15 kids, 15 bibs, 15 balls

15 kids, 15 bibs, 15 balls

Nobody else put their hand up. That is the whole recruitment story.

The club needed a coach for my child's age group or the team folded. I looked round the touchline, everyone looked at their shoes, and I heard myself say I'd do it. A week later I was handed 15 kids, 15 bibs and 15 balls and told to get on with it.

That was the induction. Not a plan, not a mentor, not a folder of sessions. A bag of kit and a pitch booking.

I want to be honest about what that first season actually felt like, because I don't think we say it out loud enough.

It felt like being found out, weekly. I'd stand there on a Saturday morning with a whistle I didn't really know when to blow, running a drill I'd half remembered from my own childhood, watching it collapse in about ninety seconds. Kids in the wrong places. One in tears. Two having a wrestle by the goal. A parent behind me asking, quite reasonably, what we were working on this week. I did not know. I was working on surviving until ten o'clock.

My preparation was YouTube at eleven at night. Search "fun football drills under 9s", scribble something on the back of an envelope, hope. Some weeks the envelope worked and I felt like a genius. Most weeks I was improvising by minute six.

And here's the thing. I wasn't unusual. I was the normal case. According to UK Coaching's 2024 Population Study, 62 per cent of youth coaching in this country is delivered by volunteers. People like me. Parents who put a hand up because the alternative was no team at all. Sport England reported in November 2024 that England has 1.7 million fewer sport volunteers than in 2016-17, so the ones still standing are stretched thinner than ever.

What did I need that I never had?

I needed to know what this Saturday's session was for. Not a philosophy. Just a shape. Here's the theme, here's the warm-up, here's the game, here's what good looks like for this age.

I needed to know what came next. Kids came back week after week and I had no thread connecting one session to the next. Every Saturday was episode one.

I needed someone to ask. Not a course, not a portal. A person, or something like one, who could answer "what do I do with the kid who won't join in?" on a Tuesday night when the question was actually live.

And I needed someone to tell me I wasn't failing. Because the kids kept coming back. They laughed, they got muddy, some of them got better without me quite knowing why. It took me a full season to realise that turning up with a bag of balls and caring was already most of the job. Nobody told me that either.

I stuck at it. Plenty don't, and I understand every one of them. We hand volunteers our children's first experience of sport, give them nothing to work with, then wonder why they burn out by Easter.

I'm biased on the fix, and I'll declare it: what I saw in those seasons is a big part of why I co-founded SHOT. But you don't have to buy anything to act on the point of this post.

If you run a club, go and find your newest coach this week. The one who got the bibs and the balls in September. Ask them what they're planning for Saturday. If they go quiet, sit with them for twenty minutes and help them build one session. You'll do more for player development than any kit sponsorship ever will.

And if you're the parent who just put your hand up: you're not being found out. Everyone's envelope collapses by minute six. Come back next Saturday anyway.