Diary of a coach - playmaker

My experiences of the FA's foundation course

I wrote last time about my reasons for tentatively stepping into football coaching, and how the first step was a free hit.

The FA’s ‘EE Playmaker’ course is indeed free, and provides an introduction to coaching. It also enables me to support (adult) coaching sessions. As long as I pass, that is!

Registration was easy enough, and I was soon presented with the course dashboard, which breaks the course up into ten sections. The good news is my progress is automatically saved, so I can dip in and out at my leisure, which is super helpful.

The course modules are variable in length, and you’re advised at the start how much time each will take. Again, this is very useful if, like me, you’re fitting the course in around life. I did various bits at lunch times and evenings over the course of a couple of weeks.

We begin with a couple of modules about inclusion. This was fully expected, and can be condensed into ‘football is for everyone; don’t do anything that would get your average middle-aged white man cancelled’.

I work for a multi-national engineering company. I have this sort of content poured into my eyeballs on a yearly basis, apparently to refresh me.

That’s not to say I don’t value the message. It is to say that we’re well into diminishing returns with this and I’m already on message. And it’s surface-level stuff: brief, situational questions, lacking context, that require a binary answer. Yuck.

As an aside, about ten years ago, my company brought a guy in from the FA to deliver a course on ethics, diversity and inclusion. He was brilliant, and so was the course. Everything is done via a screen now, which seems a shame.

Anyway, I’m on message with the inclusion stuff. All good, let’s move on.

From there we get into the real meat of the course. After a slightly uninspiring (if unsurprising) opening, I was enthused by the ‘Plan, Do, Review’ modules.

The Plan module is about how to devise training content which is relevant for the players you’re coaching, and there was plenty about how to focus in on certain skills. For example, what sort of drills to use if you want players to have more/fewer touches. It highlighted the need to give players problems to solve, rather than just repeating drills. It gets into the relationship between training area and the intensity of the session.

This was all really good stuff. Even as someone who partook in training sessions for 20 years, I still learned a fair bit, and there was more content than I was expecting.

The Do module is more about how to manage the session, how to talk to players, how to adapt. The focus is on how to keep confidence up, what sort of language to use (including body language). The Plan session is more about the players; the Do session is more about the coach.

The Review module is pretty self-explanatory. My main takeaway was about asking the players for feedback, but also noticing what enthused them and what didn’t.

We finish up with a first aid module and a safeguarding module. I was expecting both of these to be a bit generic like the inclusion modules, but they weren’t.

The best thing I can say about the first aid module is that it left me wondering why first aid training isn’t mandatory in my workplace. I’ve done first aid stuff before, but not for a long time. Things have moved on, and this was very informative. I actually felt a little ashamed at how out of touch I was.

The safeguarding module was pretty much common sense, but also very important. It answered a few questions I had like the protocol around dressing rooms. But I also learned a few things like how strict protocol is around communication, even with referees. It makes sense, but I hadn’t thought about it.

There’s a wrap-up module, and then I’m done. I’ve qualified!

So what’s next? Well, to be involved in kids coaching, I need to do a dedicated safeguarding course. To lead a session and become a ‘Lead Playmaker’ (Lead as in leader, not the heavy metal), I need to do a dedicated first aid module. I expect I’ll do both, but we’re out of the free content now. They are £30 each.

Then I’ll be into the scary bit - reaching out to local clubs. The FA website has a really useful ‘football near me’ page. The Manchester FA site also has a list of coaching ‘vacancies’, but it has been down for weeks.

It still feels like a big leap, and I’m still nervous about stepping into it. But it also feels like the time is right. My daughter was picked to play for her school team this week, and I spent an hour watching six-year-olds swarm around the ball before the biggest, fastest one on the team emerged with the ball and usually scored. That gave me a sense of what I’d be working with, and I’m not sure it helped!

But she had a great time. I think she has the bug.

TME