Author Archives: Gage Cooper

This blog is going to take a bit of a turn, I’m going to be writing less formal ‘articles’ in favour or shorter blogs. I want to truly document what’s going on with my passions, football and fitness. Plus documenting the other aspects of my life. Essentially I’m going to blog instead of vlog due to the easy of being able to write instead of edit and well, I’m too scared to be on camera. Here I will reveal the good and the bad, my success and mistakes. You’re welcome to follow the journey.

Anyway, now you know how this is going to work, lets get into it.

So last nights training session was so much more enjoyable. Last week I was basically a moody arsehole. Reflecting back on that session, it wasn’t a good look and I wasn’t being a good role model. So this week I wrote down some personal cues. They went something like this “Remember too; deflect behaviour with humour, stay calm, use the silence method, a count down, use clear instructions.” All these are very simple techniques but I had to remind myself. The fact that I turned up confident with my ‘control techniques’ meant I turned up with more enthusiasm and the consequence was a excited bunch of kids, ready to have fun.

As good as the session was, sadly, I wasn’t perfect. We have an issue with our goalkeeper. He wants to play on the pitch. Which isn’t the problem, we want our boys to want to learn the game. Come the next game and subsequent training session he wasn’t there and now threatening to leave our team. His body language in training is one of disinterest. If he wasn’t a child, I’d say his attitude is shit. But to be honest, he looks sad playing football.

Initially I read the situation and concluded he wasn’t putting in the effort. I tried to talk to him about how best to go about talking to us coaches and what effort is required to change position. Instead I should have asked him what’s up, if he’s okay, is there anything going on in his life. I should have asked him about his school life or home life. But I got it wrong. This is the art of coaching and man management. Hopefully next week provides the opportunity to put things right, but since I got it wrong, it’s time to rebuild a solid relationship with him.

I’ve been a bit restless over the Christmas break. I generally struggle at this time of year when life seems to come to a standstill. Maybe it’s self perceived but I needed something to sink my teeth into. With this inability to relax and a thirst for self improvement, I took a communication skills course. Provided by High Speed Training and on a side note, I have to recommend their courses. Simply put, you get plenty of bang for your buck.

I took the course because I thought I’d be able to develop the way I explain things. We’ve all struggled with the odd stutter and I’m prone to over explain things. Admittedly, it was naive on my part to expect an outcome. It did teach me about the importance of feedback, how to inspire long term motivation and gave me a frame of what effective coaching looks like. In fact, it probably taught me more about coaching than the FA level 1 course I took in the summer.

What I’m going to do better.

Feedback.

I definitely want to improve the amount of feedback I give and how I deliver it. The start of this course was heavy on feedback and it’s always illuminating to discover what you didn’t know about seemingly simple things. For example, I wasn’t aware that it might be a good idea to give feedback as often as possible. That’s not to say you been to be blowing smoke for the sake of it but balance it out. It’s as simple as if they’ve done something good let them know about it. If they do something bad, let them know. The difficulty comes when knowing how to deliver that message. To help myself, I’ve come up with an equation, Action (Good/Bad) + Why = Understanding / development plan.

*Be clear about the action to the player. Explain why it’s good or bad to develop understanding. If bad, come up with development plan with them. And always critique with compassion and kindness.

Motivation.

If you asked me to motivate a group of players, I’d probably play Al Pacino’s “inches” speech from Any Given Sunday. It’s an incredibly inspiring video and I’m sure would motivate anyone to give their all on the pitch. But that’s only one aspect of motivation. Before, I’d never have considered setting a good example much of a motivational tool. Infact here’s a list of all the things I wouldn’t have considered;

• Having clear expectations
• Encourage thinking and sharing ideas
• Regular feedback
• Train or develop people for their role
• Positivity
• Gratitude

The basics of coaching.

