Vote for your favourite
pre-season tip

Tip 1: Steven from Blyth Spartans Juniors U16s

Include ALL parents, players and coaches as early as possible after the present season ends to ensure everyone understands and agrees how we will integrate the clubs visions and values but also what the teams goals and aspirations are and how we as a team will hopefully achieve them. This would include communication platforms, payments, training and ensuring a positive attitude throughout.

Tip 2: Alexia from Alexandra Park Women’s FC

Use the time between seasons to communicate changes in admin or payments to the team and ensure they are all ready to kick off the season come September. Use the time between seasons to scout for new players and hold trials to recruit your best team possible. Assess team strengths and player performance and use the pre-season to work on ironing out the kinks and filling gaps.

Tip 3: Chris from Rugby Borough U8s Eagles

Moving from U8 to U9 is always tricky. More players, bigger pitch, longer games and ultimately, a more competitive age group. We’re advising our lads to really focus on pressure off of the ball, giving the opposition little time to make decisions and forcing them to slip up and give away possession. We’re trailing this tac already and the lads are really showing up, beating some teams comfortably that normally give us a tough game. Our top tip for next season surrounds the off the ball play, high pressure, awareness of space and of course, winning as many games as we can.

Tip 4: Steven from Newcastle Strikers U9s

• Making sure it’s fun for the kids
• Getting set up early enough so the kids have got the time to gel with each other
• Making sure that all the abilities of the kids are cared for
• Letting the kids know what I’m about
• Showing the that it’s a sport for all abilities
• Getting a few games under there belts

Tip 5: Heather from Globe Bullough Park FC 

Building relationships with your parents, during the summer months, getting them involved in the club, doing volunteering roles if possible, visiting their training sessions – as we have more time – this has proven valuable for us. As some parents have small businesses, and offer sponsorship for kits, raffle prizes, some offer to help out with our fundraising events, so building relationships with parents onboard for the new season – keeping them involved during the season, has worked for us.

Parents help out with other mums, offering lifts, running the lines, even organising team building events for their children’s teams. Parents are a very valuable asset for any team, and the growth of the club as well for us anyway, we wouldn’t be able to do anything without them.

Tip 6: Jack from Spinghead AFC

We have created player contracts for all the girls in our team. This lists our expectations and goals for the team for everything from effort to time management and communication.

We have a section for the kids, the parents and us as coaches, and we are all held to the same principles of, listen, respect and most importantly have fun.

We made an event out of the contract signing, where the girls arrived, read the contract and signed along with photographs, and a signing on bonus in chocolate.

Overall it has had fantastic feedback and support from the parents, and we have noticed an incredible change in the attitude and communication between all parties.

Tip 7: Chloe from Blackburn Eagles FC

Set out a clear code of conduct for players and parents of what is expected from them for the season, combine this with players and parents expectations from coaches.

We also do quarterly player surveys to collect regular information on where they are at, their thoughts and feelings towards training drills and give them free reign to let us know what areas they want more help developing so we can tailor our sessions to suit the needs of our players.

Tip 8: Melissa from Ponteland United FC

Prepare for next season by starting early with communications to all of your members. Make sure everyone has any links they need, and are aware of timescales.

Follow everything up, and use clear instructions to make sure joining and renewing via LoveAdmin is a smooth and easy process.

We will be doing this over the summer as we complete our first renewals since signing up to LoveAdmin, but so far it has been a huge success!

Tip 9: Rebecca from Brooklyn Junior Football Club

Speak to the parents, new and old! It’s wonderful to have such a good relationship with your members! We always host a meeting where everyone can come and ask questions, give ideas for fundraising, give feedback on how we run the club etc.

Being open and honest with your members is one of the best ways to prepare for the football season. We are currently doing this now as we are low on funds, (like most clubs) we have to pay our local sports centre over £35,000 a year to rent the space from them as we don’t have our own facilities and they have informed us they will be increasing this by 5% next season, so we have emailed our members to let them know why we are currently doing so much fundraising. If you start as you mean to go on with the honesty, then the new season gets off to the best positive start and the football family is a happy one.

Tip 10: David from Shotton Colts FC U12s

Give every family a role within your club. For example, these are just some of the roles within our current U12s team.
A Lead Coach and Assistant Coach that plan all the training sessions and picks the team. A Fixtures Secretary and Referee Secretary to organise all our matches with coaches and referees. A Treasurer and a Statistician – to collect all the player and match data. A Presentation Organiser and a Trophy Organiser, Net and Pitch Teams to put the nets up and down at home games, and put up the respect barriers. Tournament Organisers and Tracksuit and Strip Organisers to help plan matches.

My advice would be to make everyone and every family feel apart of the club and they won’t leave. Make everyone have a vested interest and you will find that all families will get involved and feel like a big family wanting the best for their team. Only then can you be successful. Its is very difficult trying to do this with just 1,2 or 3 people trying to do everything.