Game Plan Coaching Podcast

3v3 Special: Fit for the future

Recorded live at St George's Park at the Football Association's 3v3 showcase event, this episode is a little different in format, multiple conversations across the day with former England internationals, FA staff, grassroots coaches and parents, all exploring one of the most significant changes to children's football in a generation.
From next season, under 7s football in England moves to a 3v3 format. No referees, no coaches dictating from the sideline. Just children playing football. This episode explores what that means, why it matters, and what coaches can do to make the most of it.
 
Three Key Messages
 
1. Get out of the way and let them play 3v3 asks children to trust the children. No referees, no instructions from the sideline, no adults solving problems that children are more than capable of solving themselves. Children self-officiate, communicate, lead. They do on a proper pitch exactly what they do on the playground. And they love it.
2. More touches, more decisions, more love for the game The numbers are hard to argue with. A child playing 3v3 gets 100% of their potential playing time. In a 5v5 format with substitutions, that can drop to as little as five hours of actual football across a season. More time on the ball means more decisions, more problems to solve, more moments where a child can feel the game.
 
3. This is bigger than a format change 3v3 is not just a smaller version of the game. It is a philosophy. It is the FA saying clearly that children's football should be designed around children - their rights, their enjoyment, their development as people as well as players. 
 
Get in Touch
Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/
 

Craig Morris: Prepared, not planned

Craig Morris spent 20 years as Podium Technical Coach at Paddle UK, coaching across three Olympic disciplines - kayak, canoe and kayak cross - and overseeing three athletes to four Olympic medals across Tokyo and Paris 2024. At Paris he coached Kimberley Woods to double bronze and Adam Burgess to silver in the men's canoe. Since leaving British Canoeing he has moved into coach development, working across multiple sports.
 
Three Key Messages
1. Prepared, not planned Craig's game plan contribution is one of the most immediately useful ideas in the whole series, and it came directly from one of his athletes, Adam Burgess, during a review of the Tokyo Olympics campaign. The idea sits on a continuum. At one end, meticulously scripted practice with everything timed and controlled. At the other, turning up with no intention or direction whatsoever. Neither extreme serves the athlete well. The sweet spot in the middle is what Craig calls a zone of presence - leaning into what you know to be stable in your sport while staying genuinely open and responsive to what emerges. In canoe slalom, the river doesn't care about your plan. The best performers are the ones prepared for anything, not the ones who've rehearsed everything.
 
2. Coach alongside, not above A thread that runs through the whole conversation. Craig describes the shift in his coaching from a place of technical certainty, where he had the model, he had the answers, and the athlete's job was to fulfil his vision, to something far more collaborative and genuinely curious. Coaching with, not to. Situating yourself alongside the performer rather than above them. He talks about sessions becoming noisier, more joyful, athletes taking more ownership and showing more patience with problems. And athletes having longer careers because they found a new love for the sport.
 
3. What do we need to let go of to see things as they truly are? Craig's closing question to coaches is one of the most honest things anyone has brought to the game plan. It comes from a long personal journey of recognising that when you have a rigid technical model of performance, you risk seeing only what you want to see rather than what's actually happening. What might you be getting in the way of?
 
Other Things Worth Knowing
The wisdom of not-knowing Craig co-authored a paper with Keith Davids and Carl Woods called On the Wisdom of Not-Knowing: Reflections of an Olympic Canoe Slalom Coach, published in Sport, Education and Society. The paper questions whether coaches in high performance environments have come to rely too heavily on secondary information - data, reports, analysis - at the expense of what the world is sharing with them directly. It's a genuinely thought-provoking read and sits right at the heart of everything Craig talked about in this conversation. Well worth tracking down.
Read it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13573322.2022.2140135
 
Verbs above nouns A small but significant idea that Craig picked up from researcher Carl Woods. Thinking about coaching in terms of verbs rather than nouns. Response-able as a skill, not just responsibility as a concept. Performing as an ongoing verb, not a fixed outcome.
 
