This is rarely a problem of effort or talent. It is a problem of where defenders are strong and where attacks tend to live. Many of the defensive techniques in our coaching repertoire, the shave, the jab and the block tackle, work over the ground and apply pressure from the defender’s right side. When the attack stays there, defenders are well-equipped. When the attack crosses to the side where the stick struggles to reach, the defender’s toolkit becomes a narrower set of options.

Several recent The Hockey Site sessions have looked at different parts of this idea: Fede Tanuscio’s left-foot patterns, Russell Coates’s 3D elimination work, Andrew Wilson’s body-open receiving, Simon Letchford’s left-hand grip work, and the defensive grip material from Adam Falla and Ross Gilham-Jones. Each handles a piece of the puzzle. This article puts them next to each other and works through how to use them as one connected attacking pattern.

Sources

• Left foot, Fede Tanuscio

• How to train 3D elimination skills, Russell Coates

• Dynamic receiving, Andrew Wilson

• Why the left hand matters, Simon Letchford

• Essential grip skills, Adam Falla and Ross Gilham-Jones

Why the left side matters

In Russell Coates’s session on 3D elimination, the standard defensive toolkit in field hockey is a horizontal-stick toolkit. The shave reaches across the ground, the jab pokes the ball away from the carrier’s stick, the block tackle plants flat in front of the ball. Coates puts it directly: the shave, the jab and the block tackle “are basically all utilized in situations where the ball is basically traveling over the ground.”[2]

Adam Falla and Ross Gilham-Jones approach this from the defender’s grip side. Defenders move between two grips during a contest: the frying-pan grip, with the V down the flat side of the stick, for channeling and jab tackles, and the hammer grip, with the knuckles to the sky, for the block tackle. The transition between those two grips, and the speed at which a defender can make it, is a meaningful part of what makes a strong tackler.[5]

This matters because everything in that toolkit assumes the ball stays where the defender’s stick can comfortably arrive. Move the ball into the receiver’s body-open angle, drag the carrier across the defender’s left foot, or take the ball off the ground entirely, and the toolkit becomes a narrower set of options.

Tanuscio’s left-foot patterns

Fede Tanuscio’s masterclass works through two ways of “playing on the left foot”. The first is a passing pattern: the ball gets played into the receiver’s left foot. Often this involves a contra-lead, a lead against the grain of the play that creates the receiving angle. Tanuscio describes the pattern as leading “with the defender or the strike or midfielder to receive the ball” and then playing the ball “on the left foot of the midfielder.”[1]

The reasoning is body geometry. When the ball arrives on the receiver’s left foot with the body already turning open, the receiver is in a position to play forward, sideways or back without a major reset. The defender, marking from behind, has the stick reaching for a ball that has crossed in front of the receiver’s body. Tanuscio calls this “a vulnerable zone” because the defenders “don’t have any more control of the action.”[1]

The second pattern is the carrying version: the attacker takes the ball into the defender’s left foot. Tanuscio is explicit about this: “What I would like to do it is also attack the left foot with the ball. So dribble the defender on the left foot.”[1] Same geometry, different direction. The ball ends up on the side where the defender’s stick is hardest to bring to bear, and the contest tilts.

Tanuscio places these patterns in different areas of the field. The contra-lead is what makes the angle work in tight central spaces, while in lateral build the receiver’s left foot pattern reads as an outlet that is harder to press.

The receiving foundation

Andrew Wilson’s session on dynamic receiving is the technical floor for everything in Tanuscio’s idea. If the receiver is not turned at the moment the ball arrives, the body-open advantage disappears.

Wilson’s central cue is short: “feet facing where you want to play.”[3] The footwork has to be done early, before the ball arrives, so that the first touch is into the next action rather than into a turn. As Wilson puts it, “move your feet early to get into the position that you want to play into. So if you’re going to receive open, they need to be at least facing the sideline. And then as you touch that ball onto your stick, then they’re fully open in a direction you want to.”[3]

Wilson splits scanning into two pre-receipt actions: a pre-scan that identifies the space and the threats, and a confirmation scan that checks whether the picture has changed. Both happen before the ball arrives.[3] The first touch then has to do less work because the decision has already been made.

Two practical cues from Wilson sit on top of this:

• Pass the ball wider than you think. If the pass is too close to the body, even a clean receive ends up on the defender’s strong side.[3] Against a 1v1 press, the lead starts on one side of the defender so the ball can be received in the far space.

