There are many ways to be a coach, just like there are a million ways to be a parent, or a teacher, or any role that requires mentoring and leading and teaching others. Lots of people can recall their good coaches. Even more, however, can recall their bad ones. These are the rotten apples we commiserate with each other about, telling tales of troubled experiences out on the field or in the locker room, important teaching-moments gone awry.

Too many people know how the taste of trust sours in your mouth when an adult meant to help you grow breaks you down instead. There are good coaches and awful coaches, decent ones and just-plain-meh ones. And, thankfully, there are fantastic ones. So where are they? Who are they? How do they become fantastic?

If you’ve ever been coached before, you can likely describe some of the qualities that distinguish good from great, decent from terrible. But as someone just learning how to coach, and at the same time striving to not just be not-awful or halfway-decent, but as someone striving for truly fantastic (I’d even take mostly fantastic), those qualities can feel elusive and difficult to embody, not least because there are no instructions on how to be a good coach.

Nobody gives you a handbook and says, these are the Top 10 Qualities of Every Amazing (Youth Soccer) Coach And Also The Exact Steps You Need To Take to Become One. Instead, what you do get is a drawstring bag with bunch of different colored pinneys and a big black Santa sack of soccer balls that need to be inflated and a patch of field space and a bunch of sweaty teenage girls in cleats who really only need one good reason to not listen to you forever. And maybe some cones.

For every single person who takes on the responsibility of a team, especially a team of young people, the ways one “does” coaching look different. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Care About Your Players is on that list of Top 10 Qualities. What does caring about your players look like?

Do you separate your players by skill level, or do you mix them up? Does caring about your players mean developing their skills? Probably – so how do you do that? Do you focus on what they struggle with or on what they do well? Does caring about your players mean implementing fitness and nutrition regimens? Can one care about their players and also yell at them – at practice? At games? What counts as yelling, actually? Speaking of yelling…what does a caring coach do when they mess up? What does an apology look like to a kid that’s not necessarily your kid but certainly is your kid in some other sense?

Do you design practices, or does your team have a say in what they do? Do you put them into groups, or do you have them choose their own? If they are winning ‘too much’, should you move them up a league? If they are losing ‘too much’, or by too much, should you move them down? What is ‘too much’? What if you have one kid who should probably be playing at a different level (for better or for worse) – do you advise them to move them to a “more appropriate" team, or advocate they stay with their friends? Maybe it’s best to just stay out of it?

Does a caring coach look at a challenge and say, “You’re not ready yet.” Or do they say, “Game on”? Let’s say your team is going to play a game with some guest players. What if the guest players score all the goals? Do you sub them off, or keep them on? And as a matter of fact… who’s in the starting lineup? How do you make substitutions? Who comes off, who stays on, and when? How do you give feedback? Who the hell is in charge of all this stuff?! Oh wait, that’s me… damn it.

“All of this just depends!” You’re probably thinking by now.

“Depends on what?” I’d shoot back.

“Depends on the moment, the opponent, the sport, the outcome you’re looking for, the outcome they’re looking for.”

“Who is they?” I’d ask.

“Well, the players. And the parents, I guess. Maybe your boss?”

“Anything else?”

At this point you’re probably rolling your eyes at me. “And it probably depends on attendance at practice, the time of year, the talent of the team, your coaching style, the way you were coached as a kid, the week you had at work… should I keep going?” You get the point: everything about coaching is a judgment call. So, what calls does a good coach make? And when?

Imagine, parents, that you were told you had to ‘care about your child’ in order to be a good parent (hopefully not too far a stretch of the imagination). What does that look like? Where do you start? The expression of care – how we demonstrate care and feel care for others - is unique to each of us.

The example I’ve been picking apart so far is focused on care. What if you replaced care with something else? A good coach teaches their players? A good coach leads their players? A good coach pushes their players? A good coach loves their players? A good coach challenges their players? Hidden underneath these questions is a more vulnerable one: What is a coach’s job, really?

We need not pick apart each of these verbs in order to get the gist: there are infinite ways to be a coach. That infinity even contains another infinity – the infinite ways you can be Amazing and the infinite ways you can Suck. I hope most are a combination of both with heavy emphasis on the former. Unfortunately, some coaches just suck. Sucky coaches range from apathetic to neglectful to straight-up abusive. I’ve played for shitty coaches, worked alongside them, and watched them on television. I’ve even reported them to the United States Center for Safe Sport after coaching on the same sideline in tournaments and league games (I don’t mess around if you mess with kids).

Playing the same sport under the same rules or even with the same education does not guarantee you are a Good Coach. Even if you share the same “principles” or key values, it does not mean you enact those values in the same way. In my United States Soccer Federation (USSF) National D License Course, my cohort and I spent four months learning about coaching youth soccer every week.

We went to in-person weekends where we’d spend the morning in the classroom learning and the afternoons out on the fields using that learning to lead sessions for youth soccer players. We received feedback from the instructors and our classmates, and after the completion of all this work, I was awarded the first in a series of professional national coaching licenses.

Quite a bit of coaching cred comes from the completion of these courses. A license like this does do a couple things, I suppose. It shows dedication to your formal coaching education: every student must complete a mixture of large and small assignments, either written, recorded, or video-taped, and it requires time and effort in order to do well. The courses themselves also introduce you to many different kinds of coaches from across the country – some coaches are volunteers for their kids’ recreational teams, some are high school teachers who coach athletics after school, some are paid full-time coaches at local premier soccer clubs, the list goes on. But of course, the kind of coach you are is more than where you actually spend your time, the kind of players under your authority, and the coaching licenses you have (or don’t have).

Some coaches in my D License course were loud while others were quiet. Some were thoughtful and others were self-centered. Some were collectivist, others more individualist. Some wanted to find the next Lionel Messi, others just loved helping kids. Some were men… actually most of them were men. I was one of two women in a cohort of over 25. In any case, we all engaged in discussions and debates about the sport and the children we’re responsible for, and I learned a lot over a very interesting four months.

Courses like the USSF National Licenses bring people under the umbrella of some kind of shared learning, which is very important. But they also reveal how different we are from each other - from our approaches to our values, to our own Top 10 Qualities. I really believe that every coach strives to be great, even if we take different routes to get there. Even if what you think is Good Coaching is different than what I think is Good Coaching. Even that one guy who told you after practice that he actually hates children (okay, maybe not him).

In any case, I’ve started making my own list after figuring out that nobody was going to tap my shoulder and clue me in on how the hell to do this, let alone how do it well. After all, I can theorize all I want but at the end of the day it’s me and seventeen teenage girls out there three times a week – someone has to figure out how to do it. In this case, that someone has to be me.

The most exciting part is that I’m learning every day not just how to coach but how to be a coach - how to be a good one. It’s the kind of learning you do every day, accidentally and on purpose, and I’m ready to start writing about it. With that in mind, I thought it would be neat to start a new series on The Olly Project where I’ll release a new article on the topic every day, for seven days.

And with that – this article also serves as the official launch pad for a new part of my website! Coaching youth soccer is an unexpected, wonderful part of me that did not exist when I created The Olly Project almost six years ago, and I want to make space for it. Just like I write and publish under The Light, The Dark, and The Gray, all of my writing about coaching will live under a new title: The Field.

See you out there!

The Art of Coaching Soccer: 'The Field' Series