The adaptability folder A very practical idea. Craig used to keep a folder on his desktop collecting clips of moments where his athletes adapted brilliantly, situations that previously might have been labelled mistakes, but reframed as evidence of responsiveness and skill. Over time his athletes started bringing moments to him, asking for them to be added. They were actively looking for opportunities to be adaptable.
 
Skilled intentionality Craig introduces this idea, keeping as many options open for as long as possible, as the hallmark of the best performers. He draws on the work of a coaching colleague who describes it as poker not chess - always playing with a rich hand available rather than committing too early. It's a useful lens for thinking about what you're actually trying to develop when you design practice.
 
Let the practice breathe Craig talks about the importance of not filling every gap, giving athletes time and space to sit with problems, struggle productively, and find their own solutions. The framing and contracting you do before and after a session matters as much as what happens during it.
 
Get in Touch
Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/
Craig's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-morris-1768b81b2/
 

Keith Sharpe: It's never about you

Keith Sharpe is Head of Coaching and Leadership Development for the Great Britain Cycling Team, coach mentor for the Premier League, and someone who has spent over two decades supporting athletes and coaches across Olympic, Paralympic and professional sport, including time at Right to Dream in Ghana and Denmark, where he led their Character Development strategy. Outside of all of that, he volunteers as a Samaritans listener.
 
Three Key Messages
1. It's never about you Keith's game plan contribution lands in four words and it's one of the most important reframes any coach can make. The athletes you work with have dreams, goals and ambitions and your role is to support them in chasing those things down. That doesn't mean coaches can't have their own aspirations, but when you step into the coaching role, it needs to be about the person in front of you. Keith puts it simply: coaches are a contributor to what athletes want to achieve. Polishing talent, not producing it. A small but significant distinction.
 
2. Bring your normalness One of the most quietly powerful ideas in this conversation. Keith talks about what he calls the most me feeling: that moment when you are completely and utterly yourself. For him it's a Friday night, pizza on order, friends coming round, music on. The challenge he puts to coaches is to find that feeling and bring it into everything you do. Because consistency of character isn't just good for you, it's good for the people you coach. Athletes who don't know how their coach is going to turn up today carry an anxiety that gets in the way of performance. Being authentically, consistently yourself removes that.
 
3. Seek perspectives and really listen to them Keith's game-changing advice is rooted in something coaches ask of their athletes every single session: get comfortable being uncomfortable. His challenge is to regularly seek feedback from the people you coach. Not just once, not just when things go wrong, but as a normal, embedded part of your practice. Start simple. Ask what's going well. Ask what they'd like more of. And when the feedback feels prickly, get curious rather than defensive. As Keith says, if you can do that now, those conversations just become part of how you work together.
 
Other Things Worth Knowing
Hurry slowly A theme that runs quietly through the whole conversation and one Keith writes about brilliantly on LinkedIn. Patience isn't passive. It's trusting that consistent effort over time is the thing that creates real development. Too many coaches and athletes want to rush the process. Keith's reminder is a good one: a butterfly can't be a butterfly without first being a caterpillar.
 
You don't coach at people, you coach with people Keith's nightclub analogy is one of those ideas that once you've heard it, you can't unhear it. If you start dancing at someone in a nightclub, you're going to get some strange looks. Dance with them and everything changes. Coaching is a partnership. The coaches who get the most from their athletes are the ones who genuinely invest in that relationship, building community, creating belonging, and getting people to contribute.
 
Language matters A brilliant thread in the conversation around the words we choose as coaches. Keith is thoughtful about this: coaches who over-communicate create confusion, not clarity. And the language of producing athletes versus polishing talent isn't just semantics. It reflects a fundamentally different mindset about whose journey this actually is. Worth sitting with.
 