• The static receive invites pressure. Wilson’s wording: “if we’re receiving statically, especially with a player behind us, it’s just an invitation to be tackled or to be pressed.”[3]

Without these foundations, the receiver’s left foot can be the right destination for the pass and the defender will still win the ball. The body has to arrive turned.

The grip side

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“You can never find exactly the same transition twice.” — Andreu Enrich. The same is true of the first season on the big pitch. The picture keeps changing, and our job is to give the kids the tools to read it.

We’ve all coached this kid. In 6, 7 or 8-a-side they were the player. The one who picked the ball up in their own half, beat two, slipped a pass to the only teammate they actually trusted, and arrived at the back post for the rebound. They scored hat-tricks. Parents stood on the sideline and quietly imagined a national team jersey. Then the season ticks over, the kids move up to 11-a-side on a full pitch, and on the first Saturday morning of the new format, that same player looks like a different kid. Heavy first touches. Late to everything. Standing in places that used to be the right places, and are now somehow wrong. Looking at you on the sideline a little more often than usual.

If that’s you on a Saturday morning wondering whether the wheels just fell off your best player’s development, take a breath. This is one of the most common, and most misunderstood, moments in youth field hockey. The kid hasn’t lost their ability. The game changed underneath them. The pitch is bigger, the time on the ball is shorter, the players around them are now ten teammates instead of five or six or seven, and suddenly there are positional roles to play, channels to cover, and a whole new set of off-ball decisions that small-format hockey simply did not ask of them.

TL;DR

Moving from 6, 7 or 8-a-side to 11-a-side is not a step up in difficulty. It is a step into a different game. Space, time, positional roles, and communication demands all change at once, and the players who looked best in small format are often the ones who struggle hardest because the game they mastered no longer exists. The most common problems are bunching, lack of width and depth, and ball-watching, all of which are off-ball problems first. The fix is not to drown the kids in positions and patterns. It is to keep the decision density high, protect the creativity that made them good in the first place, and use small-sided games inside the bigger format to bridge the gap. In the first season of 11-a-side, prioritise scanning, off-ball habits, simple rest defence, and transitions over set-piece detail and tactical shape. Make them think, ask more than you tell, and remember that fun is what keeps the door open for everything else.

Some of the sources used

1. Basic skills through Small Sided Games

2. Developing Game Intelligence in U14–U16 Players

3. About Feedback, Anchor Tasks, Managing Arousal and so much more

4. Practical Approaches for Fostering Creative Field Hockey Players

5. Coach the Chaos: Transition Rules For Youth Hockey

6. From Game Scenarios to Field Hockey Training: Man-to-Man, Long Corners & More with Fede Tanuscio

7. Tips from intelligent players

What actually changes from 6, 7 or 8 to 11

Let’s get specific, because “the pitch is bigger” is not really the answer.

The space changes, yes, but the more important thing is what space means. In 8-a-side, your best player could carry through three lines of pressure because the lines were close together. On the full pitch, those same three lines are spread across a much longer distance, which means carrying alone gets you halfway, and then you need a teammate. The kid who used to be a soloist now needs an orchestra. That is a big shift, and it has nothing to do with skill.

The time on the ball changes too, but again, not in the way most coaches describe it. In small format, time was short because pressure arrived quickly. In 11-a-side, the time at first reception is often a fraction longer, because the defender is further away. The catch is that what you do with that fraction is now far more consequential, because there are more players to scan, more options to choose from, and more space behind you that someone could be running into. So the quality of the half-second before the ball arrives matters more than ever. Tin Matkovic frames pre-scanning as building a live picture before the ball arrives, where each shoulder check is another tile.[1] That habit was useful in 8-a-side. In 11-a-side, it is the thing that separates the player who looks composed from the player who looks lost.

The positional roles are the most obvious change, and the one most coaches over-correct for. In small format, kids could roam. In 11-a-side, they have to share the pitch with more outfield teammates, which means they need to know where they fit when their team has the ball, where they fit when the team loses the ball, and where they are not supposed to be. This is a new layer of cognition for them, and we’ll come back to how to introduce it without crushing what made them good.

The communication demands quietly become the biggest change of all. In 8-a-side, you can play whole matches without talking, because everyone can see everyone. In 11-a-side, half your team is too far away to see what’s behind them, which means players have to call. They have to say “man on,” “strong,” “switch,” “away.” Most kids have never been asked to do this before, and asking them to learn it on Saturday morning is a recipe for silence.

