Should I let kids play every position?

It is a cold Tuesday on the turf. A right back receives a square pass just inside her own half, and for a heartbeat the whole left side of the pitch opens up in front of her. If she has a big aerial in her locker, she picks her head up, throws it cross field, and the team is inside the attacking 23 in three seconds. She does not have that skill, not really, not under pressure. So she takes an extra touch, the picture closes, and the ball goes safely square instead. Nobody made a mistake. The tool simply was not in the box.

That little moment is the whole debate in one frame. One school of thought says our job is to fill every player's toolbox, so anyone can create from anywhere and no young player is ever locked into a position before they have found out what they could be. The other says you have two sessions a week and a match on Saturday, so you train what a position actually needs most and get to the rest in proportion. Here is the awkward part. Both are right.

So this is not a piece that ends with a tidy answer. It is a piece about a tension every coach lives with, and about the one thing that actually holds the two sides together. It is not a single session or a single drill. It is the season.

Every coach lives with the same tug of war. Do you fill every player's toolbox so anyone can create from anywhere, or do you train the specific skills their position needs most and get to the rest in proportion? Push too far either way and you pay for it: versatile players who are comfortable everywhere and trusted nowhere, or specialists boxed in before anyone found out what they could become. This article makes the case for both camps, digs into why the question bites hardest with youth, and names the constraint every club coach is really fighting.

Rather than force a tidy answer, we look at the one thing that quietly holds the two sides together and how it changes the way you plan a year. Then we get practical, with two ready to run training sessions and three takeaways you can use at your next session. Read on to see how the tension actually resolves.

One of the most repeated ideas in technical coaching is not really about hockey. It is about a toolbox. In a masterclass on training technical skills, Tsoanelo Pholo borrows the FIH image and puts the coach's job in one line:

Fill first, then teach the harder question of when.

The reason that matters is that tactics rest on technique. Pholo again: "I would love to play a fast paced game where we go from outlet to attacking circle in three seconds. But if I do not have players that can accelerate the game with either a hit or a really fast slap or a 70 meter aerial, I need to change my tactics." Read that twice. The game plan was never blocked by the whiteboard. It was blocked by the toolbox. A half empty box means the tactic was never really on the table.

Some tools belong in every single player's box, whatever their shirt number. The grip is the obvious one. In his masterclass on the grip, Simon Letchford is blunt about it: "If we grip the stick correctly in our left hand, then I think we can execute all of our skills far better and more easily than if we hold the stick the wrong way." He argues for a default and then variations off it: “Our go to grip should always be strong and a forehand grip. Everything from there is a variation.”

Adam Falla and Ross Gilham-Jones make the same case from a different angle in Essential Grip Skills: "If we can get the hands in the right position for different techniques, then we're off to a really good start in creating good hockey fundamentals." Nobody in those conversations asks what position the player plays. A defender's receiving and a striker's receiving are the same receiving.

And then there is the argument that hits hardest with youth. Pholo: "I would love to see, especially with the youth, not restrict them to positions too early. Allow kids to play and learn everything." She even dreams out loud about it, asking "Can your right back overlap and become a left striker?" before landing on a line worth pinning above the whiteboard: "Don't be held back by your position." Decide at ten that a child is a defender, and you may spend the next eight years training away the very skills that would have let them become something more.

There is a deeper reason to wait. The years when players are young tend to be the years when new skills wire in fastest, so breadth bought early is breadth bought cheap, and the broad movement base you build then, comfort on both sides of the stick, balance, agility, a feel for space, is what every specialised skill later stands on. A child's current position tells you almost nothing about their ceiling. Potential is far wider than any early performance suggests, and the day we file a ten year old under one role is the day we quietly stop finding out what else was in there.

Now pour a second coffee, because the other side of the table has a point that will not go away, and it is made of time.

You do not have unlimited sessions. Most club coaches have two nights a week and a match. In that world, "fill every toolbox with every tool" is not a philosophy, it is a fantasy. Periodisation for Club Coaches puts the discipline plainly: "Cover less, own more," and "Pick one or two themes per block. The urge to cover everything is the trap." Every minute you spend on a rarely used tool is a minute you did not spend on the one this player reaches for in nearly every possession.

That is why prioritising by position is not lazy, it is honest. As players get older and time gets tighter, the strong programmes do specialise. In Practice Session Design, Fede Tanuscio describes national team weeks where defenders, midfielders and forwards break off for line specific skill work, on top of the shared tactical picture, precisely because there is finally enough time to go deep per role. He also has a phrase for the alternative, "training to train," and lists it among his pet hates. Sessions that are not tied to what this team, in this position, needs on Saturday are just movement.

