What girls' football taught me about coaching everyone

What girls' football taught me about coaching everyone

Girls' football is my favourite thing in coaching. Not a worthy cause I signed up to, not a box the club needed ticking. The actual highlight of my week. And it made me a better coach of everyone, boys included, because it forced me to unlearn most of what I thought coaching was.

When I started, I coached the way I'd been coached: here's the technique, here's the drill, repeat until better. Ability first, everything else later.

Girls' football took one look at that and quietly dismantled it.

The first thing I learned: confidence comes before technique, not after it. I used to assume confidence was the reward for getting good. Master the skill, feel the confidence. What I actually watched, week after week, was the opposite. A player who believed she was allowed to try things would attempt the turn, fluff it, laugh, attempt it again, and get it by half term. A player who was frightened of looking silly would never attempt it at all, and no amount of technical instruction fixes a skill that's never attempted. The research backs what the touchline shows you: Women in Sport's survey of more than 4,000 girls found 68 per cent citing fear of judgement and 61 per cent citing low confidence as what holds them back. You can't drill your way past that. You have to coach the fear first. So my job stopped being "teach the turn" and became "build a place where fluffing the turn costs nothing". The technique followed. It always followed.

The second thing: belonging comes before performance. Plenty of my players didn't first turn up for football. They turned up for their mate, for the group, for somewhere to be on a Saturday that felt like theirs. The football grew on them afterwards, and then some of them got seriously, wonderfully good. But belonging was the door. If a girl feels like the group is hers, she'll run through walls in training. If she feels like a guest in someone else's team, she'll drift, and the drift is quiet, and by the time you notice she's gone. The numbers on that drift are grim: Women in Sport found 43 per cent of girls who considered themselves sporty disengage from sport after primary school, against 24 per cent of boys. The Youth Sport Trust's Girls Active 2024 survey found enjoyment of PE falling from 86 per cent at ages 7 to 8 to 56 per cent by 14 to 15. Those girls didn't stop liking sport. Too often, sport stopped feeling like it was for them.

The third thing, and the one I'd put on a poster: watch the quiet ones. My worst habit as a new coach was coaching the loudest ten per cent. The kid demanding the ball, the one asking questions, the one in my eyeline. Meanwhile the quiet one at the edge of the drill was having an entire season I knew nothing about. Sometimes quietly thriving. Sometimes quietly deciding this wasn't for her. The loud kids tell you how they're doing. The quiet ones make you come and find out, and if you never do, you'll read their whole story in one line, months later: she's not coming back.

Now, here's the bit that surprised me. I took all of that back to coaching boys, expecting to need my old methods again. I didn't. The boys needed exactly the same things. Confidence before technique. Belonging before performance. Someone watching the quiet ones. Boys are just better trained at hiding the need, so we mistake the hiding for not needing it. Half the "difficult" boys I've coached weren't difficult. They were quiet ones being loud about it.

None of this means going soft on standards. My girls' teams competed as hard as anyone. It means getting the order right. Confidence, belonging, then performance, in that order, because performance built on the first two doesn't collapse the first time it rains.

So if you coach kids, any kids, this weekend: find your quietest player, learn one true thing about how their season is actually going, and praise one brave attempt that failed. That's it. That's the session plan girls' football gave me, and it works on everyone.