Pre-season at grassroots is nothing like pre-season at a professional club. You get about four weeks if the pitch is free. You get maybe two sessions a week. And you get roughly two thirds of your squad, because the rest are in Spain, at their nan's, or have suddenly decided they play rugby now.
I have run pre-season badly and I have run it reasonably well. The difference was never the drills. It was being honest with myself about how few sessions I actually had, and then deciding what those sessions were for.
Start by counting the sessions you really have
Before you plan a single drill, get a calendar and count. Four weeks, two sessions a week, is eight. Now take one off for the week the pitch is being reseeded. Take another off for the tournament weekend. Take a third off because it will rain sideways one Tuesday and you will call it.
You have six sessions. Six. Write those six on a bit of paper and plan those, because a beautiful eight week programme that assumes perfect attendance is a fantasy, and you will bin it by the middle of August.
What pre-season is actually for at this level
It is not for fitness. Nine year olds do not need a running block. They are already fitter than you and they will get match sharp by playing matches. If you spend your first session doing laps of the pitch you will lose two players to boredom and one to a parent who watched it happen.
Here is what pre-season is genuinely good for:
Getting them back in the habit of turning up, listening, and putting their own shin pads on.
Letting new players find their feet before the results start mattering.
Seeing who has grown six inches over the summer, because it changes who can play where.
Setting the standards you want for the season, quietly, before anyone has anything to prove.
Week one: get them back and get them moving
Keep the ball involved from the first minute. Rondos, tag games, anything where a kid who has not touched a football since May gets a touch inside thirty seconds. Sixty to seventy minutes is plenty.
Learn the new names properly. Say them out loud. A player who hears their name in the first session comes back to the second one.
Week two: add the ball, add a little load
Now you can ask more of them. Passing patterns with a bit of pressure. Three v three and four v four games with short rests. The load comes from the games, not from shuttles. If you want their lungs working, make the pitch bigger and the rests shorter. They will not even notice.
This is the week I usually spot who has come back with a bit of confidence and who has come back quiet. Both are worth knowing.
Week three: shape
Only now do I talk about shape, and only for the format they are actually going to play. If you coach an age group affected by the FA's format changes for 2026/27, check your league handbook before you spend a session drilling a shape they will never use. The formats have moved for some age groups and it caught a few coaches out last time.
Keep it simple. Where do you stand when we have it. Where do you stand when they have it. Who goes with the runner. That is a whole session, and it is a better session than the one where you draw a formation on a whiteboard for twenty minutes.
Week four: friendlies and sharpening
Two friendlies if you can get them, against teams roughly your level. Rotate everyone. Play people out of position on purpose so you learn something.
Do not chase the result. I have watched coaches win a friendly 6-0 in the second week of August with their strongest eleven and then finish bottom of the division, having taught their squad that some of them are decoration.
Heat, water and common sense
Pre-season in England now regularly runs through genuinely hot weeks, and the FA and county FAs put out guidance every summer for a reason. Shorter sessions. Water breaks written into the plan rather than offered when someone asks. Shade at the side of the pitch. Nothing at full tilt in the middle of a hot afternoon.
If a player looks off, they come off. There is no session in July worth being wrong about that.
Write down more than you think you need to
Attendance, minutes, who played where, who picked up a knock. It feels like admin in August and it is gold in November when a parent asks you why their lad has not started for a month and you can actually answer.
This is the bit I built Trac for. I tracked every minute of my own U12s for a full season, and the thing I was most wrong about was playing time. I thought it was even. It was not. Once I could see it, I fixed it in a fortnight.
Three mistakes I have made
First, planning eight sessions and getting five. Plan for the five.
Second, running fitness in week one. Every player who was on the fence about coming back decided for me.
Third, naming a first eleven in pre-season. Once you have said it out loud you cannot take it back, and you have spent your best month of the year narrowing your options instead of widening them.
Where to go next
If you want session content rather than a plan, the U9 training session plans in the playbook are the sessions I actually ran, written up as they happened. If you want to see what tracking a squad through pre-season looks like, have a look at the training side of Trac, or at what it does with match reports and squad stats once the season starts.
Six sessions. Ball involved. Water in the plan. Everything else is decoration.