On the field, out on the grass, my most important role as a coach is teaching players how to use freedom. Fly-soar-create-connect-combine-learn rules break rules-be brave-get knocked down-get back up-discover an all new magic-CHOOSE.
Sounds fantastic, those words. Could pick a dynamic font, click ‘animate’ and make it an ad campaign—but teaching is not marketing. Trust me.
The task of teaching freedom—teaching it—is, ironically, pushing a boulder up a slope. It’s endlessly challenging. Because freedom is useless to someone who doesn’t know what their choices are in the first place. Because freedom is useless if, in spite of having it, they habitually make the same choice over and over (and over…and over). Because freedom is useless if they lack the will and skills to execute upon the choices they’ve made.
Freedom is also challenging because even when a player knows their options, even when they’re prepared to try something genuinely creative, and even when they execute on those choices…the end result still might not work out at all and now there they are, out on a limb, having failed for all to see.
Precarious. Chaotic. Ever-changing.
To establish a point of orientation, every year I go through a goal-setting exercise with my players—a grounding to determine what they want and what they’re prepared to do to get it. The format evolves as they get older, beginning with commitment-based goals and progressing towards process-minded goals and then on to outcome-driven goals. This past summer, for my most advanced team—high school juniors and sophomores playing in the ECNL Regional League—I added an opening question that wasn’t a goal but rather a prompt, meant to help me better guide their collective direction:
What are the motivating factors (your reasons WHY) that make you most want to come to the practice field each day?
The girls had already played beyond the first teen threshold when an estimated 70% of female athletes give up sports, then succeeded in playing on past the next major attrition point (first high school cuts)…so, what was going to sustain their energy and resolve for the coming year?
- To improve their scouting profiles and lock in college commitments?
- To make the June ECRL playoffs or reach ECRL Nationals in Seattle in July?
- To earn individual accolades or a promotion to our ECNL team?
All would be common and valid responses at our level of play, and each would dictate modified focuses on-and-off the field. Do we need to be entering showcases and guiding players to college ID camps? Are we scouting opponents and planning pre-match film study to climb our league table? Are we creating sound Individual Development Plans (IDPs) and routing players for guest training sessions with our elite teams?
For this team, across the 21 girls on the roster, the answers to the opening prompt showed minimal variance, almost all touching the same themes:
I like to play with my friends and work on getting better together.
This is also a valid and popular response among youth athletes…and the nature of this motivation in itself explains the consistency within the group. In their paper “Being, Having and Belonging: Values and Ways of Engaging in Sport,”2 Aggerholm & Breivik identify this WHY as belonging. This drive, which they also term dwelling, relates to the human desire to find rootedness and community—a stable home base—to inhabit while carrying on through the world at large.
As part of the goal-setting exercise, I have the players read their answers aloud to the team so they can hold each other accountable. Listening to one speaker after another, clearly we had a team unified in purpose. And from a coaching perspective, a team that already has what it wants—in this case, belonging—should be the easiest team to manage, right?
Not so fast.
Over time, day in and day out, to keep both hands firmly on that giant stone, to anchor one foot in the dirt and dig in…the pusher must be convinced they get to, not that they have to.1
Belonging Being and Having = Past Present and Future
I came across the Aggerholm & Breivik paper by way of a social media post from Stu McMillan of ALTIS, who I’ve interviewed in the past (and whose writing I’ve edited). The title of that interview, “Pursuing Challenges and Growth,” exemplifies what I like about Stu: he’s a seeker.
The three “existential modes of engagement in sport” that Aggerholm & Breivik outline shouldn’t strike anyone as AHA lightning bolts; instead, for coaches, there’s more a snug yep-been-there fit:
- Being—“Engagement in the mode of being describes a free and active engagement, with a focus on inherent values and experiential qualities.”2 The freedom to play. Flow, competition, mano a mano, no thought, the joy of instinctive and creative movement, eyes wide breathing in the MOMENT the PACE the CONNECTION that livens the game.
- Having—“Engagement in the mode of having describes a focus on possession and appropriation. It emphasizes participation for the sake of achieving, producing or gaining something.”2 This mode should come with scare quotes, because it is not in fact about what you already “have”…but what you wish you had. It is wanting, it is aspiration. Competing to lock down a spot in the starting 11, competing to earn promotion to a higher or more senior team, D1 or bust. Training—and playing—as a means to another goal-driven end.
- Belonging—“Belonging is central to understanding how people belong to places, but it can also contribute to describing coexistence with others. The communitarian dimension of belonging concerns moods, social values, shared ethos, norms, language, traditions, etc.”2 Team bonding, team culture. A history of shared experience. As much off-the-field as on it—travel time, down time, team meals and team parties, nicknames and inside jokes, player group chats, pre- and post-game rituals.