We have to coach the vocabulary and then coach the habit.

The most common problems coaches see during the transition

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This article is for the rest of us. The competitive club coach who has two sessions a week, a match on the weekend, a squad with mixed availability, and a season that runs longer than any neat macrocycle. The coach who likes the ideas but needs to translate them.

The good news is that periodisation at club level is not about copying a High Performance or HP model into a smaller box. It is about borrowing the underlying principles, intent, structure, recovery, coherence, and applying them to your reality. Most of what HP coaches do well, you can do well too. You just have to let go of doing all of it.

Some of the sources we used

• Smart Pre-Season Planning

• Pre-Season Training

• Hockey Conditioning Made Simple

• Physically Game Ready

• Practice Session Design

• From a Game Situation to a Practice

• About Feedback, Anchor Tasks and More

What periodisation actually means at club level

Periodisation, stripped to its essentials, is just the deliberate planning of training across time so that adaptation, recovery, and game performance line up. It is intent applied to a calendar. The mistake club coaches make is reading about the elite version and assuming the smaller version of it is also smaller in importance. It is the opposite. With only two sessions a week, every minute on the pitch carries more weight, not less.

Russell Coates put it cleanly in his pre-season workshop. Pre-season, in his view, is about getting better without draining the players physically, not about getting fitter as an end in itself.[1] He also talks about making fewer choices but better ones, and about what you leave out being just as important as what you add. That is periodisation in two sentences. It also happens to describe the entire club season.

Mick Beunen, working with the Belgian Red Lions, periodises in three-week overload phases followed by a deload week, with strength as the foundation always coupled with speed and game-relevant movement.[2] You cannot copy that volume in a club environment, but you can absolutely copy the idea. Three weeks of pushing a theme, one week of consolidating it. That fits inside a club calendar without rewriting your life.

Fede Tanuscio frames the same thing through a coaching lens: a daily programme nested inside a weekly programme, nested inside a monthly programme, nested inside a year programme.[3] He calls training to train one of his pet hates, and he is right. If your Tuesday and Thursday sessions are not connected to each other or to last weekend’s game and next weekend’s game, you do not have periodisation. You have two sessions.

How to structure a week with only two sessions

Treat your two sessions as one system. Tanuscio uses a clean rule of thumb in his junior planning: one focus with the ball, one focus without the ball, across the week.[3] You can use a similar rule. One technical or principle-led night, one game-context or tactical night, both stitched to the same theme.

A useful default looks like this:

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Think about the last time you watched a side that genuinely looked like they were playing a different sport. Not because their athletes were faster, although that helps, but because the ball seemed to arrive before the defence had finished thinking. The passes were early. The movement was timed, not frantic. The decisions were made before the pressure arrived. That is speed of play. And it has almost nothing to do with how fast your outside midfielders can cover fifty metres. Speed of play is the product of three things happening in the right order: decision speed, ball speed, and movement timing. When all three align, a team looks impossibly quick. When only one is present, usually physical pace, a team looks busy but not dangerous.

So why do so many coaching programmes still confuse pace with speed of play? Partly because pace is visible and measurable. You can time a sprint. You can track metres per minute on GPS. But you cannot easily measure how quickly a midfielder read the pressure, chose the forward option, and released the ball before the defender arrived. That invisible speed, the speed between the ears, is what separates teams that run fast from teams that play fast.

Sources used to write down these thoughts

• Speed and Intent

• The 3-Second Decision Framework for Receiving Under Pressure

• Eyes Up: Pre-Scanning in Field Hockey — Tin Matkovic

• On-Ball Decision Making — Robert Noall

• Rediscovering the Hit Pass — Fede Tanuscio

• Third Man Combinations — Russell Coates

• Managing Transitions — Andreu Enrich

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The Three Dimensions of Speed in Hockey

Let us start by pulling apart what speed of play actually means. It is not one thing. It is three things that either compound each other or cancel each other out.

The first dimension is decision speed. This is how quickly a player recognises the situation, selects the best option, and commits to it. Robert Noall’s work on on-ball decision making is the clearest articulation of this. He separates the process into two distinct phases: prescanning, which happens while the ball is travelling to you, and on-ball decision making, which happens the moment you receive it.[1]
The critical insight is that these are not the same skill. A player can prescan beautifully and still freeze on the ball. Or they can be brilliant at reading pressure in the moment but never look up before the ball arrives. The fastest decision makers do both, and they do them so quickly that defenders are always responding to the last picture, not the current one.

