How to Coach Girls' and Women's Teams

More coaches are taking on girls' and women's teams than at any point in the history of the English game, and plenty arrive with the same quiet question: is this different from what I already know?

Here is the honest answer. The football is exactly the same. The passing angles, the pressing triggers, the principles of a good session: none of it changes because of who is playing. What often does change is the context around the team: how players found their way into football, how much coaching they have had before you, and what keeps them in the game.

This guide covers the principles that matter, what the best coaches in the women's game actually do, a session progression built from real drills, and the adjustments worth making without ever lowering the bar.

What coaching the women's game actually means

Coaching a girls' or women's team means coaching football, full stop. The tactical and technical content of your sessions should look identical to anything else you would put on for players of that experience level.

The word doing the work in that sentence is experience. The men's game has a pathway so dense that most boys arrive at any team having played for years. The women's game is growing fast but the pathway is younger, which means one squad can contain a player with a decade of club football and a player who started eight months ago. That spread, not the football itself, is the real coaching challenge.

There are two other things worth knowing before your first session. Female players carry a significantly higher risk of ACL injury, and the evidence says you can reduce it on the training pitch. And in a growing game, your environment does double duty: it develops the players you have and it decides whether they, and their friends, are still playing next season.

The four principles

1. Same standards, same detail. Set the technical detail, the intensity and the expectations you would set for any team. Players notice within one session whether they are being coached properly or minded, and nothing empties a squad faster than a coach who has quietly decided the group cannot handle real coaching. Demand plenty, explain why, and watch the group rise to it.

2. Plan for the experience mix, not the average. Coaching to the middle bores your experienced players and loses your beginners. Run the same practice with tiered challenges instead: same theme, different constraints per player. One player passes with her stronger foot, another must use both, a third plays one touch. The session looks unified and every player is stretched at her own edge.

3. Make ACL prevention part of every warm-up. Female footballers suffer ACL injuries at several times the rate of male players, and structured neuromuscular warm-ups, with strength, landing mechanics and controlled deceleration, have been shown to cut serious knee injuries substantially. Ten minutes at the start of every session is the cheapest insurance in football. Build it in as a habit, not an optional extra.

4. The environment is a competitive advantage. In a growing game, players who feel connected stay, improve and bring friends. Learn names fast, give every player a role, and protect the social fabric of the squad as deliberately as you plan your sessions. None of this is soft: England's best women's teams treat culture as infrastructure, and it shows on the pitch.

What the best coaches in the women's game do

Sarina Wiegman's England sides are built on ruthless clarity. Every player knows her role, her back-up role, and exactly what the team does in each phase, and Wiegman is famously direct about selection decisions rather than softening them. The lesson for a grassroots coach is not the tactics but the respect: honest, specific communication, delivered like the players are professionals, because they are treated as such.

Emma Hayes built Chelsea into serial champions by taking the details of the women's game more seriously than anyone else. Her staff individualised training loads, and Chelsea became the first club in the world to tailor training around players' menstrual cycles to manage injury risk and performance. You do not need a sports science department to copy the principle: know your players as individuals, take the physical evidence seriously, and never assume what works elsewhere transfers unexamined.

Notice what neither coach does: neither treats the women's game as a diluted version of anything. They treat it as its own elite environment with its own details worth mastering. That mindset scales down to a Sunday morning under-12s session perfectly.

How to coach it: a session progression

The progression below is built from drills in our Drill Library and shows how one session can protect knees, serve a mixed-experience squad and still be proper football.

Start with the knees, every week. The Strength and Stability Activation warm-up covers the movements the ACL evidence points at: single-leg control, hip and hamstring strength, and landing mechanics. Coach three things relentlessly: soft, quiet landings; the knee tracking over the toes rather than collapsing inward; and control before speed. Done consistently, this is the most important ten minutes of your week.

Then raise the pulse with movement quality. The Dynamic Movement Activation adds accelerations, decelerations and changes of direction. Slowing down well matters more than speeding up: coach short braking steps, a lowered centre of gravity and hips behind the ball of the foot. For a deeper structure, our guide to designing effective warm-ups shows how these pieces fit together.

Build technique with tiered challenges. Passing Technique in Pairs is where the experience mix becomes manageable. Everyone works on the same picture, but you set the level per pair: bigger distances and one-touch play for the experienced, closer range and an extra touch for beginners. Move around the pairs setting individual challenges quietly, so every player hears coaching aimed at her.

Finish with a game everyone can win in. The Vision Gate Game puts scanning and decisions into a competitive game where effort and awareness count as much as technique, which lets newer players contribute genuinely alongside experienced ones. Praise the decision, not just the execution, and your least experienced player finishes the night having won something real.

Three mistakes that kill girls' and women's teams

Coaching it as a watered-down men's game. Slower sessions, less detail, lower expectations, all delivered with good intentions. Players read it instantly as a lack of respect, and your best ones leave for a coach who takes them seriously. The fix is the whole theme of this piece: same standards and detail, adapted to the experience mix in front of you.

Treating the squad as one level. Pitching everything at your strongest players humiliates beginners; pitching it at beginners wastes everyone else's evening. Neither group comes back. Tier the practices, set individual targets, and make improvement the currency rather than comparison.

Skipping the injury work when time is short. The warm-up is always the first thing cut, and it is the one part of your session with evidence of preventing a year-long injury. Protect those ten minutes like kick-off time. If the session must shrink, shrink something else.

Adapting it to your level

With junior girls' teams, expect players to arrive at all ages, not just at five or six, so keep a permanent on-ramp: buddy systems for new starters, practices that never expose one player as the beginner, and celebration of firsts (first tackle, first goal, first full match). Friendship is a huge retention factor at these ages, so let the social side breathe, and put real energy into growing the squad through school links and taster sessions. Our guide to building player confidence pairs naturally with all of this.

Adult women's teams often hold the widest experience range in grassroots football: returners, converts from other sports and complete beginners in one squad. Be upfront about it, use your experienced players as informal mentors, and agree standards as a group so accountability comes from inside the dressing room. Respect the reality of work and family schedules, and make every minute of the one weekly session count.

The takeaway

Coach the football exactly as you would coach it anywhere, with the same standards and detail. Plan for the experience mix, not the average. Guard the ten minutes of ACL prevention every single week. And build an environment good enough that players bring their friends.

If you want ready-made session plans and warm-up structures to build from, they are part of Coach Notes Pro, alongside the rest of our coaching library.