For a visual aid, Aggerholm & Breivik situate being, having, and belonging as three discrete points on an equilateral triangle. Isolating the three modes of engagement is useful for identification purposes: once severed, each are as clearly recognizable as the four coactives most coaches recognize as the qualities present in every sports action: physical, technical, tactical, and mindset/psychological.
Those four coactives must remain balanced and in-sync for an athlete to succeed; similarly, being, having, and belonging also operate as coactives—all must be present and in a functional balance. Segregating these modes of engagement and focusing excessively on any one at the expense of the others saws two legs off the stool and puts players/teams at risk of wobbling toppling there-it-goes…collapse.
What happens when a team is built on a pillar of being? Watch a Liverpool game from the opening months of the 25/26 Premier League season. Think Neymar-era PSG. Scroll pretty much João Félix’s entire career. Poch has been banging his against this with the USMNT3, inheriting a core of players with individual quality but freighted with a sense of entitlement, players who view the role of representing the national team as an obligation/side hustle vs. something they ASPIRE to play on or are proud of belonging to. Teams that over-emphasize being are the hickory-smoked almonds of sport—delicious, but full of carcinogens. Without having (wanting) or belonging (connectedness)…no matter how capable of being, they’ll terminally fall short when the game demands that you push the rock up the hill and suffer together.
The excess of being with the USMNT is often traced to unbridgeable gaps among the surplus of European-based players—otherwise, broadly speaking, too much being is rarely associated with American soccer. Because of the absence of a pickup soccer culture in the USA, youth teams and programs are more likely to over-emphasize having than being. Which is, in fact, worse—kids don’t burn out from too much being or too much belonging.
I’ll repeat that, it’s important: Kids don’t burn out from too much being or too much belonging.
Too much wanting? It’s a grind, it’s frustrating, it’s mathematically doomed. While the being-based team can be genuinely entertaining and unpredictable—they do PLAY, just not always together—the having-based team is joyless. Mercenary. Clock-in, clock-out. Playing not to play, but as a means to an end. Making decisions based on what will produce the best Veo clip or IG reel—sure, because I held onto the ball WAY too long my 9-11-7 all made runs that took them offsides, but I rinsed that chick with a double-stepover and that highlight will look bomb-dot-com on my scouting profile.
Multiply the all-having mindset by 11 and that torpedoes being (competing) and belonging (together)…and those teams will mostly lose, because winning together isn’t a priority. And while some players will reach their personal end goals, what gives those outcomes value is the same quality that gives anything value: scarcity. Not everyone gets them. More players will NOT achieve those outcomes than will, leading to burned-out bummed-out kids.
Having is in the future and as soon as that future seems unattainable or undesirable, players will exercise the ultimate act of freedom: I quit.
Without plunging too deep into a rabbit hole of Einstein or the growing block universe theory, I think the three modes of engagement resonate—and are so seamlessly intertwined—because they also correspond to the past, present, and future:
- Belonging is based on what has been, shared experience.
- Being is what is happening in the present moment.
- Having is what might be.
Belonging (past), being (present), and having (future) are the elements through which we engage in all things—elements which are coactive—within every free moment in time. Where you go next is a function of where you’ve recently been. What you choose in that moment is largely determined by where you want to go.
Freedom is all the decisions you make to chart that course.
To Live Is to Fly: On Wings and Constraints
“Everything is not enough
And nothin’ is too much to bear
Where you been is good and gone
All you keep is the getting there.”
– Townes Van Zandt, To Live Is to Fly
Because it’s so much easier to follow a trail than to blaze one, many players—and, tbh, many people—would rather cede their freedom. Box it up, tape down the flaps, stash it on a shelf in the garage just in case…but in the meantime, just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.
Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it—a pathway to immediate success. Evaluating youth athletes, after the unmissable obviouses of size and speed, the next differentiator is an ability to follow instructions. Clear cut, quickly separating those who can from those who cannot. Coachability. The paradox? To excel over time, players have to stop following instructions and play.
Soccer is a ball, space/time, and teammates/opposition. Which—not coincidentally—directly correspond to being (the present moment), having (the immediate future), and belonging (the past just past). Playing—freedom—is what you make of all three, at once.
How do you teach someone to play?
“One of the first things I learned about teaching is that you have to respond to each student individually. You don’t start with any idea of what they should be doing, who they’re supposed to be, or what their performance level is, and you don’t compare them to one another. You simply start with each one of them wherever they are and develop the process from there.”
— Robert Irwin, seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees
The all-at-onceness of play muddles the creation of a curriculum. All undertakings have to start somewhere, and on first touch the ball appears the instrument of the game. Music is the ordering of sound, the layers of chords and the tension in the spaces between—but to teach students to play, we don’t start on sequence, on harmony, on rest intervals…okay, kids, the word of the day is caesura. No—you start with a recorder or a ukelele or a piano and show them a first note.
