Learning to reinforce good decisions, not just correct mistakes, changes how a player sees their own game. It sounds simple. Most coaching, and most parenting from the sideline, does the opposite without ever meaning to.
Watch any training session for twenty minutes and you will notice something. The session stops the moment something goes wrong. A misplaced pass, a heavy touch, a poor decision, and the whistle goes, the group gathers, and the correction gets made.
Now watch for the moment something goes right. A player finds a teammate in space they would never normally see, executes exactly the pattern the practice was built to develop, makes the best decision on the pitch all session. Nine times out of ten, the session keeps moving. Nobody stops. Nobody points at it. It happens and it passes.
I heard this described well on a podcast recently, and it stopped me in my tracks because it described a habit I recognised in myself. We are trained, almost by instinct, to intervene on mistakes and let good decisions go unremarked. Over time, that habit teaches players something we never intended, that the only moments worth stopping for are the ones where something went wrong.
What It Means to Reinforce Good Decisions in OIRS
This is the third part of the framework I coach by, OIRS: Observe, Intervene, Reinforce, Step Away. Reinforce is the step that gets skipped more than any other, not because coaches don’t value it, but because correcting an error feels urgent in a way that celebrating a good decision doesn’t.
To reinforce good decisions well does not mean handing out praise for the sake of it. It means stopping the session, in the moment, to make sure every player in the group sees exactly what a good decision looked like, who made it, and why it worked. Done properly, it is just as instructive as a correction. Arguably more so, because it shows players what to aim for rather than only what to avoid. This idea overlaps closely with the psychology of positive reinforcement, which is well studied outside of sport and holds up just as well on a football pitch.
A Practice in Passing and Receiving
Here is what this looks like in practice. Say the session is built around receiving on the half turn and finding passes into areas the opposition isn’t expecting. A player finds a teammate in a pocket of space that nobody else on the pitch had spotted, exactly the pattern the whole practice was designed to produce.
The old habit is to let it go and keep the session moving, saving the stoppage for the next mistake. The better habit, the one I have had to build deliberately, is to stop the session right there. Not for long. Just long enough to say, that pass, that’s what we’re looking for, and let every player in the group see it happen again if needed.
Why This Isn’t Natural
I will be honest about this because it matters. Stopping a session to highlight something a player did well did not come naturally to me. Early on, my attention went almost entirely toward what needed fixing. It took a deliberate shift, and a fair amount of catching myself mid-session, to start treating a great decision as just as worthy of a stoppage as a poor one.
It is a strange thing to admit as a coach, that noticing what’s good takes more discipline than noticing what’s wrong. But that has been my experience, and I suspect it is true for a lot of coaches and a lot of parents too.
What This Looks Like From the Sideline for Parents
Parents do a version of this without realising it. It is far easier to react to a mistake in the moment, a lost ball, a missed chance, than to react to a good decision that doesn’t immediately lead to a goal. A great pass that gets a poor first touch from a teammate often goes completely unmentioned on the drive home, while the missed chance gets replayed several times over.
Try noticing the good decisions this week, separate from the outcome they produced. A good pass is still a good pass even if the final touch lets it down. Naming that distinction out loud teaches a child to value the decision itself, not just the result attached to it.
The Power of Players Seeing It From Each Other
There is nothing better for a group of players than watching one of their own teammates execute something well in real time. It carries a different weight than a coach describing what good looks like from the sideline. It is proof, live, from inside the group, that the standard being asked for is actually achievable, because someone standing right next to them just did it.
This is a big part of what I mean when I talk about building an environment rather than simply running a session. The environment includes the moments you choose to stop for, not just the constraints you set up in advance. Stopping to reinforce a great decision is one of the clearest ways a coach shapes what a group comes to value.
Practising Reinforce This Week
This one is simple to try and harder to sustain. Whether you are coaching a session or watching from the sideline, look for the good decision before you look for the mistake. When you see it, say something, specifically, about what made it good, not just that it was good.
Do this consistently and something shifts in a group. Players start looking for the right decision rather than just avoiding the wrong one, and that is a far more useful thing to be chasing.
This is the natural follow-on from Step Away, the fourth part of OIRS, which I wrote about last week. The two ideas work together: reinforce good decisions clearly enough, and stepping away from a player stops feeling like a risk.
If you want a simple way to bring this into conversations with your own child after a match or session, I have put together a short companion resource this week built around exactly that. You can access it here: