How do I keep juniors engaged without lowering my standards?

Tin Matkovic's formula is equal care, different demands. Everybody gets the same attention and the same coaching point, but what you ask of each player differs, so the strongest are still stretched and the newest can see a way to catch up. He runs one drill across several ability groups rather than splitting the squad, and offers extra work rather than assigning it. Standards can also be held in things unrelated to hockey, like Jon Bleby's no phones at team meals.

Should I deselect young players who are not keeping up?

Mark Bateman of England under 18s would rather make errors including players than excluding them, because young players often do not yet know what they do not know. He describes a pathway where players can come in and out repeatedly. Where deselection is unavoidable, Tin Matkovic's rule is to make sure the player still has a comparable environment to grow in afterwards. David Passmore adds that junior results rarely predict where a player ends up.

When do clubs lose junior hockey players?

Fede Tanuscio names the move from the small pitch to the full pitch as the point where clubs lose most children, though he offers it as his own observation rather than as data. His answer is patience with a realistic timescale, three to six months for players to stop being overwhelmed by the space, and coaching by question rather than correction. No coach in The Hockey Site archive quotes a dropout statistic, and the figures that circulate elsewhere are rarely sourced.

Why do field hockey players check out or coast in training?

It is usually a signal rather than laziness. In his masterclass on Coachability, Shea McAleese frames coachability as a decision about who owns your development, so coasting often points to a player who has not yet taken ownership, or to an environment that has stopped giving them a reason to invest.

How do you re-engage a field hockey player who has switched off?

Hand responsibility back rather than fixing everything for them, design sessions that are meaningful rather than merely busy, and show genuine belief. The Pygmalion Effect masterclass with Andreu Enrich and Ric Charlesworth shows how a coach's expectations lift or lower what a player is willing to give.

Does making field hockey training fun undermine standards?

No. The Hockey Site article Fun lights the fire argues that fun is a genuine performance tool. A loose, positive atmosphere widens attention and sharpens decision making, while a tight, fearful one narrows both.

fun Archives - The Hockey Site

How do I keep juniors coming back without letting the standards slide?

Quick answer. The choice between keeping them and pushing them is mostly a false one. The coaches here hold the standard in the demands they make of each player, not in who gets to stay: equal care, different demands. They keep the door open in both directions rather than deselecting, they bias towards including a player and being wrong rather than excluding one, and they cap how much they ask of a young group at any one time so the standard is reachable. And they watch the moments where clubs actually lose children, which is less about a hard session and more about a transition nobody prepared them for.

That is the short version. Here is what the coaches say.

The formula that solves the question. Tin Matkovic puts it in four words in Balancing Skill Gaps: “equal care, different demands is also really important. So equal care is that we want to make sure that everybody feels special in the trainings, and different demands is that we touch the best player so that they can still improve, and we can touch the new players so that they can still find a glimpse of catching up for the level that we are.” The standard does not drop. It just stops being the same standard for everyone in the room.

How that looks in a session. Matkovic runs one drill across four ability groups rather than splitting the squad: “on the left side, they will do exactly the same drill, but maybe the intensity will not be that good”, and the coaching point stays the same for all of them. “You created one drill that fits for four groups.” Where he does want to stretch the strongest, he offers rather than assigns: “you can find this additional stuff that you would like to do with groups and then offer it only to the players that are able to do it, or maybe are super motivated to do it.” He is realistic about who takes it up: “maybe some people are just committed to two times a week and they will not feel that this third additional training is for them.”

Bias towards including and being wrong. Mark Bateman, who coaches England’s under 18s, gives the sharpest line on this: “we’d rather include people and make errors including them than make errors excluding them.” His reasoning is about what a young player can even know about themselves yet: “we can’t be deselecting people at our age because at times they don’t know what they don’t know. So it’s about trying to help them understand that, so they’ve got a better self-awareness of it.”

Make the door swing both ways. Bateman describes the change in the England pathway as exactly that: “you can come in, you can come out, you can come in, you can come out, as opposed to maybe what it might have been in previous years”, along with an open door for players with no access to a talent academy. A player who knows they can come back is a very different proposition from one who has been told no.