The second dimension is ball speed. This is how fast the ball travels from one player to the next, or from a player into a dangerous area. It is the most underrated accelerator in the game. A crisp, flat pass that arrives at pace does something no amount of running can replicate: it moves the defensive picture before defenders can shift their weight. Fede Tanuscio makes a compelling case for the hit pass as a forgotten weapon precisely because of this. A short-grip hit, executed without breaking stride, skips entire defensive lines in a way that a push or a sweep often cannot match.[2]
The ball simply travels faster than feet. And when a team consistently moves the ball at high speed, the cumulative effect is that the opposition is always a half-second behind the play.

The third dimension is movement timing. This is not about how fast a player runs. It is about when they start running, and where they run to. Russell Coates describes this brilliantly in his work on third man combinations: defenders naturally ball-watch, and the third man exploits that by timing a run into the space the defender has just vacated.[3]
The run does not have to be fast. It has to be on time. A perfectly timed walk into space can be more dangerous than an explosive sprint into a clogged channel. Movement timing is also deeply connected to off-ball principles. If players understand where to position themselves before the ball arrives, they do not need to cover as much ground when it does.

When all three dimensions align, hockey looks effortless. The ball arrives early, the receiver already knows what to do with it, and the next player is already moving into the space that just opened. When they do not align, you get what most of us have seen too many times: a team that runs hard, passes sideways, and wonders why the circle entries never come.

Why Scanning and Pre-Decision Are the Real Accelerators

If you could only coach one thing to make your team play faster, it should not be fitness. It should be scanning.

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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. Talk with people who see the world differently.

2. Sometimes, the most ordinary things can be made extraordinary just by doing them with the right people.

3. Silence is the best reply to a fool.

4. It’s never been about how many games you have won. It’s about how many lives you have positively impacted and transformed.

5. There’s always something to smile about.

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

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6. There’s someone who needs you today.

7. Love the people in your life loudly and clearly. Don’t assume they know — say it, show it, repeat it.

8. We all need to teach the will, not the win. We need to remind those we lead it’s about the courage to enter the arena, to keep going when the odds are stacked against you, and to define success on your own terms.

9. When we understand that each day isn’t one more day but one less, we’ll start giving more value to things that really matter.

10. Where am I avoiding a hard conversation that I need to have?

Hope you enjoyed these… happy coaching!

Have you seen ? ↓

This masterclass with Jennifer Wright, lecturer in sport at the University of Stirling and a long time hockey player herself, dug into exactly that question. Drawing on a body of halftime research and her own MSc study inside an elite women’s European hockey environment, Jenn pulled out themes that any of us, from senior internationals to under twelves on a Sunday morning, can take into our next match.

Be the calm voice in the chaos

If there is one line from this masterclass worth pinning above your changing room door, it is the coach in Jenn’s study describing himself as the calm voice in the chaos. That single phrase reframes the whole halftime question. Halftime is not a moment for the coach to perform, it is a moment for the coach to regulate.

Jennifer called halftime a cauldron of emotions, echoing David Burstyn’s research, and that lines up with what most of us feel walking off the pitch. Players are running towards you with adrenaline still spiking. One is furious, another avoids eye contact, a small group is animated, someone is silent, someone else is already opening sweets. Your own heart rate is climbing. You are pre choosing your words before you have even spoken. In that environment, the most useful thing you can be is steady.

What makes that steadiness possible is preparation. As the coach in the study put it:

“instead of thinking, I’ve got to be brilliant at half time, it’s just I’ve got to be good at every single debrief.”

Read that again. Halftime is not a separate skill that lives only on match day, it is the same skill you have been quietly rehearsing every Tuesday and Thursday night. The trigger words, the visuals, the questions, the tone, all of it should already be familiar to your players by the time they sit down between halves. If your training debriefs are vague, your halftime will be vague. If your training debriefs are sharp and short, halftime will feel like a continuation of something the players already know how to do.

The other half of being calm is being honest about the clock. The coach in the study reminded everyone that “10 minutes disappears quickly. You’re probably down to about four and a half minutes in reality.” Once you accept that, your behaviour changes. You stop trying to fill the space and start trying to choose what matters. As Jenn put it, “less is more, we don’t have to fill the space.” For coaches who feel that filling the space gives them control, that is a hard but freeing lesson.