Coaching seems to be something that I find comes naturally to me. Although I might be indulging in some mild form of self grandiosity, ultimately I lead with Compassion and Kindness. It seems to be serving me well but if I’m to be an effective coach in the long term I’ll need to refer to a framework of coaching. This stuff didn’t come up on my level one course. Luckily down to my natural curiosity and self awareness to improve, I stumbled across a basic framework.

• Identify problem
• Get their perspective and let them ask questions.
• State your expectations
• Work with them to come up with agreed development plan
• Monitor the situation

This course was aimed at people looking to improve their communication within a business setting. But the course has given me so many relatable skills it’s unbelievable. I’ve not even mentioned the information in regards to emotional intelligence. I want to dive into that with more depth, so that might be a future blog. So far though, the information I’ve taken away will undoubtedly improve my coaching. Ironically this blog was written on the 31st of December 2021. In 2022 this blog will serve me as a tool to remind myself of the skills I’ve learnt. Hopefully it helps a few people along the way too.

Last week I wrote about my biggest struggles within coaching, this week I’m going to explore what I believe to be my current strengths. In my working life I’ve held various roles within a gym setting either taking personal clients or group fitness. The art of planning and executing a lesson will never leave me. Combined with an understanding of strength and conditioning within a professional environment has undoubtedly translated to my football coaching.

I’m not a S&C guru by any stretch but I do enjoy the topic in relation to my own training. That passion has given me a grounding in the how too’s of warm ups and planning plus building my confidence in the process. I’m not saying football coaches can only be bred from S&C coaches, that’s obviously not true. But we all develop our own skills in different arenas. Eddie Jones is a former teacher, Jose Mourinho a sports scientist and Pep Guardiola a former player. All reached the top of their sports, each from different backgrounds.

Warm ups

With this understanding of fitness, I like my warm ups to be interesting. Though this isn’t a novel approach and I won’t be making waves by saying that but I just can’t bring myself to send a group of young footballers off for laps to warm up. RAMP (Raise, Activate, Mobilise, Potentiate) serves has a great framework to deliver interesting warm ups. Yes, you could do a lap, a few exercises and a sprint to get you ready for training, but that’s amateur. Especially when Raise and Activate can be merged by a simple game, recently we used the ‘upside down cone’ game. A simple way to get them to mobilise is to change the way they can travel in the box eg. skipping or high knees. Then potentiate with a ball game. At this point the players don’t even think they’re warming up, they’re playing games and having fun. RAMP is a very simple process but so effective. So if I’m not being creative with warm ups, I’m just being lazy and I don’t want to be a lazy coach.

Planning

When planning a session, I used to use STEP, most people learn it on their FA level 1 course. It’s alright but I would rearrange it to task, space, equipment and people. TSEP doesn’t spell anything though. For me, it’s illogical to plan your session based firstly on the space you have, great you’ve got an acre of field to use but what are you trying to achieve?

I think drills, practice or games, ultimately pick themselves and that’s why I start with task. I need a place to go, an objective, something to work on. Once I’ve decided that, now I can consider what space I’ve got to use. It’s made easy though since we train at the same pitch each week. Same with equipment, I know what’s available to me so unless I’m using jumpers for goal posts, I’m good to go. Last but not least, how do the people fit into this i.e. the players. I’m usually considering whether they prefer games or do I need to change it up often and do I need to keep the rules simple? Once I’ve answered all these questions, now I know what tools I need to complete the objective. So if I’m including a rondo in a warm up, it’s because it’s related to the aim and it satisfies my need for space and equipment and finally, it’s been tailored to suit my players.

Confidence

I remember the first large group session I took, there must have been about 30 people all of different ranks of seniority. My legs had gone to jelly and I was sweating profusely. Essentially I was shitting myself. Luckily, by the time I came to stand up in front of 15, 10 year olds, I was pretty confident. But the early days are going to be rough and it’s going to be scary. The simple reason being, you don’t want to look a dick. You’re in the best position to make a fool of yourself and you’ve got to roll with it. You will do the wrong thing and say the wrong thing.

