not because they forgot the technique. Because they don’t know which decision the moment is asking for.

They’re stuck choosing between being brave and being safe, and they’re doing it in half a second with a striker running at them.

So if you want confident defenders, you can’t just coach tackling technique. You have to coach the choices that come before it. The decision layer is what turns “I hope I don’t get beaten” into “I know what I’m trying to make happen.”

TL;DR

Confident defending isn’t a personality trait. It’s a repeatable decision process. When defenders learn a simple decision tree (delay, channel, press, tackle) and understand the role of the second defender, they stop panicking and start playing. The technique still matters, but it becomes the tool that serves the decision, not the thing they gamble on. Use progressive practices that start in 1v1, then add recovery defenders, then add transitions, so the decision-making grows with the chaos.

Sources to explore further

• The Second Defender’s Checklist — A practical decision tree for when to hold, switch, release, or commit in double defending.

• Robert Noall - 1v1 in game situations — How to coach 1v1 defending in realistic game contexts, not isolated technique drills.

• Russell Coates - Channel & Shave — The body shape and footwork cues that let defenders channel first and tackle only when the moment is on.

• Russell Coates - Defensive Transitions — The recovery mindset and first actions after losing it, so defenders don’t panic-tackle in chaos.

• Danny Kerry - Closing & tackling in a zone defence — Who closes and who holds in a zonal system, so tackling becomes a team decision.

• Fede Tanuscio - Rest Defence in Field Hockey — How structure behind the ball reduces fear and helps young defenders defend intentions, not just positions.

What confident defending actually looks like in young players

When a young defender is confident, it’s not that they tackle more. It’s that they look less rushed.

They arrive earlier. They take away something specific. They shape the attacker’s run. They buy time. And if the tackle is on, they go. If it isn’t, they don’t force it.

The opposite is the defender who feels the moment slipping away. They sprint, they lunge, they “try something,” and then they’re out of the play. That’s not a technique failure. It’s a decision failure under pressure.

This is why the “second defender” concept matters so much at youth level. When players start to understand that defending is a partnership, and that someone is covering behind them, they stop feeling like every moment is life-or-death. And here’s the thing… once a defender trusts that the situation is controlled, the technique almost always improves without you having to nag it. Because the body is calmer. The feet are calmer. The stick is calmer.

The decision tree a defender faces: delay, channel, press, tackle

If you want a simple coaching model that holds up, steal this structure.

First you delay. Then you channel. Then you press. And only then do you tackle.

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Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most teams spend most of their defensive preparation on how to press, and probably a lot less on what happens when that press breaks. Yet the moments immediately after a press is bypassed are often the most dangerous in the entire match. Get those first few seconds wrong, and you’re not just conceding possession. You’re conceding high-quality chances.

This article is about those critical seconds. Not the press itself, but the recovery. Not the ideal scenario, but the messy reality when your structure fractures and you need to rebuild it before the opposition punishes you. And yes, it’s a long read… but worth it we think ;)

TLDR:
When your press breaks, you have roughly 4 seconds to reorganize before danger develops. This framework gives players three clear roles—Delayers (apply immediate pressure), Deniers (close passing lanes), and Droppers (get goal-side)—plus decision triggers for when to re-press versus reset. Master the recovery, and you'll maintain defensive solidity even when your primary plan fails.
Read it all to discover the training progressions that make this automatic, the common breakdowns that lead to catastrophic counters, and the advanced variants for elite teams to turn defensive chaos into their next attacking opportunity.

We’ll address:
- The reality of the Modern Broken Press
- The 4 Second Reset Framework
- Avoiding the Catastrophic Counter
- Decision Triggers
- Training the Reset
- Troubleshooting the Reset
- Why This Matters
- More Advanced Variants and Creative Strategies

Some of the sources used:
- https://my.thehockeysite.com/p/managing-transitions 
- https://my.thehockeysite.com/p/rest-defence-in-field-hockey 
- https://my.thehockeysite.com/p/defensive-system-variants-and-pressing 

The Reality of the Modern Broken Press

Let’s start with what we’re actually dealing with. When I say “broken press,” I’m talking about the moment when the opposition successfully plays through or around your pressing structure. This could be a sharp vertical pass that eliminates your first line, a diagonal ball that exploits the space between your units, or even just a series of quick passes that pull your players out of position.