When you do have to deselect, protect what happens next. Matkovic’s rule is about the environment rather than the conversation: “if it’s a permanent selection, then I suggest that you make sure that the individual that is not selected has the same, or basically a little bit less, but still the same environment to grow after he’s been put out of the selection.” He also points out that how hard this lands is cultural: some children have been selected and deselected all the way through, and for others “it’s a drama process”.

Junior results tell you almost nothing anyway. David Passmore makes the case in A research based approach to talent development: “when kids are under 8, under 10, under 12, under 14, their success actually will rarely have a direct term effect on where they end up.” He goes further, and argues the bumps are part of it: “as much as we want kids to progress nice and smoothly up a hill, the reality is not only are there obstacles that they face, deselection, not getting the right support, not getting the right coaching, being injured. Actually what’s proven is that we need to put those bumps in the road, we need to give them a rocky pathway and challenges as coaches, because down the line that’s going to make them better players.”

The line that joins enjoyment to staying. Passmore’s version of the parents’ conversation is the clearest statement of the whole idea: “don’t judge me on where you are now, judge me on where your kids end up. Do they enjoy hockey enough? If they’re going to be good, they’re more likely to stay in it, and then do they go on to play representative when they’re older?” That is not a soft position. Enjoyment is the mechanism by which anybody is still there to get good.

Hold the standard somewhere cheap. Jon Bleby, who runs GB’s elite development programme, gives an example that costs nothing and is not about hockey at all: “we don’t have any phones when we’re having team meals, and even just that one simple little standard, it just makes such an incredible difference.” Standards do not have to be enforced through selection.

Cap what you ask for. Fede Tanuscio puts a hard limit on how much a young team can carry in How to transfer key hockey principles when kids switch to full pitches: “we cannot have, from under 9, 20 principles. That’s not good.” His working number for under 12 is two principles with the ball and two without, adding roughly two more per age band. A standard nobody can hold in their head is not a standard, it is noise.

And watch the transition, because that is where they go. Tanuscio names the moment, and hedges it honestly as his own observation: “it’s also where they lost, I don’t know if I’m wrong, but this was where they lose more kids, the transition from the small pitch to the big pitch.” His advice is patience with a real timescale attached, three to six months before players stop being lost in the space, and questions rather than corrections: “always asking questions. And the kids, they always said, yeah, because I see that one free. Okay, but do you think it’s dangerous, that?”

Getting a switched-off child back. Lisa Letchford has the most immediately usable tactic on this page, from Basic skills through Small Sided Games: “every kid wants to impress and wants to feel like you’re watching and listening. I would say the next time that you see something even small positive in what they’re trying to do, jump on it immediately and recognise it. And I reckon you’ll get them listening the next time that they come in.” She also defends mixed ability on developmental grounds up to about under 14, and keeps sessions to “40 minutes to an hour”, with about twenty minutes as the ceiling on any one game.

Two honest limits on this page. First, nobody on this site quotes a dropout statistic, and the numbers that circulate about children leaving sport are rarely sourced, so we are not going to repeat one. Second, and more interesting, none of these coaches has treated retention as a separate problem from enjoyment. They assert the link and move on. If your club is losing children at a particular age, you are probably ahead of the published thinking and the useful data is your own registration list.

None of this is a policy. What these coaches give you is a way of holding a line without using selection to do it, and a few places to look when children stop coming. Watch the sessions in full, take what fits your club, and check who did not come back after the pitch got bigger.

Go more in depth here

Tin Matkovic

Balancing Skill Gaps

Watch on demand

David Passmore

A research based approach to talent

Watch on demand

How to transfer key hockey principles when kids switch to full pitches

Fede Tanuscio

Small pitch to full pitch

Watch on demand

More coaching questions: How do I build confidence in field hockey players that survives mistakes?, How do I motivate field hockey players who have checked out?, How do I help a field hockey player let go of a mistake and reset?, We’ve got no drag flicker. How do I develop one safely?. All of them are in Field Hockey Coaching Questions.

The experts mentioned in this article

Tin MatkovicCoach from Croatia, currently coaching in Germany.

David PassmoreHead coach USA Women.

Fede TanuscioFormer Argentina international player. Currently Sport Director for Hockey Luxembourg.

