Great coaching is about more than just drills and tactics—it’s about creating an engaging environment where players think, adapt, and problem-solve. Why? Because the game of field hockey challenges players to do this every game. That’s where The Coaching Lab MatchPlay Cards come in.
MatchPlay Cards are the latest coaching resource to accelerate your coaching; they’re packed with team and player challenges and add another layer of excitement, encouraging decision-making, creativity, and deeper learning. If you’re a coach or teacher looking to elevate your sessions, here are some ways to incorporate MatchPlay Cards effectively.
Encourage Player-Led Problem Solving:
Instead of providing all the solutions to play like traditional coaching, you want to help players solve their own in-game problems. Add MatchPlay Cards to shift responsibility onto players with challenges to solve in small-sided games.
Add a team challenge to your scrimmages, one MatchPlay Card to each team but keep them a secret, don't have teams share what their challenge card is with their opponents. This fosters communication, teamwork, and decision-making under pressure, all valuable skills you want to develop in your player.
You can also set player challenges with MatchPlay Cards to change how your players engage with scrimmages and training. Give a challenge card to your best player who’s finding it easy, or support a player who is struggling to get the ball.
Create Competitive Scenarios:
Use MatchPlay Cards to gamify training sessions and prepare for an upcoming opposition by playing our game scenarios. Adding team and player challenges to your training builds players' game understanding, helping them to solve problems and make good decisions.
Pick out 1 or 2 of your chosen challenge cards from the deck (there are 40+ to pick from!) that relate to a future team you’ll face, and play out a game scenario with one team using the challenge cards you’ve picked.
MatchPlay Cards are an easy yet powerful way to increase engagement, deepen learning, and create dynamic training sessions. Whether you use them for skill development, tactical training, or simply to add fun to your sessions, they’re a game-changer for coaches at all levels.
"I am a coach who is trying to move to a more games-based approach and I had just begun to learn what constraints were and the impact of them. I got the cards because I wanted more ideas on constraints to add to the training." Alan Good, Liberty Field Hockey Coach.
Develop Tactical Awareness:
MatchPlay Cards can be used to reinforce tactical learning. If your focus is on pressing, a challenge like "No backward passes allowed" forces players to think about positioning and movement. If working on counterattacks, a card like "All goals must come from a pass played forward within three seconds of winning possession" sharpens transition play.
MatchPlay Cards are loved in 77 countries around the world, from grassroots to the elite. Helping coaches and teachers to play more games, save planning time and engage players. It’s as easy as: pick them, add them, play them.
Give players a choice over what team and player challenges they add into training or pick them for them to instantly bring their learning to life.
"We play 5v5 and I get a player from each team to choose a card from the deck and those are the two rules we're going to play with or it could be for the individual cards that we say, here are 3 cards, now go and assign them to people on your team or assign them to somebody on the other team." Alan Good, Liberty Field Hockey Coach.
Use Them to Set the Tone:
Don’t leave scrimmaging to the final part of your sessions. Start your session by introducing a MatchPlay Card challenge to the group. Whether it's a team-wide challenge that relates to your session theme or an individual challenge, these moments set the focus and create immediate engagement.
MatchPlay Cards are a coaching tool kit for you to use in developing players' communication and decision-making. Use the same few challenge cards every week or change them up and see how players adapt to the challenges you set them.
MatchPlay Cards by The Coaching Lab are available now exclusively at Longstreth Sporting Goods. They’re even multi-sport, so teachers can use them in other lessons as well!