Similarly, with their youngest players, many soccer clubs embrace “the ball is my friend” as a foundation model. This effort to combine the curiosity of being (playing) with a more simple type of belonging (connection to an object) can be effective with kids who are just beginning to learn peer relationships and who mostly haven’t developed spatial awareness or an ability to project themselves into a future determined by their own choices.
One-player-one-ball: isolate skill and remove the feral cacophony of all-at-onceness. Inside touches, outside touches, sole roles, toe taps, bells, pull-backs, step-overs, manipulating the ball—from there you teach Coervers and game model patterns and the game predictably, oh-so predictably, unfolds.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, ecological and constraints-led coaches take the all-at-onceness as their starting point, arguing that THAT is the game—if you try to remove it from the teaching process, what you are teaching is something other than the game.
Therefore, those elements must always be present: opposition/teammates, directionality, attacking to score and defending to prevent scoring. Game-based activities are then manipulated with constraints that ideally channel play in certain ways and promote desired skills to emerge.
The problem with teaching technical skills in isolation is it can become joyless, drill and kill math; the problem with ecological approaches is those systems have the most appeal when working backward from established talent…and there’s a good chance you will not have a collection of prodigies in your training environment and cannot jump directly into complex equations with players who don’t yet understand how to add and subtract.
You simply start with each one of them wherever they are and develop the process from there.
3 Short Films About Freedom and Play
In the gold kits, the girl wearing jersey #11 was a new addition to my G09 ECRL team this past spring. She came to us from a lower-flight team that had relied on her to provide a dominant, vocal presence and through the early summer there was a transition phase where she needed to adapt and learn ways to connect with highly-bonded teammates who did not need that same alpha-role filled. Additionally, as a very rare player who did not start organized club play until after middle school (while playing basketball and volleyball and competing in sprints and jumps in track), she is still establishing her relationship with the ball.
PLAY is the all-at-onceness of the past, present, and future:
- Teammates/Opposition: The reflex choice #11 falls back on in this moment is to provide her teammate a command versus a connection. She calls for and points to a switch of play that the right-footed center back’s body shape and preference both preclude…as opening up to change the point of attack as directed would expose the ball to the pressing defender.
- Time/Space: These exist in the wide (unperceived) channel made by #11, our right outside back, our striker, and the right sideline.
- The Ball: Because she is not processing those relationships between the past and the future that create the conditions to play, when the ball comes to her IN THE PRESENT, #11’s first step is surprise, she retreats from the arriving moment instead of freely playing in it, which opens the pathway for the defender to disrupt possession.
Be available. After the broken possession from Video #1, that was my cue to #11—feel free to use your voice, but still BE an available option and own any ball that comes your direction. And owning the ball does not mean being chained to it. You don’t even need to touch it, possession can be held in trust—as long as you will be first arriving to the space where the ball is going next, that ball is still yours.
In the run of play in Video 2, I tried to guide #11 to play a hard, longer touch to herself in the direction of the corner flag—the ball, time/space, opposition, she can connect all of those in a more dangerous attacking space if she first creates a 1v1 sprint race that she can bank on winning.
What does this teaching process look like? How do you to go from here to there? It’s an experiment, it’s trial & error. It’s reviewing game film with purpose, it’s providing physical demonstrations on the training ground, it’s useful feedback in the run of play, it’s deciding to shut up and just let her play, it’s listening, it’s isolating specific skills to improve, it’s osmosis, it’s ongoing.
It’s recognition—although this pin and spin didn’t work, she initiated and executed it in the moment and only a few feet of inswing on the ball from the keeper happened to take it out of bounds. Otherwise, she could feel she was right on the verge of being free to play in space, being-having-belonging all at once with the means and opportunity to put the ball in the back of the net.
“With any new situation, all you’re trying to do is tease out something of significance. You’re not trying to form it from the outside—you’re just trying to tease it out. The whole game is about attending and reasoning. In other words, you have to play it as it lays and keep it in play. Playing it as it lays and keeping it in play mean you try to turn people on to themselves, making every moment as good as you can make it, but then they’re responsible.”
— Robert Irwin, seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees
Back to Belonging (You Can Go Home Again)
Rewinding, back to the beginning, I said teaching freedom is my most important role—I did not, however, claim it was a role I performed flawlessly.
On this G09 ECRL team, this belonging team of players who’ve been together for years and years, sometimes they collectively elect to take the freedom I’ve bestowed and use it to moderate their effort in training. A belonging-driven practice…ain’t that competitive. Fly-soar-create-connect-combine-learn rules break rules-be brave-get knocked down-get back up-discover an all new magic—cue needle scratch, yeah none of that’s happening.
