The Pattern
A coach watches their midfielder drift too narrow for the third time in 15 minutes. They make a mental note. By halftime, the observation has blurred with a dozen others. By tomorrow's session, it's gone entirely—replaced by new patterns, new mistakes, new insights that will meet the same fate. This is the hidden tragedy of coaching: most observations evaporate before they can change anything.
The goal of coaching is simple: turning observations into behavior. A coach spots something, addresses it, and the player adapts. But somewhere between observation and impact, the vast majority of a coach's thinking simply disappears.
Let's follow that midfielder observation. The coach spots the pattern—drifting too narrow—and flags it during a water break: "Stay wider, give yourself space." The player nods. But the session moves on. They're working on transition play.
Next session is match prep. New patterns emerge: the right-back caught square, the striker's heavy touch, a communication breakdown between center-backs.
By the following week, that original observation is gone. The coach remembers it vaguely, but there's nowhere for it to live. The insight dies.
This isn't negligence. It's the nature of the job. Coaching happens in real-time, observations accumulate faster than they can be processed, and there's no system to capture what matters before it evaporates.
The Conversion Problem
I've started thinking about this as a conversion problem. At the top of the funnel, coaches generate dozens of observations every day—during sessions, before matches, driving home from training, lying awake at 2am replaying a sequence. In the middle, a fraction of those get captured or remembered. At the bottom, an even smaller fraction actually changes player behavior.
The goal of coaching is to turn observations into behavior change. But most coaching intelligence never makes it through the funnel. It dies in the coach's head, lost to the demands of the next session, the next match, the next priority.
The Four Relationships
This conversion problem shows up in four critical relationships where observations fail to translate into impact.
1. Coach → Player
The ideal: A coach observes something, gives feedback, the player incorporates it. Repeat until the behavior becomes automatic.
The reality: Most feedback doesn't stick on the first attempt. A player might understand the instruction intellectually but struggle to execute it under pressure, or in the context of a fast-moving game. The coach needs to reinforce the observation multiple times, in different contexts, before it becomes ingrained.
But reinforcement requires remembering. If the coach doesn't capture the observation—or if it gets buried under the dozens of other insights they've had since—there's no systematic way to follow up. The player nods, tries once or twice, and the feedback evaporates. Worse, many observations never become feedback at all. The coach notices something but doesn't have the time or context to address it in the moment, and by the next opportunity, the observation is gone.
2. Coach → Coach
The ideal: When multiple coaches work with the same player—club and national team, head coach and assistant, position-specific trainer—they operate from shared context. Each coach knows what the others are emphasizing, what's been worked on, what feedback has already been given.
The reality: Coaches rarely share observations in this kind of detail. A club coach might be working on a midfielder's defensive positioning while the national team coach emphasizes their attacking runs. Without coordination, the player receives conflicting guidance and doesn't know which to prioritize.
Even within the same club, assistant coaches and specialists often work in silos. A goalkeeper coach notices something about distribution under pressure, but unless they explicitly communicate it to the head coach, the insight doesn't influence broader tactical decisions.
The player becomes the unintentional mediator between disconnected coaching intelligences, trying to reconcile different emphases without the full picture.
3. Coach → Club
The ideal: A coach's observations about players and the team become institutional knowledge. When a coach leaves, their successor inherits not just the squad but the accumulated intelligence about how each player learns, what tactical adjustments have been tried, what works and what doesn't. When a player graduates from one team to another within the club, their developmental context travels with them.
The reality: When a coach leaves, most of that intelligence walks out the door with them. The next coach rebuilds understanding from scratch, re-learning lessons the previous coach already knew. The club loses its memory.
This is particularly damaging at the academy level, where player development happens over years and continuity of coaching insight is crucial. A player might spend five years in a club's system, moving from U14s to U18s, working with three or four different coaches. But if those coaches can't build on each other's observations, the player's development is fragmented. Each new coach starts fresh, unaware of what's already been tried or learned.
4. Coach → Self
This is the foundation. If a coach can't effectively collaborate with their own future self—capturing observations when they occur and accessing them when decisions need to be made—the other three relationships become impossible to solve.
The problem: A coach has an insight during a session but can't act on it immediately. They make a mental note to address it later. But "later" is competing with a dozen other mental notes, and unless the insight resurfaces at exactly the right moment, it dies.
Coaches think constantly—during training, watching matches, lying awake at night. But thoughts are ephemeral. Without a system to capture and organize this intelligence, coaches are forced to rely on memory and luck. They become less effective than they could be, not because they lack insight, but because they lack a way to preserve and act on it.
What Needs to Change
The common thread across all four relationships is the same: coaching intelligence is trapped in an ephemeral medium. Observations happen constantly, but they have nowhere to live. Without a system to capture and organize this intelligence, it evaporates.
This isn't inevitable. For coaching to evolve, we need tools that match how coaches actually work. Tools that make it effortless to capture observations at the moment they occur—whether that's on the training ground, driving home, or lying awake at 2am. Tools that make those observations accessible when decisions need to be made, whether that's planning the next session, giving feedback to a player, or coordinating with another coach.
The goal isn't to replace coaching intuition or add administrative burden. It's to ensure that the observations coaches already have—the insights that currently die in their heads—can survive long enough to change behavior on the pitch.
When that happens, the conversion problem begins to solve itself. Coaches become more effective because their intelligence persists. Players develop faster because feedback is consistent and reinforced. Clubs build institutional memory instead of losing it with every coaching change. And coaches can finally collaborate with their future selves, instead of relying on memory and luck.
The observations are already there. They just need somewhere to go.