If your coaching depends on constantly finding new exercises, you’re a curator, not a coach. That’s a hard line from the book, and I still catch myself needing the reminder some weeks.
The Real Problem With “I’ve Run Out Of Ideas”
The feeling that you need something new is a symptom, not the actual disease. The disease is a kind of withdrawal from the constant novelty of social media coaching content, the sense that if this week’s session doesn’t look different from last week’s, something’s wrong.
It isn’t. You don’t need 100 different exercises. You need 5 exercises with 20 genuine variations each.
Twenty Variations, One Exercise
Take any receiving exercise you already run and, without changing the core activity, here are ways to genuinely change the challenge: shrink the space. Limit the touches. Add passive pressure, then active pressure. Add time pressure. Give the receiver a decision, then a second decision. Add competition, points for successful execution. Add a consequence for failure. Change the passing distance or the pass type, ground, bouncing, aerial. Add a combination after receiving, or a defending phase after receiving. Add scanning or communication requirements. Add a transition element, attack to defence or back again. Add real match context, a scoreline, a time limit.
That’s most of a full list without inventing a single new drill. Depth beats variety, and depth is available in the sessions you’re already running, if you’re willing to progress the challenge instead of replacing the exercise.
The One-Pagers I Actually Built To Stop Reinventing The Wheel
Alongside that principle, I’ve built a small number of genuine reference sheets over the years for the situations that used to eat my prep time. A 9v9 Formations cheatsheet, built for clubs moving up from smaller-sided football and needing a clear, simple reference for shape and roles. A one-page UEFA C Licence cheatsheet, put together while I was working through the qualification myself, shared with other coaches for feedback before I finished it.
Neither replaces thinking. Both exist so I’m not rebuilding the same formation logic or the same licence content from scratch every time I need it.
What I’d Actually Suggest
Before you go looking for a new drill this week, take one you already run regularly and add two variations from the list above, properly, not just verbally announcing a change. See how far that takes the same session before you reach for something new. Most weeks, it’s further than you’d expect.
And if you’re rebuilding a formation guide or a reference document from scratch every season, that’s exactly the kind of one-pager worth building once and keeping. A number of mine are shared inside the Football Coaching Academy, alongside nearly 1,600 coaches who’ve stopped treating every week as a blank page.