What is? Friend groups-boyfriends-midterms-house parties-homecoming-flag football volleyball stick sports-this college that college-why Chipotle is buns-that boy from another school who crashed his car-shin pain sore knees sore throats six hours sleep no five crushing global fatigue-coach coach are we going to have to do much running today?
Okay, mister marketing genius, try turning that into an ad campaign.
One consequence of kids playing so many games year round is you can’t ask them to flip the same competitive switch day after day—being can’t stand alone as the value proposition and sometimes easing off the gas pedal to allow for belonging and connection is the healthiest option.
Other times, however, middling effort in training is not an exercise of freedom but a demonstration of its constraints. Sports are competitive (being). Sports are aspirational (having). Those coactives must be in sync, just like executing on physical ability requires the supporting technical, tactical, and mental qualities. But…competition and aspiration can be hostile to belonging. Norms are a core element of belonging and norms are enforced via permission structures—the collectively-enforced standards for what is and is not acceptable within a group dynamic.
In addition to our team goal-setting exercise, late in the season I also held 20-30 minute, one-on-one IDP meetings with the players. In their team goal setting, most had included in their WHY some aspirational mention of working hard, getting better as a team, and improving their skills. In these private conversations, however, many talked about how one obstacle to achieving their goals was that at times they were reluctant to push each other to raise their standards and put in max effort on the training ground.
They had become captive to their norms.
I don’t want to be the one who’s trying way harder than everyone else.
I don’t want to be the one telling my teammates to focus on soccer when they start talking about other things.
I don’t want to be the one to call other girls out if they’re not giving their best effort.
“Finding your voice—that is, talking on the field—is a challenge even on the highest levels…Very few women or girls are willing to take the responsibility of displaying leadership through communication, because it’s stressful. They worry about what others will think of them when they are yelling on the field. They are also afraid of taking on a role that separates them from others.”5
— Anson Dorrance, The Vision of a Champion (2002)
Coaching the USWNT and perennial NCAA Championship contenders at UNC, some of the most laser-focused ambitious Type-A Big Dogs in the nation…Anson Dorrance struggled with the reality that his players often didn’t want to take on a role that would risk separating them from the group.
A team of teenage club players? Best of luck.
I don’t have the answer, but to whatever extent one exists, the route there is a return to freedom. As much as being separated from the group is a legitimate fear, losing the freedom to choose what to want and how to be are fears that run even deeper.
So, if our training starts tilting towards an unspoken “let’s all give each other a break and put in 75% effort together,” I lean into the freedom to choose, to embrace the higher gear that will make those sprint reps, those 1v1s, that 7v5 game worthwhile. The pusher of the rock must be convinced they get to, not that they have to.
- Sometimes being is the answer: recapturing the spark, having the players reflect immediately after a particularly fast-paced and competitive small-sided game—how did that just feel? Fun, right? I agree, that was—don’t forget, playing super hard is more fun than kinda sorta going through the motions.
- Sometimes having is the answer: reminding them of what they want. Even players who don’t have the D1-or-bust mindset still want something—more playing time, time at a preferred position, being in form to earn a starting spot on high school teams—and all of those future wants require pushing to excel in the now.
- Sometimes it’s disrupting the norms of belonging. Purposefully changing the group dynamic by elevating different voices in leadership moments. Pulling the more established leaders aside and challenging them to re-assert the qualities that allowed them to assume leadership roles in the first place.
Pushing the rock, it goes both ways—as much for the coach as for the players. Just to finish this article, I had to learn something new. I was able to get started, with what I knew at the time, but progressing to a satisfying completion wasn’t possible with just what I knew at that starting point. The leaps only came about because of what I read or re-read, new experiences on the field, different ways of thinking about what I was seeing.
“There’s this Chekhov quote that I’m kind of living by lately. He says a work of art doesn’t have to solve a problem—it just has to formulate it correctly.”6
— George Saunders
Coaching—like the game—is an art. Both are immanent, emerging out of all-at-onceness—and the moment it becomes present, the sequence starts over again. And as a coach, you don’t have to solve the problem—you just have to formulate it correctly.
Lead photo by Christine Clayton.
References
1. Albert Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus. 1955.
2. Aggerholm & Breivik. “Being, having and belonging: values and ways of engaging in sport.” March 17, 2020. Taylor & Francis Online.
3. Lizzy Becherano. “Pochettino: USMNT must ‘think big,’ aim to win 2026 World Cup.” November 27, 2025. ESPN.
4. Kennedy, A., & O’Brien, K. A. (2024). Adding texture to the Art of constraints-led coaching: a request for more research-informed guidelines. Sports Coaching Review, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/21640629.2024.2395135.
5. Anson Dorrance. The Vision of a Champion. 2002.
6. David Marchese. “The Interview: George Saunders Says Ditching These Three Delusions Can Save You.” New York Times, 1/10/26.