Coaching at Unit 2 Govan Road, in four blocks of one session

The group lines up on the warm-up strip and the register is taken standing, children on the line, before anybody touches a ball. The coach counts heads, reads the names, and counts heads again.

The block has three parts and they run in the same order every time. Move is running, changing direction and stopping on a call. Join is two or three partner tasks that put a child next to somebody they have not worked with this week. Handle is first contact with the ball, slowly, on both sides of the body.

A child who arrives late joins the warm-up wherever it has got to. Nobody goes into the skill block cold, and nobody sits out an hour for arriving ten minutes behind.

One teaching point per session, written in one sentence on the whiteboard by the office door before the group comes in. For twenty-one minutes it is the only thing the coach corrects. If the point is receiving on the back foot, a loose first touch is coached and a loose pass is left until the game block.

The point is worked in three steps: unopposed, where the child repeats it without pressure; passive, where a defender is present but walks; live, where the defender plays. A group that stalls at passive stays there, and the coach shortens the game block rather than pretend the step was reached.

Three against three, or four against four, played across the court rather than along it, so the far bays hold two games at once and nobody stands waiting for a touch. Two games of seven minutes with a minute between them to redraw the sides.

The coach stops the game three times at most and changes a condition instead of giving an instruction: two touches only; a goal counts twice if everyone has touched the ball since the last one. The condition makes the teaching point happen on its own, which is why it is written on the same board.

Scores are called at the end and recorded nowhere; sides are redrawn next session.

The group walks the width of the hall twice, then holds four stretches on the mats in the corner by the office window, where the coach can watch the pedestrian door and the collection queue at the same time.

Two questions go to the group and the coach waits for the answers: what were we working on, and where did it happen in the game. Those answers decide what goes on the board next week.

Kit comes in while the group is sitting — bibs counted into the bag, balls counted into the rack, bottles out of the hall. The session ends at the pedestrian door, name by name, against the collection note taken at drop-off. A child whose named adult has not arrived waits inside the hall with a coach, never outside on the estate road.