It’s easy to say to someone, ‘just have confidence’. But that’s shit advice, it’s like telling someone to not worry when they’re anxious. But I would say the need to have confidence never goes away. I realised this when I took a session a few weeks ago, that day I’d had some bad news and was feeling anxious. Emotionally, I wasn’t up for it. Predictably the session wasn’t my best. But I still needed to dig deep to have confidence to show up and be positive for the players sake. Luckily or unluckily, confidence comes from experience. Good and bad experiences will build your confidence simply because you’ve been there and done it and the experience isn’t new to you anymore.

I think it’s important to get as many experiences as possible. If you don’t have a related background, go find stuff that translates. Like the athlete must try lots of sports as a kid to learn new movement patterns, coaches must expose themselves to as many sports, topics and experience as possible. I’ve already mentioned my fitness background but today I’m learning from the worlds of business, teaching and other sports to develop my coaching. The more varied your learning, the more unique your experience will be.

It’s been some time since I posted to this blog. To be honest, I’ve fallen into the trap of writing ‘how to’ pieces. I realise that’s not the point of this blog, when in fact I’m here to share my journey and write about what I’m learning along the way. I don’t really want to tell anyone what to do, but I’d rather offer my experience to inspire change. It’s like teaching kids how to play football, theres no specific way, just ideas and experiences. So my inspiration comes from my latest session review.

That session review read, ‘remember my challenging behaviour training and improve communication’. I can’t believe I struggled for weeks for my next topic but my latest reflection revealed the most strikingly obvious thing to write about. I often remind myself of the phrase ‘world class basics’, I even have it written down in my note pad. But as I sit there trying to learn the principles of the game I had a realisation. The game is simple, score more goals than the other team. There’s no need to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the game, since principles of play are not the world class basics of coaching. I’m not saying you don’t need to know what you’re talking about, but I probably don’t need a long thought out footballing philosophy at this point in time.

Dealing with behaviour

The challenging behaviour course taught me a few things. Firstly, it gave me the tools to stay calm when things get frustrating and also it stopped me from becoming a total dictator. If I’m honest, I was becoming the unbearable, intolerable coach who eventually wouldn’t have a team to lead. I’m happy to admit that because I have the self awareness to know I needed to correct it. But it’s clear this requires life long learning.

I deal with challenging behaviour much better these days but I’m not perfect and the lads can be really trying at times. Like the other night at training, all of a sudden footballs are being booted here there and everywhere or the boys are shouting and chasing each other. The reflection time served as a great reminder to stick to the basics, don’t react to everything, use humour to deflect and not to raise my voice because they’re being noisy. Even if it’s their fault the training is going terribly, it’s my responsibility on get it back on track. Also, nobody want’s a grumpy coach who just tunes you in all the time.

Communication

Speaking in front of a group comes fairly naturally to me, I’m lucky to have that kind of confidence where I can address a large group. I would have to admit though, I’m prone to over explaining things. Which makes it difficult to explain a practice or session plan to a group of 10 year olds, who are, as noted in my last paragraph, naturally inclined to cause chaos!

I try to use an ‘EDIP’ approach, where I Explain then Demonstrate, they Imitate and finally Practice. This has massively helped because if I keep the explain bit down to a few key points, I can quickly involve the boys with a demonstration. In this way, it doesn’t matter if one or two people were not concentrating because once it’s time to imitate they can look at what the other groups are doing. Before the practice phase begins, I usually get questions and that’s when I can go into more detail, usually by this stage most people are paying attention because they don’t want to miss the detail…assuming the practice is fun, of course!

Coaching

Coaching has thrown up some surprising challenges and I never thought I’d be who I am today, I even took a challenging behaviour course, I thought I’d be a natural LOL. But it’s been great for my personal development. If you had told me a year ago I’d have become passionate about behaviour, relationships and communication, I’d have said you’re nuts. I just wanted to get a team to play good football. I realise now there’s so much more to coaching and the aspects spoken about, form the world class basics that I have to implement into my coaching philosophy.

