From the coaching side, working in an individual academy brought its own mix of challenges and opportunities. One opportunity was seeing how individually talented players train and work outside of a team structure, where a coach could be patient with a player who didn’t want to focus on defence while still enforcing consistent training standards.

The biggest challenge for the coaching staff and for me, was the gap in skill level between athletes. How do you make practice challenging but achievable for everyone without dropping the level for some or losing the motivation of others?

Splitting by skill level helped but it didn’t solve it

The coach split training into two groups, older and younger and that helped to some degree but gaps remained even within those smaller groups. This was because these players weren’t working toward a shared team goal, the gap in skill levels showed up sometimes as frustration, arrogance and quiet intolerance between players who were on paper supposed to be training together.

I worked on helping players redirect that energy back toward their own development instead of comparing themselves to whoever was next to them at different skill level. It’s a natural thing to compare yourself to the player beside you, but at different skill levels that comparison usually isn’t useful information about your own progress.

Changing what a mistake means across every skill level

The coach and I also ran a workshop on how we wanted mistakes in training to be seen not as failure but as evidence that you’re pushing your existing ability toward something better. This mattered at every skill level in the room, not just for the players catching up. Advanced players needed the same permission to make mistakes while working on something harder as the players still building fundamentals.

In 1-on-1 sessions, I talked with players about how challenging yourself is the whole reason they’re there and that even if a training partner is at a different skill level than you, your own actions still matter more for your development than anyone else’s. Training with players below your level can genuinely help them, but the risk is it pulls you down toward their level too. The fix is making sure you’re still challenging yourself regardless of who’s next to you.

Lose the ball in training 100 times, so you don’t lose it in the game.

Making practice work across skill levels

The coach got more creative with practice design over the year, adjusting difficulty by skill level where they could but the basics of any sport can always be made harder through your own effort, even when that’s not the comfortable choice. That’s the part that doesn’t depend on the coach splitting groups correctly, it depends on the player deciding to push themselves regardless of the skill level around them.

What coaching across different skill levels actually taught me

You can’t fully solve a skill-level gap through scheduling alone. Splitting groups by level helps but the deeper fix is cultural; helping every player in the room whatever their skill level understand that a mistake is data about where they’re pushing, not proof of falling behind. Get that right and the gap between skill levels stops being a threat to anyone’s confidence, it just becomes the normal texture of a room full of people improving at different speeds.

This is week 3 of the series. Next up: the case study that challenged everything I thought I knew about talent.