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And then the coach explodes.

“PASS IT! PASS IT! LEFT! NO, RIGHT! OKAY STOP. EVERYBODY STOP. Come in. Come in. Right, so what we want to do here is when we have a two versus one on the outside, we need to be thinking about...”

The moment is gone. The decision the kid was about to make? Gone too. The brain that was about to work something out? Switched off. Because there’s no need to think when someone’s already thinking for you.

We’ve all been that coach. More times than we’d like to admit.

Sources used for these thoughts on youth coaching

• Learning Environments — Andreu Enrich

• The Evolution of Creativity — Tin Matkovic

• Tips from Intelligent Players — Andreu Enrich

• Small Sided Games — Andreu Enrich

• The Pygmalion Effect

• Building Life Skills Through Coaching

• Balancing Skill Gaps — Tin Matkovic

• Basic Skills Through Small Sided Games — Lisa Letchford

• Practice Session Design — Fede Tanuscio

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Why over-coaching happens (and why it’s not your fault)

There’s a version of the over-coaching story that blames coaches. Bad coaches, controlling coaches, coaches who need to feel important. That’s not the real story.

Most of the coaches I know who over-coach do it because they genuinely want their players to improve. They see the mistake. They know the solution. They can’t bear to watch the opportunity slip by without jumping in. That instinct — to help, to correct, to fix — is exactly the instinct that made them want to coach in the first place.

So yeah. Over-coaching comes from caring. That’s actually what makes it so hard to address.

Here’s the catch, though. Caring doesn’t automatically translate into good coaching. There’s a version of caring that helps players grow, and a version that does the thinking for them. The difference is whether you trust them to work things out, or whether you’re there to provide the answers.

Tin Matkovic, in a masterclass on creativity and player development, put it this way:

“I think in the past people were much more keen on having this clarity of everything what’s being done and also having a control. I would say then now in these times, there’s more of an ‘okay, I’m gonna let my players also find their own way of doing it.’”

That shift, from control to trust, is the whole game.

What the research tells us about constant feedback

Andreu Enrich has spent years studying how coaches actually shape player behaviour. His view on feedback is pretty clear: immediate, specific, and contingent feedback works. Everything else is noise.

What that means in practice is this. Feedback that’s too frequent loses its value. If you say “good!” after every touch, “good” stops meaning anything. Players tune it out. Worse, if every mistake is followed by a correction, players stop risking anything at all. They play safe. They wait for the coach to tell them what to do next. And then, on match day, when no one’s there to shout “PASS IT!”, they freeze.

In Enrich‘s words: “If someone makes a good action and I wait for 30 minutes, you remember that action that was really good... that is of course better than doing nothing. But the value of this positive reinforcement, when it’s taking place just directly after the action takes place, it’s huge.” And the reverse is equally true: positive reinforcement applied constantly, indiscriminately, for everything, is worth nothing at all.

There’s another layer to this. Andreu introduced the Pygmalion Effect in one of our earlier masterclasses: the idea, drawn from psychology and educational research, that coach expectations have a measurable effect on player outcomes. If you coach as if your players can’t think for themselves, they’ll learn not to. If you coach as if they’re capable of working things out, they’ll start to believe that too.

Your behaviour in training is a signal. When you stop the session every thirty seconds to correct, the signal you’re sending is: “You’re not capable of figuring this out without me.” And players, being smart humans, will take you at your word.

Guided discovery: the harder, better approach

So if constant instruction doesn’t work, what does?

Guided discovery is the idea that players learn faster and retain more when they arrive at the answer themselves, rather than receiving it from a coach. Instead of “when there’s a 2v1, pass inside,” you ask: “What did you see when you had the two versus one? What options did you have? What would you do differently?

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This final article in our series is about exactly that. We are going to look at the “next play” mentality that keeps coaches from being swallowed by either their successes or their failures. We will talk about building leaders inside your team who can carry the culture forward without you having to be in the room. We will get honest about burnout, because it is far more common in our sport than we like to admit. And we will talk about what legacy actually means, because most of the time it has nothing to do with trophies.

The Next Play Mentality

Mike Krzyzewski, aka Coach K, coached basketball for over four decades. He won more games than any other coach in the history of Division One basketball. He coached three Olympic gold medals. He worked with players like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant. And when he reflects on what kept him sharp across all of it, the thing he keeps returning to is something he calls “next play.”

