Top priorities for
young footballers.

The first session Damian Zane ever coached was, by his own account, the worst session anybody has ever run.

He'd taken an under-14s side. Turned up, got the balls out, kids standing there waiting.

Damian Zane

I could not for the life of me think of any of the things we'd done in my whole life. I just froze. And it was the worst session.

Now bear in mind, this is a bloke who'd played three and a half years professionally in Romania. Fifteen years of other people's sessions in his legs. And there he is on a pitch in Newcastle with a bag of balls and twenty teenagers, and the tank is completely empty.

Damian Zane

I went home and promised that I would never serve a session like that. From then on I always had a plan. That was my first lesson.

I'm starting there on purpose, because it turned out to be the shape of the whole chat. Zany's at Weston now, was at the Jets Academy for years, and his pro licence is all but done. He gave me forty-seven minutes and a stack of things worth writing down — and nearly every one of them came with a scar on it. He's not telling you what he read somewhere. He's telling you what he got wrong.

Which, if you ask me, is the only kind of advice worth listening to.

"We focus on what kids don't have"

I asked how you develop a young player's strengths without sanding off the bits that make them them.

Damian Zane

Every player has some traits that are theirs. They're unique.

I think sometimes we focus on what kids don't have. Well — they're not gonna have everything. Rather than what they do. And who they are.

I sometimes think we try and mould players into who we think they should be. Everyone should just try and find the strengths and build on them.

He can pick the shape of a player frighteningly early, too. He told me about a seven-year-old coming off the bench as a sub — and instead of chasing the ball like every other seven-year-old on the planet, the kid ran and cleared one off his own line.

Damian Zane

He made a beeline not for the ball — for the goal. You're not gonna change that player.

But here's the useful half, and it's the bit I'd have got wrong: that's not a reason to stamp CENTRE BACK on his forehead at seven.

Damian Zane

You still have to develop the all-round game. If he can shoot, maybe he can go forward on set pieces and score goals. Add another string to their bow as they get older. Which can mean the difference of having a career or not.

He wants kids moved all over the park at JDL ages, and one of his reasons has nothing to do with football at all. He'd read how Dinamo Zagreb think about it: stick a kid at right back every week for five years and you're loading one side of a body that's still being built. Right foot, right foot, right foot.

It's the same logic as only ever training one arm and wondering why you look strange in a singlet.

The question he wouldn't answer

Then I asked him the straight tactical one. When do you commit to playing out from the back, and when do you go long?

He didn't answer it.

Damian Zane

The first one's probably to parents.

I've coached at JDL level, and the anxiety is mostly from the parents. I remember my first year of JDL, and the parents would be yelling "boot it out". And we're trying to teach them to be composed defenders.

That anxiety from the parent, by yelling out, gets put upon the child. And that's how they grow up — every time that moment comes, that anxiety kicks in. And rather than… maybe they could have had a touch and found a pass. And kept the ball.

If you want players with composure, it doesn't just happen. It has to happen. And they have to be brave enough to make mistakes.

Before anyone reads that as a shot across the fence — it isn't, and neither is this. Nobody hands you a manual on the way in. Everybody standing on that sideline is there because they love the kid and they want the moment to go well, and the yell is just that love with nowhere to go. Nobody's ever told us what it does on the other end. That's the gap, not the parent.

Now, I'd walked in assuming a coach with his background would be a purist about playing out. Possession, patterns, the lot. He isn't, and this was the bit that actually shifted something for me.

He described how one of his son's coaches set it up: if the opposition step up and press, it's not a bad ball to bypass them — into the space, into the striker, into a winger.

So sometimes, I said, the ball you're looking for is the long one?

Damian Zane

It's a long pass, is it? And it's the right pass. Rather than it has to be one way.

I more like to coach about the space, and where it is. If they start dropping off, we play short. And the only way you can get players like that is at a young age. Coach them, but let them make mistakes.

And he's got no romance about it either, thank God:

Damian Zane

Sometimes you have to clear the ball — to save a goal, or in front of your goal if you're not sure what's around you. There's still got to be some ugly parts to football to win games.

Which is exactly what makes the yelling so expensive. "Boot it out" is often the right call. It just never teaches a kid when. It hands him the answer without the question, and then we're all baffled at fifteen when he can't read the game.

His own son is a goalkeeper, which he reports on with roughly the enthusiasm of a man describing a long dental procedure.

Damian Zane

Watching him is horrendous.

The boy made an error playing out from the back and came back the next week having solved it himself: go direct instead. Sensible, right? Kid finds problem, kid fixes problem. I'd have patted him on the head and bought him a Powerade.

Damian Zane

The mistake happened, there was a poor decision, and we talked about it. But the solution isn't then just revert to what's safe.

Safe isn't the fix for scared. Write that one on the fridge.

Where the calm comes from

So I asked him the obvious follow-up — where did your composure come from? Because he clearly had it as a player, and I can tell you from bitter personal experience it doesn't arrive in the post.

A German coach named Rudy, when he was young.

Damian Zane

I never felt under any pressure — there was no anxiety when I had the ball at my feet. I was really calm.

And how Rudy got him there is almost boringly unglamorous. Touches. Game-like practices instead of lines and cones. Skills pulled out just long enough to get the coordination, then folded straight back into the game.

Then he said this, which isn't boring at all:

Damian Zane

His attention to detail, and how he made you feel — I still remember that feeling. There's one particular year where I grew so much that I just felt untouchable.