The thing is, presses break all the time. Even at elite level, even with the best teams. Andreu Enrich, who coaches in the German Bundesliga and with the German national team, frames it perfectly in his work on managing transitions: there’s a moment after every loss or bypass where the game is completely open, where neither team has proper organization, and that moment is absolutely critical.[1]

The problem isn’t that presses break—that’s inevitable. The problem is what happens next. Do your players have a clear understanding of their roles in those chaotic seconds? Do they know when to keep pressing and when to drop? Most importantly, do they have a framework that allows them to make those decisions quickly and collectively?

This is where the 4-Second Reset comes in.

The 4-Second Reset Framework

The name is deliberate. Four seconds isn’t arbitrary—it’s roughly the window you have between the moment your press is bypassed and the moment the opposition can create a dangerous attacking situation. Miss that window, and you’re defending a counterattack. Use it well, and you can reestablish defensive shape before the danger truly develops.

But let’s be clear about what this framework is and isn’t. It’s not a rigid system where everyone has a predetermined position. It’s a set of principles that allow your players to reorganize quickly based on where the ball is, where the opponents are, and where the biggest danger sits.

Fede Tanuscio, who has worked extensively on defensive transitions at international level, emphasizes that in these moments you’re not defending positions—you’re defending intentions.[2] In the first two to three seconds after your press breaks, you need to read what the ball-winner wants to do. Are they looking to play forward immediately? Are they trying to switch the play? Are they looking to find a central player who can turn and face your goal?

This reading of intention is what separates teams that recover effectively from teams that just chase.

The Three Roles: Drop, Delay, Deny

Within the 4-Second Reset, every player falls into one of three roles depending on their position relative to the ball when the press breaks:

The Delayers are your front-line players—typically your forwards and maybe an advanced midfielder. When the press breaks, their job isn’t to win the ball back (though if they can, great). Their job is to apply immediate body and stick pressure on the ball carrier, denying them time to scan forward and play the dangerous pass. As Tanuscio puts it, you hold your position, you keep your body shape, and you make it difficult for them to execute cleanly.[2] You’re buying time, not committing to tackles you probably won’t win.

The Droppers are your deepest players—your defenders and defensive midfielder. The moment the press breaks, they need to be thinking about getting goal-side. Not just running back blindly to “fill space,” but reading where the opponent’s most dangerous players are and making sure those players can’t receive the ball in behind. Enrich talks about players needing to “find the man”—identify the strikers, identify the runners, and make sure you’re close enough to them that the first forward pass isn’t an easy one.[1]

The Deniers sit in the middle—your central midfielders and sometimes your side midfielders depending on where the ball is. Their role is the trickiest because it’s context-dependent. They need to close down passing lanes without getting eliminated, they need to be aware of runners coming from deep, and they need to support both the delay and the drop. When things go wrong in the reset, it’s usually because these players either push too high (leaving gaps between lines) or drop too deep (not supporting the pressure on the ball).

The magic happens when all three roles execute simultaneously. The delayers create immediate pressure and force a decision from the ball carrier. The deniers compress the middle of the field and make the vertical pass difficult. The droppers ensure that even if that pass does get played, there’s organization behind the ball.

Protecting the Center: The Non-Negotiable

If there’s one principle that overrides everything else in the 4-Second Reset, it’s this: protect the center. Always. When Tanuscio discusses rest defence principles, this is his first and most emphatic point.[2] The center of the field is where goals come from. If you push the opposition wide, you buy yourself time. If you let them come through the middle, you’re in immediate danger.

What does this actually look like? It means your deniers are prioritizing central passing lanes over wide ones. It means your droppers are angling their recovery runs to protect the circle and the slot, not just sprinting straight back. It means sometimes you deliberately let them have the easy wide pass if it means keeping your shape centrally.

This is hard to coach because it feels counterintuitive. Your players see an opponent free on the flank and want to close them down. But if closing that player down means leaving the center exposed, you haven’t solved the problem—you’ve just moved it. The discipline to stay centrally compact while the ball goes wide is one of the markers of a mature defensive unit.

Avoiding the Catastrophic Counter

Let’s talk about the worst-case scenarios. Not just conceding from a broken press, but conceding badly—the kind of goal where you watch the video back and everyone’s in the wrong place, no one’s communicating, and it looks like organized chaos.

These catastrophic counters usually happen because of a few specific breakdowns, and understanding them helps you coach against them.

Spacing: When Gaps Become Chasms

The first problem is spacing. When your press breaks and players start recovering, there’s a natural tendency for gaps to open up between your lines. Maybe your forwards are still high trying to press, your midfield is caught in transition, and your defenders are dropping deep. Suddenly you’ve got 15 meters between your midfield and defense, and that’s where the opposition’s best player receives the ball with time and space to do damage.