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

The idea is simple: after every result, good or bad, you move forward. Not by ignoring what just happened, but by extracting the lesson and committing to what comes next with full attention and full energy. As Coach K puts it, “success and failure are both impostors. What matters is how you approach what comes next.” The players who built long, successful careers at Duke were the ones who embodied this. When they scored, they got back. When they lost the ball, they recovered. When they won a championship, they showed up the following season ready to earn it again.

This maps directly onto something Jamilon Mülders talks about in his masterclass on result versus process. Mülders, who has worked at the highest levels of international hockey 🇩🇪🇨🇳🇳🇱, makes the argument that process-focused coaches are simply more sustainable than results-focused ones. When your self-worth as a coach is too tightly attached to the scoreboard, every loss becomes an identity crisis and every win becomes a pressure to maintain something fragile. When you are anchored in the process, in the quality of the work, in the development you see day to day, you have something to return to regardless of what the result was on gameday.

Mülders goes further than theory. He talks about a specific review cadence, returning to results every two to three weeks to evaluate them as data points rather than verdicts. The question is not “did we win or lose” but “what does this tell us about where we are in the process?” He describes the ideal review as quick, short, and on time. Not a lengthy post-mortem that reopens every wound, but a focused, honest look at what the data shows, followed by a clear decision about what to adjust. That kind of disciplined rhythm is what keeps a coaching team from lurching between elation and despair, and it is what allows you to stay anchored in the work when the results are not yet reflecting it.

Coach K is equally clear about something that often surprises people: handling winning is sometimes harder than handling losing. Staying hungry after a good result, not letting satisfaction become complacency, is one of the great ongoing disciplines of coaching. “

Next play” is not just a response to setbacks. It is a commitment to staying present and moving forward, no matter what just happened.

Building Leaders Who Outlast You

Here is a question worth sitting with: if you disappeared from your programme tomorrow, what would survive?

Not just the tactical system. Not just the results. Would the culture survive? Would the values you have worked to install still be there three seasons later, being taught by the players who were once your juniors to the ones who have just arrived?

Coach K built his programme at Duke around what he calls a tiered leadership structure. Rather than everything running through him, he developed leaders at every level of the team. Senior players were expected not just to perform, but to teach. Shane Battier, one of his great captains, described how he learned what it meant to be a Duke basketball player not from Coach K directly, but from the senior players who were there when he arrived. By the time Battier became a captain himself, he was doing exactly the same thing for the next generation. The culture transferred itself, naturally, because it was real.

Coach K describes this not as delegation but as empowerment. “Give leaders the freedom to lead.” His role was to create the conditions. His players’ role was to inhabit them and then pass them on. The result was a programme that could survive the absence of any individual, including the head coach himself.

Shane McLeod has spoken about this dynamic across two AMA sessions for The Hockey Site, one following the Tokyo Olympics and one after Paris. What stands out across both conversations is how McLeod thinks about the long game. The coaching team did not just prepare for one tournament. They prepared the players to think for themselves, to lead within the group, to carry the programme’s values into situations where no coach was in the room. That kind of preparation does not happen overnight, and it does not happen by accident. It is the result of a coach who is consciously building something bigger than their own tenure.

One thing McLeod is particularly clear about is the distinction between building on strengths and trying to fix weaknesses. Rather than spending energy correcting what players cannot do, his approach leans into what they do exceptionally well — their superpowers. The result is a group where individuals feel genuinely valued for who they are, not constantly reminded of what they lack. That dynamic has a compounding effect on culture. Players who feel seen for their strengths become more invested, more vocal, and more willing to take responsibility. They become the kind of leaders who carry the culture forward without being asked to. The shift McLeod described between Tokyo and Paris was not primarily a tactical one. It was a deepening of exactly this kind of distributed leadership — players equipped not just to execute but to think, adapt, and lead in the spaces where no coach is present.

In practical terms for most of us, this means giving your leaders, often the most experienced players, real responsibility. Not symbolic captaincy, but actual decision-making authority. Let them run sections of training. Let them lead the post-match debrief. Let them set the standards for new arrivals. When you create those structures, two things happen: your players grow into better leaders, and your programme develops a backbone that does not depend entirely on you.

