Article by Ron Cogdill, a seasoned educator and youth sports expert, has spent over 30 years inspiring young minds. As a published author and 7-time national championship coach, he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to his writing.

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Every coach arrives with a playbook, a set of strategies honed through years of experience. But what happens when those tried-and-true methods slam into the brick wall of reality? When the team in front of you doesn’t fit neatly into the template you’ve carefully crafted?

Understanding the Coaching Challenge

I’ll begin by saying that coaching raw beginners in youth sports programs is the hardest kind of coaching any coach will ever face… for two reasons:

The first reason is that you’ll have too much to teach! I mean, the knowledge and skill levels of these young athletes a coach will face will be stuck on zero, and before you can even begin your teaching, you’ll need to show them how to tie their shoes.

The second reason is that if you are coaching raw beginners, you aren’t going to have enough practice time to do all this teaching! The game schedules in these kids’ sports programs often throw the first game at you after about the third practice, and your chances of having your little pod of athlete-want-to-bes trained and ready will also be stuck on zero.

So… how do you handle this impossible situation as a coach?

Two Types of Youth Sports Programs

Let me begin my answer to that question by explaining that there are actually two general types of kids’ sports programs that you might find yourself coaching in. 

The first is what we commonly call “club sports”. In these, you, the coach, will likely recruit a collection of athletes of your choosing, train them with no limits on practices and practice time, and you will be blessed by the fact that you won’t be required to throw them into competition until you deem them “ready”. In other words, you won’t have a “time crunch”. I spent most of my career coaching teams in club programs of this sort, and I gave myself weeks and months to teach skills, conditioning, strategies, work habits, attitudes, and on and on before throwing them into competition. It was heavenly!

The second type of sports programs are the school and recreational programs in which seasons are only three months long, league rules limit practices and practice time, and the people who make out the competitive schedules will throw the first contest at you right out of the gate. It’s the toughest kind of coaching ever invented. It was the sort of program I watched from my folding chair yesterday. And, unfortunately, it’s programs of this sort in which new and untrained coaches are usually thrown.

And the question I’m dealing with today is this: What can a beginning coach do to succeed in these situations?

How a Beginning Coach Can Succeed in Recreational Programs

Here are my suggestions:

1. Keep your chin up, and don’t lose sleep because your team looked clueless in their first game of the season. Discouraged and discouraging coaches suck! Consider your first game (and also the next several games) to be nothing more than glorified practices, and your task is to learn from them. Then when it comes time to judge your success as a coach, do it not from the first game, but from the last game.
   
2. If you are coaching beginning athletes, build your teaching around skills, skills, and skills! A coach who neglects skill-teaching in these situations to concentrate on conditioning, fancy offensive schemes, or anything else is like a builder who nails together the walls and floors, and roof of his house without first constructing a foundation! Skills are the foundation of sports!
   
3. Since there’s a good chance you won’t have ample time to do this skill teaching if you’re coaching in one of these school or recreational programs, sort through the skills of your sport, rank them, and then concentrate your efforts on the most important foundational skills while leaving the fancy stuff for another year and another season! This sort of prioritization might sound like a small thing, but it’s not. I spent six or seven years in the early part of my career coaching beginning sixth-grade athletes in school programs. And the most valuable lesson I took from this experience is the importance of analyzing the skills of the sport you’ll be teaching, and dealing with the most important ones first!
   
4. If it’s a team sport you’re coaching, understand that skills, alone, won’t be enough. You must furnish your little team of beginners with some sort of simple offensive and defensive scheme that will allow them to unleash these skills in some organized manner. This “organized manner” might be accomplished by assigning your students positions, or it might be nothing more than training them to spread out and move off the ball. (I might add that in the soccer games I watched yesterday, the players on every single team sucked together into little globs around the ball that caused the skills of soccer to evaporate into non-existence.) The first rule of thumb for most of these team sports is… spread out!
   
5. And finally (and this is important!), as you plan your practices, figure out ways to work on two and three skills simultaneously! This sublime coaching trick is especially important in these school and recreational programs where time is your enemy. When introducing skills and training your students to perform them correctly, you’ll need to concentrate their attention on single matters. But once you are past the initial teaching and you’re into the drill-and-practice phase, you need to get creative with your drills and design them for double and triple duty. You see, all the coaches you are up against will face the same time limitations that you are… but the coach who can drill on two and three things simultaneously has essentially doubled or tripled his or her practice time! Remember that… and do it!

The Art of Flexible Strategy

I’d like to end this little ramble with a quick word about the word I just used: “creative”.

Creativity is a sublime coaching tool! Just because the rest of the coaching world is heading off in one direction doesn’t mean you have to follow in lock-step. Attend clinics, read books, watch YouTube videos, and pick the minds of coaches any time you get a chance. But… always remember this: New ideas are lurking inside your head that can set you and your collection of athletes apart! This is especially true in coaching beginners.

A few years ago at the University of Oregon, a creative coach named Chip Kelly turned the college football world on its head by creating a scheme for playing football games without huddling. And many years before that, the track & field coach at Oregon State University, a man named Bernie Wagner, found himself with a new high jumping student named Dick Fosbury who had the bright idea of clearing the crossbar on his back rather than on his stomach. Wagner opened his mind and worked with Fosbury to perfect his creative new jump, and he proceeded to not only win the Olympics but to turn the high jumping world on its back!

Creativity doesn’t have to be as earth-shaking as revolutionizing an entire sport. Try simply explaining things in new and different ways. Try new drills, new formations, and new approaches to old ideas.

Embracing the Learning Journey

Coaching is a continuous process of discovery. Every team teaches you something new if you’re willing to listen. The best coaches aren’t those with the most sophisticated playbooks, but those who remain perpetually curious, adaptable, and committed to growth.

Your coaching journey is uniquely yours. Each team will challenge you differently. Each season will reveal new insights about yourself and the athletes you guide. The moment you think you know everything is precisely the moment you stop truly learning.

What was a moment when you had to completely reimagine your coaching approach to meet your team where they were? Share your story.

* The stories in Winning Ways are of actual athletes but names have been replaced for privacy.