Enrich emphasizes that in counter defense situations, you need to think about staying connected as a block.[1] When you’re dropping, you’re not just running toward your goal—you’re maintaining relationships with the players around you. Your defensive line should be talking to your midfield, your goalkeeper should be organizing from behind, and everyone should be aware of where the gaps are forming.

The practical coaching point here is about reference points. In training, when you work on recovery scenarios, constantly pause and ask: “Who can you see? Where’s the gap? Who’s responsible for closing it?” Players need to develop peripheral awareness of their defensive unit, not just focus on the ball.

Communication: The Difference Between Recovery and Panic

Here’s a test: next time your team’s press breaks in a match, listen. Are your players talking? Or is everyone just running?

The teams that recover well are loud. The goalkeeper is calling out runners. The central defender is directing the midfield. Someone is shouting “step” or “hold” to coordinate when to engage the ball carrier. The communication isn’t random—it’s purposeful, it’s constant, and it’s focused on intentions not just positions.

Tanuscio mentions that without clear commands and organization, executing rest defence principles is nearly impossible.[2] The free central defender has a special responsibility here. They can see the whole picture, they can read the opponent’s intention, and they need to be the one calling the organization as the team drops.

But communication isn’t just about volume. It’s about information. “Push up” doesn’t help anyone. “Close the 10, I’ve got the striker” is actionable. Train your players to communicate specific threats and specific responsibilities, not just generic instructions.

Foul Management: When to Hold, When to Hit

And then there’s the uncomfortable tactical question: when do you commit a foul?

Let me be clear—I’m not advocating cynical fouls or anything that ruins the game. But there are moments in a broken press recovery where a well-timed, professional foul in the right area of the field can be the difference between defending a free hit in the midfield and defending a 2v1 in your circle.

The key is location. If your press breaks in the opponent’s half and they’re starting a counter, sometimes the smartest thing your forward can do is force them to stop, even if it means conceding a free hit. You’re trading a low-risk restart for a high-risk transition. That’s good coaching, not dark arts.

But this requires judgment. It requires players who can read the danger level of the situation quickly. And it requires a team culture where taking a tactical foul to help your teammates isn’t seen as a failure, but as a smart defensive play.

The absolute worst thing you can do is commit a foul in a dangerous area. If your press breaks and a defender lunges in desperately inside your 25, you’ve just turned a dangerous situation into a catastrophic one. Better to drop, stay on your feet, and trust your unit to recover together.

Decision Triggers: Re-Press or Reset?

So your press has broken. You’ve got four seconds (probably even less) to make a decision. Do you immediately re-press—try to win the ball back high—or do you drop and reset your shape?

This is the decision that separates the good from the great, and it’s one of the hardest things to coach because it’s so context-dependent. But there are triggers you can train your players to recognize.

When to Re-Press Immediately

The clearest trigger for an immediate re-press is location. If your press breaks in the opponent’s 25 yards, you almost always want to try to re-press. The risk-reward is in your favor. Even if the re-press fails, you’re not in immediate danger because you’ve got numbers behind the ball.

Enrich breaks this down beautifully in his framework for defensive transition: when you lose the ball in their half, the immediate reaction should be to put pressure directly on the ball and cut off vertical passing options.[1] This is what he calls the “counter-press” approach, and it’s predicated on having enough players around the ball to make the press effective.

The second trigger is the ball carrier’s body position and intent. If they receive facing backward, under pressure, without good passing options forward, that’s a pressing trigger. They’re vulnerable in that moment, and if you can collectively squeeze, you can force a mistake or at least prevent them from launching a dangerous counter.

The third trigger is numerical advantage. If the ball has gone to their player but you’ve got two or three of yours nearby who can quickly converge, the re-press makes sense. The key word is “quickly”—if your players have to sprint ten meters to get there, that’s not quick enough. The window has closed.

When to Drop and Reset

On the flip side, there are clear signals that you should abandon the press and get organized behind the ball.

The most obvious is when the ball gets played into space behind your pressing line with good tempo. If they’ve executed a clean line-breaking pass and their player is receiving with space to attack, chasing that is usually suicide. Your defenders need to recognize this immediately and start dropping to protect the center and get numbers back.

Tanuscio talks about recognizing when the ball reaches a “vulnerable zone” in your defensive structure.[3] If the opponent manages to play the ball through the middle of your press into a space where they can turn and face your goal, that’s your signal to stop pressing high and start getting compact low. He calls this “recycling the press”—you drop back, reestablish your shape, and look for the next pressing opportunity rather than chasing a situation that’s already lost.

