Be Prepared To Disappoint

What’s the hardest part about coaching a team?

When asked the question, head coaches have a near unanimous response:

Pep Guardiola — “The worst thing, by far, is when you cannot let your players play. There are many players who deserve to play, but we can only play eleven. That’s the toughest part of our profession.”

Jürgen Klopp — “[Telling players they are not playing] is excruciating. Most of the time, there is no answer. The only real answer is that we can only start 11 players.”

For Guardiola and Klopp, they’ve made their careers in the club game, where they are tasked with picking a team every three or four days.

For Hope Powell, however, she made her name in the international format, where selection and deselection only comes every six weeks.

When she took over as head coach of Brighton & Hove Albion in 2017, it struck her just how weighty it was to disappoint players every week.

“Players sometimes assume it’s an easy thing to do,” Powell said, shaking her head.

Asking Eddie

In an interview with Coaches’ Voice, Powell was asked whether she sought advice from coaches in other sports. She responded by explaining that she’d observed England Rugby’s World Cup preparations, and also attended some Q&A webinars with then-coach Eddie Jones.

“One of the questions I posed to him was how he dealt with leaving players out,” Powell said.

Like most coaches, Powell says she’d fallen into the trap of wanting to console a player there and then, and deal with their disappointment immediately.

In the new era of connection-first empathic coaches, the desire to explain away a players’ disappointment is a natural desire. But it can also serve to drain your emotional capacity, and distract you from preparing for the upcoming game.

Since deselection conversations need to be future-focused (ie. here’s what you can do to push for selection next week) it can be better to have a process in place that preserves your emotional capacity, and also allows the player to work through the adversity.

“I don’t want to upset players,” Powell concludes, “so it’s better to let them manage their emotions first, and then you can have a proper conversation where their emotions are out of it, and they can see a little clearer.”

Cody’s Notes

• The most drained I’ve ever seen head coaches is not after games, it’s after team selection day.

• It’s worth considering and planning for the intensity of selection / deselection based on how regularly you need to do it (club vs. international, for instance).

• A good template sentence to use with players is: “You’re playing/not playing this week. If you want me to give you more details about what you can do, come and see me after training.”

• Powell’s final message is poignant. What you want out of deselection is clarity. Each player must emerge with a clear path forward.

• At a certain point, there is nothing you can say to a player that’s been left out that will suffice.

• Another good line that I’ve heard used: “Your job is to practice so well that I look like an idiot for not picking you.”

• Ultimately, a coach’s role isn’t to make everyone happy; it’s to make

  decisions that help the team realize their goals. Often those decisions

  are unpopular.