As a new coach, I’m eager to get hands on with delivering the best sessions I can think of. Sometimes they hit and just as often they miss. That’s life and that’s part of the journey. We all make mistakes and we don’t always get it right but I accept that from myself because I accept it from my players. I’m okay with mistakes. The thing that troubled me was, I didn’t know how to handle a group of 10 year olds and I didn’t know how to deal with behaviour.

As adults, we like to think children will just blindly obey us and do everything we ask. But that’s now how humans work and that includes children! Kids will do as we ask, so long we’ve built a solid relationship with them. This realisation dawned on me one night after a particularly bad training session, I was having a negative impact on that relationship due to my lack of skills. This left me feeling awful, it wasn’t fair on them and it wasn’t good for me. So I undertook a challenging behaviour course and this is what I learned.

Consider the underlying reasons for behaviour that challenges.

First of all, I love this definition. ‘Behaviour that challenges’, the course didn’t ever label a behaviour bad because well, kids aren’t bad people and they’re not behaving in a way to be a villain. Behaviours are often a child’s way of expressing themselves and communicating their emotions. Any behaviour that we would normally describe as naughtiness could be a result of a child’s home life, experiencing trauma or neglect, social media/peer pressure or have special educational needs or disabilities. This is why we mustn’t react badly or ‘snap’ at behaviour that challenges, we should always approach with intelligence and compassion.

Deflect before you react. 

This is what I mean by reacting in an intelligent way. Rather than an instant reaction to a low level disruption by scalding the child, use softer techniques. Such as strategic ignoring for attention seeking behaviours, sometimes children who want attention, seek it even if it’s negative. Be sure to give attention positively at more appropriate times. When possible, use humour to deflect and get back on track, this one is easy as a football coach because the players love abit of banter. Also using peer praise to help get the group on task, you’ll notice only a few will be disruptive and others will be displaying model behaviour, so praise them. Let them know they’re showing the behaviours required and watch as the ones who aren’t, start looking for praise themselves, and then, praise them.

Always, always, always, remain calm! 

I refer to the training session mentioned as the session I wish I knew how todo this. I’m not talking about losing your rag with players, if you go ballistic at 10 year olds, you need to seriously consider if you’re capable of working with children. I’m talking about the frustration that can come out when trying to lead a session and you’ve got disruptive behaviour all over the place. There’s sessions where children are wrestling each other the ground, shouting over you and totally disregarding your instructions. At times like this, you might be ready to cancel the session, pack up and go home. It’s vital to stay calm, how you react is your first step to reclaiming the room or group. If they sense you’ve lost it, you wont get them back! Worse still, when you lose it with them, you’ll start to fracture any relationship you’ve built up with them.

Bonus tip. Don’t allow them to switch off or even think of messing about. Make your sessions as fun as possible with plenty of activities and games. I believe the warm up sets the tone, make that interesting and then set the behaviours expected right from the off! Finally, be fun! Have a laugh with them, make them feel good and be positive. Show your passion and enthusiasm for our sport! The reason we all turn up on cold nights is because we love this game, let them see it. All this sounds simple but it’s not easy, the world class basics take continual effort and study.

When I decided to become a coach I thought it was all about having the best drills and knowing, by heart, the coaching cues needed for that drill. There was a time when I wasn’t in a position to fully commit to becoming a coach, sometimes life gets in the way and then we went into lockdown 1. But now with all this free time to study, I set about learning all I could about coaching. All my time was spent on sites like the coaches voice and youtube, religiously making notes and jotting down drills and practices. I was certain I could get anyone to play great football.