Another key trigger is when you’re numerically disadvantaged around the ball. If their player receives and they’ve got two outlets immediately available while you’ve only got one defender in the area, the math says drop. You’re not going to win that 1v2, and if you try, you’re just creating more space behind you.

And finally, and this is the hardest one to coach: game context matters. If you’re leading by a goal with five minutes left, maybe your threshold for dropping is lower than if you’re chasing the game. If you’ve just made three or four recovery runs in quick succession and your players are gassed, maybe it’s time to drop and let them breathe rather than chase another press that probably won’t work.

The art of coaching this is giving your players a clear hierarchy of triggers so they can make quick decisions under pressure. Location first, then ball carrier position, then numbers, then context. That’s not a formula, it’s a decision-making framework.

Training the Reset: From Controlled Chaos to Match Reality

Okay, so you understand the principles. You’ve explained the roles. Your players nod along in the meeting room. And then you get to training and realize that understanding something intellectually and executing it under pressure are very different things.

The challenge with training the 4-Second Reset is that it’s a transition skill—it only exists in the chaotic moments between organized phases. You can’t drill it in a static way because the whole point is responding to unpredictability. So how do you train it?

Progression 1: Transition Game with Press-Break Scenarios

Start with a structured small-sided game that forces the press-break situation repeatedly. Here’s a format that works well:

Play 7v7 or 8v8 on a three-quarter pitch. The attacking team (let’s call them blue) is trying to score in one goal. The defending team (red) sets up in a defined pressing structure—could be your diamond, could be your high press, whatever you usually use.

The key variation: blue starts every possession with the ball in their defensive third, and they must complete three passes before they’re allowed to play forward. This gives red time to set their press. Once blue completes three passes, they can play forward—and they get bonus points for breaking the press cleanly with a single pass that eliminates the first line.

This creates the training environment you need. Red is incentivized to press aggressively (to prevent the clean break), but blue is specifically trying to bypass that press. When the press breaks—and it will, repeatedly—stop play and coach the reset. Where should the delayers be? Are the droppers getting goal-side? Are the deniers closing the gaps?

Run this for 4-5 minute blocks. After each block, show video clips of good and bad resets from that same exercise. The immediate feedback loop is crucial.

A variation from Tanuscio’s work: add a neutral player who can only play in the defensive half for the attacking team.[2] This creates an automatic outlet for blue when the press comes, which means red has to constantly work on their recovery shape. It mimics the reality of playing against teams who deliberately build with deep outlets to bypass pressure.

The key coaching moments in this game aren’t when the press works—they’re when it breaks. That’s when you blow the whistle, freeze the action, and make sure everyone can articulate their role in that moment. Who should have delayed? Who should have dropped? Did we protect the center? Are the gaps too big?

Progression 2: Match-Play with Constraints

Once your players understand the roles and can execute them in a more controlled environment, you need to test them in something closer to match reality.

Set up an 11v11 (or 9v9 if numbers are tight) on a full pitch. Play normal hockey with one crucial constraint: every time the defending team’s press is successfully bypassed—and you as the coach are the judge of this—they have to work in a defined zone for the next 10 seconds.

What do I mean by “defined zone”? Mark out an area from the 25-yard line to the halfway line with cones. When the press breaks, the defending team must recover into that zone before they can engage the ball again. This forces them to prioritize dropping and resetting rather than chasing all over the field.

This constraint is artificial, obviously—in a real match, you wouldn’t have a physical boundary. But it’s effective because it makes the reset tangible. Players can’t just mindlessly chase; they have to consciously drop, reorganize, and then engage from a more compact shape.

After 15-20 minutes, remove the constraint and keep playing. You’ll find that the behavior persists even without the physical marker because you’ve trained the instinct to drop first and engage second when the press breaks.

Another variation: play with the condition that the defensive team can only commit a maximum of two fouls outside their own 25 in each 10-minute block. This forces them to be selective about when they press aggressively and when they drop off. It trains that decision-making we talked about earlier—when to re-press and when to reset.

Throughout both progressions, the critical coaching skill is pausing at the right moments and asking the right questions. Not “why did you do that?” but “what were you seeing in that moment?” Not “that was wrong” but “where should you have been and why?” You’re building decision-making capacity, not just drilling movements.

Troubleshooting the Reset: Common Problems and Fixes

Even with good training, things go wrong. Here are the issues I see most often when teams struggle with the reset, along with what’s usually causing them and how to fix it.

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