The Single Point of Failure

In the 1994-95 season, Coach K was hospitalised mid-season with serious back problems and emotional exhaustion. He had been running Duke basketball for fifteen years. Seven Final Fours. Two national championships. And then, suddenly, he was gone. The team, without him, collapsed. They had a losing season and lost their culture almost overnight.

When Coach K came back, he analysed what had happened honestly. What he found was not that the players lacked character or that the system was flawed. It was that he had built what he described as a bicycle wheel with all the spokes running through the centre. Every significant decision, every cultural touchstone, every source of energy in the programme ran through him. When he was removed from the equation, the wheel collapsed.

He calls this creating a single point of failure. And it is, he acknowledges, a very easy trap for coaches who care deeply about their work to fall into. You know the team best. You have the vision. You have the energy. So you drive everything. And without fully realising it, you make yourself indispensable in a way that is actually bad for the programme and, as it turned out, bad for you.

This is exactly what the masterclass at The Hockey Site on Why a Coach Needs a Coach addresses. The case is straightforward: coaches, precisely because they are the ones holding everything together, are among the most isolated professionals in sport. You are expected to have answers, to project confidence, to manage everyone else’s emotions while quietly absorbing your own. There is very rarely anyone looking after you the way you look after your players. And over time, that asymmetry catches up with you.

Cody Royle, who comes from the world of Aussie Rules Football and these days a renowned author and consultant on coaching culture, argues that having a coach of your own should not be an occasional intervention but a permanent structural support. Not someone you turn to when things go wrong, but someone who is consistently in your corner, challenging your thinking, and helping you see what you cannot see from inside the role. He also describes a small but powerful practical habit: voice-noting a peer before a difficult conversation. Rather than walking into a hard moment cold, you talk it through out loud first, which forces you to articulate your thinking, hear where it is not yet clear, and arrive better prepared. It sounds simple. Most coaches have never done it.

The cognitive demands of coaching are also worth taking seriously. In the masterclass by Henk Verschuur on The Cognitive Process of Coaching, the sheer mental load of the role is broken down with real clarity. Decision-making, emotional regulation, tactical reading, player management, parent management, federation management: all running simultaneously, all match day, every week. The cognitive load does not diminish as you gain experience. In many ways it grows, because you see more, you know more, and you carry more.

Verschuur makes a point that is particularly worth sitting with: a coach’s internal mental state does not stay internal. It leaks. Anxiety, frustration, and distraction do not just affect your own performance. They seep into the team environment in ways that players absorb before a single word has been spoken. The coach who arrives at training already overwhelmed is, without intending it, adding weight to every interaction. Verschuur’s argument is that curiosity is the antidote. Staying genuinely interested in the problem in front of you, approaching each session and each conversation with deliberate preparation, keeps your mental state open rather than reactive. He also makes a point that is easy to overlook: technical excellence without self-awareness eventually becomes a liability. The coach who knows the game deeply but cannot manage their own internal state will hit a ceiling, because their knowledge will be filtered through a psychology that works against them.

The lesson from Coach K’s crisis is not dramatic. It is practical: build structures around you that can function without you, find people who challenge your thinking and support your wellbeing, and do not wait until your body stops you before you take the question of self-care seriously.

Taking Care of Yourself Is Not Optional

The culture of coaching, also in field hockey, still carries a certain pride in endurance. The early starts, the late evenings, the weekends given over to fixtures and video review. There is something in the coaching identity that equates sacrifice with commitment, and rest with something close to weakness. Coach K spent most of his career operating by a version of that logic. And then, at the top of his profession, he was forced to stop.

What he said afterwards is worth sitting with. “I let my team down.” Not because he lost games, but because he had not looked after himself well enough to stay present for them. There is a second lesson from his career that cuts even deeper. In the final home game of his career, his last regular season match against North Carolina, he let the emotion of the occasion overwhelm his preparation. Duke lost. And his immediate internal response, which he later called out in himself sharply, was to feel that the team had let him down. “Which was so bad,” he says. He had started thinking like a player, not a coach. He had made the moment about himself.

These two failures, the physical collapse that came from running too hard for too long, and the emotional failure that came from losing his coaching identity for one high-stakes moment, are not failures of a bad coach. They are the very human failures of someone who cared enormously and forgot, briefly, to look after the thing that made the caring sustainable: himself.

Coach K is clear that vulnerability is not weakness. He talks about learning this, partly through his wife and daughters, in a world where his entire upbringing had treated male emotion as something to suppress.

