You Don't Have to Play It to Teach It

Coaching • Pay to Play

There is a line that comes up in every coaching conversation I have ever been part of. On the sideline, in Facebook groups, in the comments under anything I post.

“If you can’t do it, you can’t teach it.” And its cousin: “If you never played, you can’t teach it.”

I want to take that apart properly. Not wave it away, not say “well, I disagree” and move on. I want to go through it piece by piece, because I think when you break it down it falls over quickly. And I think this belief is quietly doing real damage to youth soccer in this country.

Somebody hears “this coach never played at a high level” and their brain fills in “so this coach is a novice” or “so this is just rec-level stuff.”

Those are three different claims. Collapsing them into one is where the bad reasoning starts.

There is a second blind spot underneath it. People making this argument tend not to count any experience that isn’t playing experience:

• ✓A background in education.
• ✓Ten years coaching a different sport.
• ✓A career spent teaching children something else entirely.
• ✓Study of how kids actually develop.
• ✓Thousands of hours working directly with players.

None of it counts unless it came from playing. That is a narrow and, honestly, arbitrary way to decide what qualifies as relevant.

Here is the strongest version of the other side’s case, and it deserves a fair hearing: most high-level coaches did play at a decent level. That is true. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But look at why it is true. Coaching, especially early on, pays badly. The people willing to do it anyway are the ones who love the game enough to stay near it. A lot of those people are former players, because former players are disproportionately the ones who love it that much.

If we are going to argue about whether someone can teach, we should agree on what teaching is. I would break it into four things.

• 1Content knowledge. You understand the skill deeply. What it is, what it is for, what good and bad versions look like, and why.
• 2Experience. You have worked with it, practised it, watched it done and taught. Not necessarily at an elite competitive level.
• 3Communication. You can get what is in your head into someone else’s, in a form they can use.
• 4Pedagogy. The method itself: breaking a skill into parts, sequencing them, slowing them down, designing the environment, giving feedback, knowing what to say next.

A lot of the “you have to be able to do it” argument quietly assumes the demonstration must happen at full speed. I cannot think of a single case where a technique had to be performed at game speed for a player to understand it.

If anything the opposite is true. Slowing a skill down is the standard method for teaching almost any physical movement, in any sport, at any level:

• ✓Break it into parts.
• ✓Slow it right down.
• ✓Rebuild it with repetition.
• ✓Add pressure last, not first.

Let me use my own family, because it makes the point better than a hypothetical.

My son Adam is extremely technical. He can do things with a ball I will never do. And I will still say this plainly:

You would rather I trained your kid than Adam did. Not because I am better at soccer. I am obviously not.

Four reasons:

• ✓I want to teach. The desire matters more than people credit. It is the difference between someone who prepares a session and someone who turns up.
• ✓I have reps at teaching. Not at playing. At instruction, which is its own craft with its own thousands of hours.
• ✓I have transferable experience from outside soccer that I draw on constantly.
• ✓I have had to overcompensate. Not having played forced me to build breakdowns and methods a former player might never have needed — and those tools are now the job.

The flip side is just as true, which is what makes it fair. If Adam wants to train kids, he absolutely can. He would just need to go and get the things on that list. Playing ability does not hand them to you.

The overwhelming majority of what a child learns does not arrive through direct instruction. It comes from:

• ✓Repetition, on their own.
• ✓Self-guided messing about with a ball.
• ✓The environment they train in.
• ✓Copying other kids.

And on what is actually being taught: at youth level, close to all of practice is fundamentals. Not obscure freestyle tricks. Fundamentals are exactly the kind of thing that does not require an elite playing background to teach well.

Step back. Human beings have a long record of achieving things with no precedent and no blueprint. The men who cut the Erie Canal, hundreds of miles of it, largely by hand, had no formal engineering training. The job demanded it and they worked it out.

The best-known example in sport is not from soccer at all. Richard Williams coached Venus and Serena to the top of tennis without an elite playing background of his own. Content knowledge, obsession and a teaching process beat a playing pedigree, and it is on the record.

“Would you let someone who cannot swim teach swimming?”

No. And this is a good objection, because it identifies something different in kind rather than in degree. Swimming has a safety floor built into the activity: if the instructor cannot get in the water and physically reach a child, a child can drown.

Soccer has no equivalent. The swimming case does not contradict the argument, it marks the edge of a different category, where physical capability is a safety requirement rather than a teaching one.

“You would not want an untrained person teaching surgery.”

Correct — and look closely at why. I would not need the dexterity to perform surgery in order to teach it. I would need thousands of hours around the teaching of it: observing procedures, studying outcomes, reading the research, breaking technique down alongside people who operate.

“Coaches without a background are often underqualified.”

They often are. And plenty of coaches with a playing background are wildly overconfident. That cuts both ways, which is rather the point. A playing pedigree does not inoculate anyone against being a poor teacher. Sometimes it supplies a false sense of already being qualified.

“If it mattered, it would be in the coaching license.”

This is the one I would put to anybody making the original claim.

No coaching license anywhere requires you to demonstrate that you can personally perform every skill at a competitive level. If playing ability were a prerequisite for teaching, that is exactly what licensing bodies would test.

If we insist that only people with elite playing résumés are qualified to teach children, we shrink the coaching pool on purpose. A smaller pool of qualified adults means higher prices. That is a direct contribution to the pay-to-play system pricing families out of this sport.

Turn it around:

• ✓The parent who wants to help can learn to help.
• ✓The rec coach who cares can get properly good.
• ✓The volunteer who has never kicked a ball can run a session worth running.

When somebody tells you that you cannot teach what you cannot do, ask them three questions.

• 1What do you mean by “teach”? Which of the four pillars am I missing?
• 2Name the skill. One specific technique a trained adult could never learn to teach.
• 3If it is genuinely essential, why is it not in the coaching license?

Take the claim apart philosophically, practically, pedagogically and personally, answer the honest objections rather than the weak ones, and it does not survive.

If we want more access, more affordable development and more good coaching in this sport, we have to stop gatekeeping it behind a playing résumé.

What skill do you think genuinely cannot be taught by someone who never played it? Tell me, because I would like to hear the best version of the argument.