 
Get in Touch
Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/
Keith's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-sharpe/

Dr Anna Stodter: Learning Snack

Dr Anna Stodter is a Senior Lecturer in Sport Coaching at Leeds Beckett University, a rugby coach, and a researcher whose work sits right at the intersection of coach learning and applied coaching practice. Her research has explored how coaches filter and make sense of new ideas, how experimentation drives development, and more recently, how coaches can help players engage with contact in rugby more safely and confidently. She is one of those rare people who can take a complex academic idea and make it genuinely useful for coaches working at any level. This one was a real treat.
 
Key Messages
1. You are your own filter Anna's coffee filter analogy, published in the UK Coaching Applied Research Journal, is one of the most useful frameworks for understanding coach learning you'll come across. The idea is simple but profound. Your biography; the sum of your experiences, values, beliefs and knowledge, acts like a filter for every new idea you encounter. Some things get rejected because they clash with what you already believe. Some sail straight through because you already do them. And some land in the middle, they feel relevant, they might just work, but they need adapting for your context before you taste them properly. Understanding your own filter is the starting point for becoming a more intentional learner.
 
2. Coaching is a swampy lowland, embrace it Drawing on the work of Donald Schon, Anna describes coaching not as a precise science with predictable outcomes, but as a constantly shifting environment where the ground is always moving beneath your feet. That's not a problem to be solved, it's the nature of the work. And it means that experimentation isn't optional. Trying things out, tweaking, adapting, sometimes rejecting and starting again - that reflective cycle is how coaches grow. The coaches who thrive are the ones who get comfortable with not always knowing what's coming next.
 
3. Take a learning snack One of the most immediately stealable ideas in this conversation. You don't need to overhaul your entire coaching practice to keep developing. Anna introduces the idea of the learning snack. A small, intentional moment in a session where you try something new, notice what happens, and reflect on it. It could be a different type of question, filming yourself for the first time, or asking your athletes to rate their confidence at the start and end of a session. Small bites, consistently taken, add up to real development over time.
 
Some other things…
The coffee filter in full Anna's original research followed football coaches over the course of a year, tracking how they engaged with new ideas and what actually changed in their practice. The coffee filter metaphor emerged as a way of bringing that theory to life. You can find the full diagram and explanation in the UK Coaching Applied Research Journal, Volume 8. Well worth a read.
 
Film yourself coaching Anna's game plan contribution is a simple but important one. Film yourself coaching. It's confronting, there's nowhere to hide, and your voice never sounds like it does in your head. But the perspective it offers is like nothing else. Watch it back with a colleague, pick one thing to focus on, and just chat through what you see. Anna used it to count the types of questions she was asking - and what she found genuinely surprised her. You might be surprised too.
 
Contact Confident Anna has been working on a brilliant freely available resource for rugby coaches called Contact Confident, developed with colleague Dr Katrina MacDonald and in collaboration with World Rugby. It brings together principles from judo and other contact sports to help coaches build player confidence with contact. Gradually, safely, and without it feeling like a big scary event. Short, sharp one-minute videos that coaches can dip into and adapt for their context. Find it on the Leeds Beckett University website.
 
Get in Touch
Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/
Anna's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-anna-stodter-990a0855/
 

Dr Peter Olusoga: The Superhero Complex

Welcome to the Game Plan Coaching Podcast
Dr Pete Olusoga is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Sheffield Hallam University, a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society, and a sport psychology consultant. His award-winning PhD explored stress and coping in elite sports coaching, and his research has spent over a decade asking the questions that matter for coaches: what causes burnout, how do we recognise it, and what can we do about it? He also hosts his own brilliant podcast, Eighty Percent Mental.
 
Three Key Messages
1. Burnout isn't a you problem: One of the most important reframes in this conversation. Pete is clear, burnout is a perfectly normal and rational response to an environment that demands too much. It's not a sign of weakness or individual failure. Yes, there are things coaches can do for themselves, but there is also a real organisational responsibility to look after the people within it.
 
2. The superhero complex: Pete introduces this idea from his research - an unhealthy obsession with taking on too much, giving everything, and never stopping to recover. Coaching is a giving profession by nature, but if you keep giving without ever replenishing, the wheels will eventually come off.
 