Fast forwards to the summer of this year and I’m ready to go. I’ve got the perfect drill and I’ve remembered all my cues. And, really it didn’t go too badly for my first session. But I felt I needed more. It wasn’t until I remembered the lessons I’d been learning from the High Performance Podcast. One of the phrases that sticks out and sadly I cant remember who said it but ‘I don’t coach footballers, I coach people who play football’. That phrase alone has started to shape my own coaching philosophy.

So, how do you coach people instead of footballers? The answer? Relationships. You get to know them, personally. Find out why they play, who their favourite teacher is, what their dogs called, what their parents do, favourite team or player, what other sports they like, in-fact, the list is endless. The second part to that is, care about it. Care about the things they like, ask them about it, remember what they said and sometimes, go out of your way to learn about something they like. Another great quote ‘a child won’t let you care for them until they know you care about them’. I’m speaking more specifically about youth football but this all applies to adults too, in the sense that you still need to care about people.

Regardless of age group, everyone has their own problems and their own personal experience in life. And this is why if you only coach football, you miss out on a massive chance to influence the whole of the person. This is the privilege we as coaches must earn. Sean Wane, England rugby coach details how if he noticed a player wasn’t performing or acting out of character, he would chat to them about their personal life. He detailed how on one occasion he actually stopped by unannounced at a players house, to have a chat, ask how they were to show how much he cared. Recently John Terry gave an interview about how Dean Smith influenced him. He tells the story how he was about to absolutely tune in a player for his lack of performance until Dean Smith told him to ask about his family life. From there he found out he had home issues and once he was given understanding, empathy and some time off he came back a new player.

Relationships are vital to great coaching and sadly too many coaches miss out on this opportunity to connect with someone in favour of a ‘I’m the leader and you’ll do as I say’ approach. Don’t miss out on this chance. Get to know your players and watch their faces light up when they see how much you care. And then cherish the relationship that follows, always use it for good and notice learning opportunities increase.

I’m a bit of a dreamer. So naturally fantasies of becoming the next Klopp or Pochettino occupies my daydreams the majority of the time. And being a grass roots coach is, a millions miles away from the Elite game. It is though, a necessary step especially if you didn’t play 500 league games. This blog aims to address some of the things you wouldn’t have considered about being a grass roots coach when you’re dreaming of winning the Champions League.

When I joined my local youth side, I thought great! I’ll chuck some footballs, cones and bibs in the boot of my car and I’m on my way to recreating my very own 9-a-side Pep Guardiola inspired side. The proverbial bricks came crashing down when I realised that coaching is only one aspect of the gig. I mean sure, I knew there would be more involved but until you know, you don’t know, if you know what I mean.

Building relationships. This so far has been the least considered aspect of what I do. And I don’t mean your players (more on that in future blogs). But what I didn’t anticipate and you should prepare for this before embarking on a GR coaching journey, is managing parents. I hadn’t managed anything in my life and there I was managing 14 parents who are all totally unsure about me. It’s daunting at first, but my advice would be to get to know the parents as much as you do your players. Ultimately the parents are the most important people to keep happy, without them you don’t have a team.

Organising fixtures. Maybe I’m the only person in the world who was a bit ignorant to this. I doubt i am but if you are about to take on a role as a coach then you need to know that you’ll be contacting other coaches to confirm details for the weekend fixtures. Seems simple, but when organising my first game I booked the only pitch i could find for 12pm-2pm and when I went to confirm the details with the away team coach, i was met with an extremely unhelpful and grumpy coach. It seemed before i got any sense from him the only reply i got was ‘this is an AM league’ – yeah cheers pal! So before you organise your fixture, find out if you’re at home or away, where to book your pitch and what times you normally kick off for your league and age group.

Registering players and getting confused about the process. You’ll be badgering parents for payments, to action FA links and passport photos. Photo’s are easy enough but the first two will likely cause some sort of issue. Payments will end up pending or not going through and the FA link the parents need to action will make as much sense to you as it will them.