If a twelve-year-old could hand you a note and know you’d actually read it, this is roughly what it would say. Not what coaches assume kids want, more game time, easier drills, more pizza parties. What they actually want. The things that, when they get them, make the whole season different.
The first thing is to learn their name and use it. Not just on the roster. In practice, in drills, on the sideline, after the game. “Good rep” lands differently than “Good rep, Tyler.” The specificity tells them that the comment was for them, not for the general air. Most coaches use names in the first week and then drift toward pointing and vague direction once the team is established. Kids notice when this happens. The kid who stopped hearing their name start to feel like they’ve become scenery.
Use the name every time you give feedback. Positive or corrective, it doesn’t matter. The name is what tells them you’re talking to them specifically and that you know who they are.
They want to understand their role. Not just what position they play. Their role on the team, what the coach is counting on them to do, what success looks like for them specifically, what their job is on this particular group. Kids who don’t know their role spend energy wondering about it. Kids who know their role spend energy doing it. The two-minute conversation where the coach tells a player “here’s what I need from you this season” is worth more than any individual practice drill.
And the role doesn’t have to be glamorous to be meaningful. The kid who’s told clearly “your job on this team is to be the player who makes everyone else work harder in practice because you compete on every rep” has a real job. They’ll do it. Give them something specific to be.
They want encouragement that’s real. Kids have excellent detectors for hollow praise, and most coaches give a lot of it without realizing. “Great job everyone” after a drill that was clearly mixed results. “Looking good” when the rep was not, in fact, good. “You’re really improving” said to every kid equally, regardless of whether improvement is happening. Kids discount all of that. They’ve heard it before.
What they can’t discount is specific. “That was the best version of that footwork I’ve seen from you.” “The way you fought back into that play after getting beaten the first time, that’s what I’m looking for.” “Your passing decision in the second half was exactly right.” Those land because they’re about something real that actually happened. They can hold onto specific praise in a way they can’t hold onto generic praise.
They want to know when they’re getting better. The coach who only gives feedback when something is wrong is communicating, unintentionally, that nothing is working. Kids need to know what they’re doing right, not for ego purposes, but for calibration. If they don’t know what “better” looks like on them, they can’t repeat it. The coach who says “that was the thing, do that again” is teaching them to recognize their own competence. That’s more useful than any technical correction.
They want the coach to make it fun. Not in the pizza-party sense. In the sense that they feel alive when they’re playing rather than just compliant. Fun in youth sports is mostly about engagement, being in situations where they have to figure something out, where the drill has enough challenge to require real effort, where there’s some element of competition or game-like structure that makes the work feel worth doing. The coach who runs the same three drills in the same order every practice, with the same pacing, for twelve weeks, is not running a fun practice even if every drill is well-designed. Variation and challenge are the engines of enjoyment.
They want to be trusted to play. Most kids go into youth sports with an instinct for the game. They have intuitions, inclinations, ideas about what to try. Those instincts are unrefined, and coaching them is the job. But coaches who over-manage every decision, who call out corrections during every play, who substitute at the first sign of error, who never let the kids figure anything out in real time, are training kids out of their instincts rather than into them.
Some things have to go wrong live for the kid to learn them. Let things go wrong. Watch what they do with it. Step in after, with information, not during, with control.
They want to know you’re not just there for the stars. The kid who isn’t one of the best players on the team is watching what you do with the kids who are. If every drill gets run through the top three players and everyone else cycles in the edges, they’ve learned that they’re not the priority. They’ll act accordingly. The coach who puts real attention on every player, who makes the practice accessible in a way that challenges the best players while still reaching the average ones, is the coach who keeps the whole team invested.
They want a practice that moves. Waiting in line for four minutes to take one rep is not practice. It’s waiting. The kids standing in line are not getting better. They may be getting bored, which is different from getting better. High-repetition practice structures, small groups, multiple stations, minimal standing-around time, keep kids engaged. Engaged kids learn faster and enjoy themselves more. It also keeps the energy in the room at a level where practice actually feels like something.
They want the coach to know that they’re a person, not just a player. This one is hard to articulate but kids feel it clearly. The coach who asks “how’s school?” or “how’s the family trip going?” or just acknowledges something outside of the athletic context is treating them like a person rather than a performance unit. That matters. Kids work harder for coaches who seem to know who they are off the field. Not harder in the grinding, joyless way. Harder in the way that’s actually connected to caring.
And the last thing, the one that goes underneath all the others: they want to matter to the team. Not to be the star. Not to start every game. To matter. To feel that if they weren’t there, the team would actually notice. The coach who finds the specific way that every player contributes, who names it, who makes it part of the team’s story, gives every kid on the roster that feeling. The kid who matters to their team keeps coming back to practice even when it’s hard. The kid who feels like filler stops coming back. Which kid you have on your team next year depends, in part, on which one you created this year.
That’s the note. Read it twice.