3. Slow down to respond, not react: Pete's game-changing advice is deceptively simple. Slowing down - your breathing, your thinking, your responses - creates what he calls a choice point. Instead of reacting to stress, you get to respond to it. Those small pauses, the micro-breaks, the third spaces, the 30 seconds of silence before you walk through the front door, they add up. Rest and recovery aren't luxuries. They're a performance strategy.
 
Something else worth knowing
The stress that creeps Pete explains why burnout so often catches coaches off guard. Stress doesn't always arrive all at once. It inches up gradually, and we accommodate each small increase without really noticing. Until one day, one extra thing tips everything over. Understanding how you personally respond to stress -physically, mentally, behaviourally - is one of the most valuable things you can do.
 
Get in Touch
Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/
Pete's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peteolusoga/
Eighty Percent Mental Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/eighty-percent-mental/id1528861331

Russell Earnshaw: Are you enjoying this?

Welcome to the Game Plan Coaching Podcast
Russell Earnshaw, known to most as Rusty, is one of the most influential coach developers working in sport today. Starting out in rugby, he now works across multiple sports and environments, from Premier League football academies to New Zealand, Canada, the US and beyond. He's the kind of person who makes you think differently about coaching within about five minutes of talking to him.
 
Three Key Messages
1. The best coaches see the world through the eyes of the learner Rusty's game plan contribution is rooted in a simple but profound idea from Roger Neyburn's book Experts. As coaches develop, they move from being focused on themselves to being genuinely curious about the experience of every individual in front of them. His challenge to coaches is to pick one player, watch their experience for the duration of a session, and ask yourself honestly; was that good enough?
 
2. Expertise is about having more options A recurring theme throughout the conversation is that great coaches aren't working from a checklist. They're noticing more, seeing more, and responding with a wider range of options than less experienced coaches. Rusty's advice? Deliberately expose yourself to different environments, different sports, different ages and abilities. Every experience adds to your toolkit.
 
3. Make problems visible Rusty's game-changing advice is as practical as it gets. Use bibs, headbands, scoreboards, and simple constraints to make the key problems in your session impossible to ignore, for players and for yourself. When the challenge is visible, players engage with it, problem-solve around it, and coaches don't drift away from it. Simple, effective, and immediately stealable.
 
Rusty's Game-Changing Advice
Pick one player. Watch their experience for an entire session, minute by minute. What did that look and feel like for them? Then ask yourself how you're going to make sure every player in your group is having an experience worth coming back for.
 
Get in touch
Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/ 
Rusty's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/russell-earnshaw-66161020/ 
The Magic Academy Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-magic-academy/id1434710237 

Adam Kelly: Talent, Bias, Belief

In this episode of the Game Plan Coaching Podcast I am joined by Professor Adam Kelly, Professor of Sport and Exercise at Birmingham City University.
Adam leads the Research for Athlete and Youth Sport Development Lab. With a background as Head of Academy Sports Science at Exeter City Football Club, Adam bridges the gap between academic research and applied coaching practice. His work spans collaborations with FIFA, the ECB, Olympic Lyonnais, and the South Asian Cricket Academy, focusing on talent identification and development processes in sport.
 
Three Key Messages
 
1. Understand the person before the player: One of the most important shifts coaches and pathway designers can make is to look beyond sporting attributes and first understand who the athlete is as a person. Factors like relative age, biological maturity, training age, family background, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity can all significantly shape how a player performs at any given moment. By understanding these individual characteristics first, coaches can better readjust their assessment of current performance and make more informed judgements about longer-term potential.
 
2. Widen the pool - different pathways for different players: Delaying selection matters, but so does broadening who gets considered. Adam shared two powerful examples: England Squash's birthday banding approach, which evaluates players as individuals rather than against age-group peers, and Denmark's Futures Team in football, a parallel pathway for younger or later-maturing players that has produced just as many senior international players as the traditional performance pathway. The message for clubs and pathway designers is clear - one route doesn't fit all, and widening the talent pool now pays dividends later.
 