“Through emotion, you reach a deeper level of commitment and relationship, as long as you use emotion to build and grow, not to destroy.” Saying “I don’t know” and asking for help is a skill. For many coaches, it is the hardest one to develop.

What does looking after yourself actually look like in practice? It looks like having people in your life outside of hockey who you talk to honestly. It looks like having a mentor or coach of your own who can see the patterns you cannot see from the inside. Which is precisely the permanent support structure Cody Royle describes, not a crisis intervention but an ongoing relationship that keeps you sharp and honest across the long arc of a career. It looks like building the kind of self-awareness that Henk Verschuur identifies as essential: knowing your own mental state clearly enough to stop it from leaking into your environment in ways that harm the people around you. It looks like protecting some version of a life outside the sport, something Coach K did consistently by investing deeply in his family even through the most intense seasons of his career. And it looks like treating your own development as a coach with the same seriousness that you treat your players’ development.

Legacy Is Not a Trophy

Raoul Ehren, current head coach for the Dutch women, has been involved in elite hockey for longer than most of us can remember. Across the very best in the top domestic league (the Dutch Hoofdklasse), multiple national programmes and many years at the sharp end of high-performance coaching, his AMA session on The Hockey Site returns again and again to a theme that gets to the heart of what we are talking about here: sustainability. Not just of a team’s performance, but of a coach’s ability to keep growing and contributing across a long career.

What strikes me about coaches who sustain excellence across decades is not that they found a system and stuck to it. It is that they kept asking questions. They stayed curious. They kept finding new things to learn from. And they stayed connected to the thing that brought them to coaching in the first place: a genuine love for what happens when a group of people commit to getting better together.

Ehren’s approach to sustaining a programme is notable for its directness. He moves quickly. When he identifies what needs to change, he acts on it — not recklessly, but without the paralysis that afflicts coaches who overthink every decision. He talks about leveraging superpowers: understanding what your programme does better than anyone else and building around that, rather than trying to compete on every front simultaneously. And he speaks about continuous analysis not as a burden but as a habit of mind — a standing curiosity about where things stand and what the next move should be. The practical results of this approach speak for themselves: taking a national programme (the Belgian women) from twelfth in the world to third inside four years is not an accident. It is what happens when a coach combines strategic clarity, fast and decisive action, and a relentless focus on the things that actually move the needle.

Coach K’s mother gave him a piece of advice when he was fourteen years old, the night before he started high school. “Make sure you get on the right bus.” By which she meant: choose your people carefully. Only travel with good people, and only follow someone who is worth following. Looking back across a fifty-year career, he says that simple idea shaped almost everything. The people on his bus, his staff, his players, his family, determined what was possible. No one accomplishes what they want alone.

Legacy, when we strip away the trophies and the records, comes down to this: the people you helped become better versions of themselves.

The player who is now a coach passing on something they learned from you. The captain who learned how to lead in your programme and is now leading in their workplace, their family, their community. The culture you built that outlasted your tenure because you built it to be real, not to be dependent on your presence.

Coach K says it simply: “You can’t stay the same. You gotta keep getting better.” Not as a pressure. As an invitation. The game keeps evolving. The players keep changing. The demands on coaches keep growing. And the coaches who last, who build something that genuinely lasts, are the ones who approach that reality with curiosity rather than resistance.

What We Covered: The Recap

This series started with fun. Without it, nothing else sticks. We then looked at talent, and how the best coaches see more in their players than the players see in themselves. We explored culture, and how a truly healthy team environment is built not just on wins but on shared values and the courage to protect them.

And now, in this final piece, we have come around to the long game.

The next play mentality keeps you moving forward without being dragged down by either success or setbacks. Building leaders inside your team, people who can carry the culture forward without you, is one of the most important things you can do for your programme. Protecting yourself from becoming a single point of failure is not selfishness; it is good programme design and basic self-respect. And looking after yourself, really looking after yourself, is what makes a long career possible. Legacy is not what you won. It is who you built and what you left behind in them.

So: what bus are you on? Who is on it with you? And are you looking after yourself well enough to still be driving it, with full energy and genuine enthusiasm, ten years from now?

Those are the questions worth sitting with. And they are worth coming back to, regularly, throughout a coaching career that is worth having.

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.”

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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.

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

   Share

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!

Have you seen ? ↓

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