Lisa LetchfordFormer GB international player. Coached in Belgium and now back in England.

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How do I motivate field hockey players who have checked out?

Quick answer. A player who has checked out is rarely just lazy. More often the environment has stopped giving them a reason to invest, so start there. Hand ownership of their development back to them, make sessions meaningful and genuinely enjoyable rather than merely busy, and show real belief in what they can become. Effort tends to follow when a player feels responsible, trusted and glad to be on the pitch.

That is the surface answer, but the coaches featured on The Hockey Site would tell you not to stop at running the group harder or having a quiet word on the side. The more useful question is why the investment has drained away in the first place.

Coasting is usually a signal, not a character flaw. In his masterclass on Coachability, New Zealand’s Shea McAleese argues that coachability is not a personality trait but a decision about who is responsible for your own development. Players who coast, he suggests, often have not yet learned to look in the mirror, because for a long time it was easier to make progress someone else’s job. Treating the behaviour as information about ownership, rather than proof of a bad attitude, changes what you do next.

Hand responsibility back rather than fixing everything for them. McAleese warns that quietly solving every problem for an athlete can hold them back, because it teaches them to wait for the answer. He describes small habits that flip the load onto the player: asking them to explain a point back to the group, putting them on the spot to coach a teammate, and getting clear buy-in early. Align with your leaders and key players first, he suggests, and that ownership filters down and speeds up across the squad.

Protect enjoyment, because it is the engine and not the reward. The Hockey Site article Fun lights the fire treats enjoyment as a performance variable rather than a reward for good behaviour. A squad that wants to be at training will chase more, risk more and stay longer than one turning up out of obligation, and that gap shows up in how quickly they improve. A positive, loose atmosphere widens attention and improves decision making, while a tight, fearful one narrows both. Enjoyment is not the soft option. It is one of the levers that decides how fast a group develops, and its absence is often the first thing a disengaged player is reacting to.

Design sessions that mean something, not just sessions that keep people busy. In his masterclass on feedback and learning environments, Andreu Enrich argues that the difference between a busy session and an engaging one is intentionality. Design the session around the specific behaviours you want to see, then build the conditions where those behaviours emerge naturally. When players understand why they are doing something, and can feel the connection between the drill and the real game, engagement becomes close to automatic. Small-sided games are one dependable route there, active by design and full of touches, decisions and natural pressure.

Belief changes what a player is willing to give. The masterclass on The Pygmalion Effect, with Andreu Enrich and Australia’s Ric Charlesworth, explores how a coach’s expectations quietly shape performance. Raise the bar and show a player you believe in what they can do, and they tend to rise to meet it. Expect little, and they tend to shrink to fit. For someone who has drifted to the edges of the group, being told clearly and honestly that you see more in them can be the intervention that reopens the door.

Confidence is a behaviour a player can choose, not just a mood they wait for. Performance psychologist Katie Warriner, in her masterclass Confidence: a choice and a skill, points out that behaviours are far more within our control than feelings, and the feelings often arrive after the behaviour rather than before it. With a checked-out player that reframes the ask. Rather than waiting for motivation to return on its own, invite the behaviour first, the communication, the body language, the willingness to have a go, and let the feeling catch up.

Your own energy sets the tone before you say a word. In his masterclass on emotions, energy and engagement in team talks, Mati Vila makes the point that the energy a coach brings is itself the message. Players read your state before they process a single instruction, so if you go through the motions, they will too. Tin Matkovic, in his masterclass on fostering creative players, adds that playfulness is the engine of creative play, but it has to be fuelled by a coach who is still genuinely curious. Bring something real to the pitch and the room shifts with you.

Lean on culture for the players your words cannot reach. Not every disengaged player responds to a one-to-one conversation. McAleese notes that a truly coachable group is built when senior players hold the standard and younger ones are expected to contribute in small group meetings before the whole squad gathers. When the environment itself keeps pulling people back in, you are no longer the only source of motivation in the room. That is slower to build than a rousing speech, but far more durable.

None of this is a script to run. These are starting points from coaches who have worked at the very top of the game, offered so you can test them against the group actually in front of you and keep what fits. The masterclasses below go a good deal deeper than any single article can, and they are worth an evening of your thinking time.