Thirty-odd years on, and that's what's left of it. Not a drill. A feeling.

He holds himself to the same standard he asks of his players, too, which is rarer than it ought to be:

Damian Zane

I'll say to any team I've coached — the first person I look at after a loss is myself.

What's missing

Then the direct one. Fourteen to eighteen — what aren't players getting?

He was generous about it first, which I appreciated. Reckons we're doing pretty well in those age groups: they understand the game, they're very good on their feet. Then, in exactly the same tone, without any drum roll:

Damian Zane

I think what we're probably lacking in Newcastle is strength work. I think we're way behind. I know my kids — I've just had them screened, and they've got a lot of work to do.

Money's probably the issue in our code. I look at rugby league, AFL — I think athletically they're helping their athletes a lot more than we do. And that was one of our biggest strengths going to Europe: they knew how good physically we were.

How many clubs do the young players actually even walk past the gym? Well, they will at Weston. But it's not even a part of, or linked to, football. Where it's a big part if you wanna go to the higher levels.

I asked what's missing. He ran through the technical side, said we're fine — and the gap he landed on was strength.

And he's quick to head off the thing everyone pictures when you say "gym", which is a fifteen-year-old going all Arnold and losing a yard.

Damian Zane

It's injury prevention. It's not just having muscles and strength. It's not about how you look — it's that you don't break down, you can handle higher loads.

That player could go into a professional setting, and a lot would break. They wouldn't handle the training.

Not wouldn't be good enough. Wouldn't handle it. The talent gets you the invitation. The body decides whether you're still upright in week three.

Damian Zane

And I read something where they said: the younger you start, you have the advantage over someone who started later. Or maybe skipped a bit.

You'll never catch it up, I said.

Damian Zane

You'll never catch it up.

The hours nobody organises

I put the load question to him, because it's the one I get asked most — kids on four nights a week, plus the specialist session, plus the other thing on Sunday, and parents trying to wedge more in with a shoehorn.

He talked about his own son needing sleep more than anything at an age where he's still growing. Then went somewhere I didn't expect.

Damian Zane

I don't think it's always the amount of sessions. It's what they're doing, and do they want to do it. But I don't think they do enough.

One of the biggest things that stood out in my first year of coaching was the horrendous technique of running in our game. You can get quicker just by having better technique.

I don't think they do enough exercise. And just kicking a ball. I kicked the ball every day of my life. And I didn't break down.

But if you're getting driven by an adult, that's a lot different than you going and exploring the game with a mate or a few mates. That space was magical in our generation. That's where you learn what works for you.

I said you never magically learn to kick with the outside of your foot. It's a horrible skill and you're not getting the reps at training.

Damian Zane

Is that aimed at me? Because I always use it.

It wasn't. Though for the record, I'm an absolute numpty in front of goal, so I'm in no position to be handing out technical notes to anybody.

Damian Zane

I felt comfortable doing it because — do you know why? I put the hours in.

A lot of it is the imagination. Imagining different things that happen in the game. I think players have less imagination, and for me that imagination leads to creativeness.

The last ninety seconds

I asked what he'd tell a young player. He started with a plea on their behalf, which tells you something about him.

Damian Zane

When I came out of the Jets I got to just go around and watch games, and I saw how much talent is out there. There's a lot of late developers I find out in the leagues — he's getting outrun at the moment, or these players on these big fields look like it's way too big.

But I'd like coaches to have patience with them.

Then:

Damian Zane

Player by player, the technique is better these days. But part of the game — football — is running. You can talk about kids developing with the ball, and that's very important. But it's also the physicality that they've gotta grow.

But for me, the number one thing would be — I think it is the gym, and running technique. Those two things are massive.

How many touches you have with the ball comes down to your love of it. It's like an addiction. My mum must have gone off at me daily for kicking the ball through the house. You can't walk past one without touching it.

So I summed it back to him, the way you do at the end of a long chat. Touches first, always — and ideally the ones you go and get yourself. And then the other half: it doesn't matter how good your technique is, because when you're under pressure and knackered and your body's starting to fold, you can't execute.

He picked it up before I'd finished, and went straight back to Rudy — the same coach who'd given him his calm on the ball, twenty-five minutes earlier in our conversation.

Damian Zane

I sort of learned that. Go back to Rudy — he told me in some firm words. I remember my heart was broken at the time, but I realised what I had to do, and it triggered something in me.

And I remember going to nationals. And what happened is — as soon as I got to a level of fitness, my ball playing sustained for longer.

I go to the gym again now. But I really feel it's maybe not this late. It's something that at eighteen we start doing — like, no. It's gotta be young. I think we're way behind.

And there it is again. Same bloke who froze in front of twenty kids and drove home promising himself he'd never do it twice. One coach handed him both halves of his game — the technique that made him calm, and the spray that made him fit — and he needed his heart broken to take the second one.

Read that last line properly, though, because it's the whole thing. He's not saying the gym made him a better footballer.

He's saying it let the footballer he already was stay on the pitch.

---

Big thanks to Zany for the time — genuinely one of the best chats I've had this year. There's a whole other thread in there about late developers and staying on your own path when you've been overlooked, and I'll come back to that one.

The last thing he said:

Damian Zane

You just never stop learning. If you're open to it, you'll improve, and you'll help the players develop.

If any of this landed, or you reckon I've got it wrong, flick me a message. Always happy to talk football.

Cheers, Mike