Lisa Letchford lands the coaching craft of it in Basic skills through Small Sided Games: "It's all about picking the right tool for the right moment. I love gameplay and I think it's great to be working on individual skills, but there are definitely moments where breaking the skill down to individual isolated elements is equally important." Notice that she is talking about the coach picking the right tool, not just the player. Choosing what to leave out is a skill too.

And squads are not uniform. Tin Matkovic, in Balancing Skill Gaps, reminds us that "You have individuals in your teams that are all driven differently," and that availability, ambition, experience, learning speed and role understanding vary wildly across one changing room. You cannot run the same all tools for everyone plan across a group like that. Some players need depth in one role, some need breadth, and pretending otherwise is how you lose half the squad.

Here is where the two coffees go cold, because the tension is real and it does not dissolve.

Push versatility too hard and you get players who can do a little of everything and nothing under pressure, comfortable in every role and trusted in none. Push specialisation too hard and you get a fifteen year old who is already "just a defender," capped before they were ever uncapped, and a team whose full back freezes the moment the game asks her to do something the game plan did not.

Early sorting is also more dangerous than it looks. A good chunk of what we read as talent at twelve is often the relative age effect at work, being born a few months earlier and maturing sooner. Stream by that, specialise by that, and you can bake in a gap that was never about ability at all, only about timing.

There is no formula that hands you the split. Anyone who says there is, has not coached a mixed group on a wet Tuesday. The honest position is that you are always trading breadth against depth, and the right trade changes with the player, the age, and the week.

But there is one place the trade stops being a contradiction and starts being a plan.

The two sides only look like opposites if you judge them by a single session. Judge them by a season and they turn into the same sentence.

Across the long arc, you fill the toolbox. Every player, every position, keeps working the universal tools, grip, receiving, carrying, passing, because those never stop mattering and, as Letchford warns, they drift the moment you stop looking. Periodisation for Club Coaches points to England's youth pathway view that the best players are simply the ones with the best basics, repeated under pressure, week after week. Breadth is a multi year project, and it is heaviest with youth, where you deliberately refuse to specialise and let them play and learn everything.

Breadth does not mean chaos, though, and two things keep it honest. First, you protect the trunk. The universal fundamentals get grooved until they are automatic before you load variety on top, because everything creative later leans on them. Second, you lean into variety on purpose. Practice that keeps switching between skills and situations feels messier on the night and looks less tidy than a clean block of repetitions, but it is what makes skills stick and show up again when the game is live. Mixing is a method, not a mess.

Within any given block, you prioritise. You pick the one or two tools this team, and this position, need most right now, and you go deep, the way Tanuscio's lines do. You accept that this month the strikers are living on their reverse finishes and the deep defenders are drilling the aerial out of the press, and that the rest of the box gets maintained rather than neglected. Next block, the focus moves. And you give each theme enough time to bed in, a run of weeks rather than a single night, before you decide whether it worked, because a skill needs a stretch of honest reps before it holds under pressure.

So the reconciliation is not "do both at once," which is the trap. It is "do both across time." The youngest players lean hardest toward breadth. The oldest and most time pressed lean toward prioritised depth, without ever letting the universal tools rust. And the season, not the session, is where "every tool" and "the right tools" finally agree.

You will still feel the pull both ways on any given Tuesday. That never leaves. But now the pull has somewhere to go.

Two sketches, not prescriptions. Both assume a full turf and roughly 75 to 90 minutes. Adapt to your group.

Theme: breadth. Every player spends the night playing somewhere that is not their position.

Theme: depth. Built from what last Saturday's match exposed. Assume the review flagged two problems, slow build up under a high press and weak circle entries from the right.

Notice the difference between the two nights. Session one is variety by design, players jumping between skills and unfamiliar roles, and that deliberate mess is exactly what builds skill that carries into a real game. Session two is focus by design, a couple of priorities shaped by what Saturday exposed. Neither is wrong. They just sit at different points of the same season.

We opened with a tension every coach knows: fill every player's toolbox, or train the tools their position needs most. Both cases hold up. Some skills are universal, grip, receiving, carrying and passing, and belong in every player's box no matter where they play, and specialising too early, especially with youth, quietly caps what a player could become. But time is the real constraint, and with two sessions a week you cannot train everything at once, so prioritising by position is honest rather than lazy. The way through is not to pick a side but to judge the balance across a whole season, the long arc that fills the toolbox against each block that sharpens the tools mattering most right now, with youth leaning toward breadth and older, time pressed squads leaning toward prioritised depth without ever letting the basics rust. The two sessions above put those two modes on the turf, one built for variety, one built for focus.