3. Talent ID systems are designed for children: A simple but profound reframe: talent identification systems are built around children, yet they are rarely designed with children truly at the centre. Adam challenges coaches and organisations to ensure children's rights are actively lived and realised within their pathways, from child protection checks on scouts and recruiters, to consulting young athletes on the shape and experience of the pathway itself. The asset value placed on young players in some systems can all too easily overshadow the fact that they are children first.
 
Other Things Worth Knowing
The TIDE Society: Adam co-founded the Talent Identification and Development Environments for Sport Society (TIDE), a global network of over 150 researchers and practitioners across more than 20 countries. Their forthcoming position statement outlines 13 principles of talent identification, a practical and reflective framework for coaches, recruiters, and pathway designers. It will be published as an open-access paper in the Journal of Sport Sciences. Watch this space.
The South Asian Cricket Academy (SACA): A standout initiative born from research revealing that Asian cricketers were significantly underrepresented at professional level despite being overrepresented in the talent pathway, and despite showing no meaningful difference in bowling, batting, or physical metrics compared to white peers. SACA provides an intensive programme for 18–24 year olds, and in four years has seen 18 players sign professional contracts, nearly doubling Asian representation in first-class counties. Find out more here: https://www.saca-uk.com/
The coach's eye, valuable but not enough on its own: Experience genuinely matters in talent identification, but it also carries risk. Subjective judgement informed by personal experience can lead to unconscious bias. Even highly experienced scouts interpret players differently. Adam encourages coaches to pair their intuition with an evidence-informed, intersectional lens - one that considers who the athlete is, not just what they can currently do.
 
Adam’s Game Changing Advice: "Believe in every athlete — don't form a fixed mindset about potential too early."
Those selected gain confidence, opportunity, and development. Those not selected lose it. Keeping an open mind about who can develop, and over what timeframe might be the most important habit a talent identifier can build.
 
Get in touch:
Tom’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/
Adam’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlkelly/

Skye Eddy: Meet the Parents

In this episode of the Game Plan Coaching Podcast, I’m joined by Skye Eddy, founder of Soccer Parenting and The Sideline Project, a former player, All-American goalkeeper, and coach educator. Her work is helping clubs, coaches, and parents rethink the role adults play in youth sport.
Skye’s mission is simple: inspire players by empowering parents.
Rather than falling into the usual “parents are the problem” narrative, Skye offers something far more useful - a way to see parents as an essential part of a child’s sporting experience. More importantly, she shares practical ways coaches can build trust, set clear boundaries, and create a stronger sense of community around their team.
 
Three key themes
1) Parents are part of the picture: Parents aren’t on the outside of youth sport, they’re in it. When they’re better informed, better connected, and clear on their role, it improves the experience for everyone. Players benefit. Coaches benefit. The environment becomes more purposeful and less stressful.
2) Boundaries build trust: One of the biggest takeaways. Skye talks about “door open” and “door closed” moments between coaches and parents. Not everything is up for discussion. But when expectations are clear, relationships improve - and coaching becomes easier, not harder.
3) Sidelines and car journeys matter: Some of the most influential moments happen away from the pitch. We explore sideline behaviour, car ride conversations, and how adult stress can impact children. Skye’s framework of supportive, distracting, and hostile behaviours is simple and powerful.
 
This episode will help you if:
you’ve ever felt stressed by parents
you want to build a stronger team culture
you know the coach-parent relationship matters, but you’re not sure how to improve it
you want practical ways to make youth sport better for children
 
Skye’s work is grounded in experience, backed by research, and focused on real-world application. You’ll come away with ideas you can use straight away and probably a slightly different perspective on parents too.
 
Links
Tom’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/
Skye’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skye-eddy/
Soccer Parenting: https://www.soccerparenting.com
Feedback form: https://forms.gle/UwQad2r8xozcUKCW7
 
If this episode made you think differently about parents, sidelines, or the wider environment around young players, I’d love to hear from you. Use the feedback form to share your reflections or suggest future guests and topics.