Women’s Pyramid: How newly-appointed head coaches are getting to know their squads ahead of pre-season

Pre-season is tough enough at the best of times. It may be even tougher when you are a newly-appointed head coach.

As well as the usual to-do list of planning each training session, striking the right balance between fitness work, technique and matchplay, someone new in the hot-seat also has to think very quickly about scheduling in the right number of pre-season friendlies against the right sort of opposition, making sure each game gives their side a different test.

And it all has to happen while the coach is getting to know their players, what makes them tick, how they like to get feedback, what their strengths and weaknesses are, as well as the way the club operates.

Plus, of course, they need to learn from what the previous head coach did well, and the mistakes they made.

Experienced striker Beth Merrick, previously of Wolverhampton Wanderers, Aston Villa and Coventry United, has seen brand-new head coaches take different approaches to their roles.

“I’ve had a head coach that’s come in and really won the group round; they’ve been fantastic,” she says, speaking to Dragon Football. “I’ve also had the opposite effect where it’s not worked and they’ve not even seen out the start of the season, when they’ve come in and they’ve gone against everything that’s been before and ripped that up and started again, but not really given any rationale about it. Particularly if you’ve got a key group of players that respected what it’s been before, that’s not great.

“I think there’s always an understanding that there’s got to be an element of respect of what’s happened before, that you can’t change things overnight and maybe trying to do things block by block and build by build.”

In the Women’s Super League, all the managers who finished 2025-26 are still in situ. In WSL2, Tom Mallinson is just settling in at Nottingham Forest after the departure of Carly Davies; and Durham are without a head coach as they grapple with financial issues that may prevent them from competing this season at all.

‘Everyone’s journey is different’

Slightly further down the pyramid, however, there is a veritable coaching carousel. With shorter contracts and few full-time roles, staff and players move around more often than might be seen in the men’s game, meaning that there are several managers getting to grips with a new job, new players and high expectations for the campaign ahead, and they cannot afford to waste any time ahead of pre-season.

Mollie Jowett took up the role of first-team manager at fourth-tier Leafield Athletic of the FA Women’s National League Division One Midlands at the start of June. Leafield are an independent club, providing football solely for women and girls, and without the infrastructure or financial backing that could be given by a men’s professional club. Jowett was offered the role on a Friday, had her first meeting with the club’s committee on the Saturday, and introduced herself to the players on the Sunday.

“From then, it’s been very much about player engagement, obviously,” she says. “We’ve had players retire, so we’ve needed to recruit new players, so that’s been ongoing in the background. My biggest thing was working with the players that were left: finding out where they are, what they want from the season.”

Leafield finished third last season – ten points behind champions Peterborough United, and two points behind Boldmere St Michaels, who also went up after winning the play-off against Cheadle Town Stingers of the northern division. It means expectations are high for 2026-27, and Jowett has spent pre-season meeting individually with each of her players to get to know them a little more before putting a ball at their feet on the training pitch.

“Every player’s journey is very different,” she says, pointing out that some of her players are still at school, while others are in their mid-thirties and looking ahead towards retirement.

She is also very aware that the social side of football is still a big motivation for her squad, who fit in their two training sessions a week with their full-time jobs, study, or caring responsibilities. As she adds to her squad during pre-season, she is also working to ensure the culture is as welcoming as ever; she sees her job in these first few weeks as setting out her standards while also getting to grips with what is already in place. She is loath to refer to “trials” for potential new players; instead, she talks about “closed training sessions”. The first of these will also be the first time she has her existing squad on the grass with her, but she thinks that might be a good thing.

“There’s no bias,” she points out. “There’s no history with the team from last season. They had a really successful season. I’ve got the stats from last season to look back on, but also I’m going in with a fresh mind and a different playing style.”

Jowett has a little truism she repeats: “Fitness wins matches.” That does not necessarily mean the Leafield Athletic players will be sent off on distance runs twice a week, or that they will be put through the rigours of the infamous bleep test, an endurance assessment that gets progressively harder.

“You can put an 80-minute shift in, but if you lose it for the last 10 minutes, that’s where you lose the game,” she adds. It is a big differentiator in tiers three and four now, as more clubs move towards a more professional model of operation. Teams like Leafield, who are more limited in their resources, need to keep up, and Jowett says that means putting a lot of faith in players to do the necessary work. She also wants to make sure everyone is training smarter and using the most sophisticated data and methods possible.

“The data that we’ve used in the female game has been very much male-driven,” she says. “You’re expected to train like a man, you’re expected to compete like a man, and you’re expected to recover like a man, but we’re not men. So we’re going into the season with a new mindset where the [strength and conditioning] will be female-focused. One, it helps injury prevention and two, it’s just the right thing to do in the female game.

“I’ve said to players, on a Tuesday session, it will be S&C for the first 30 or 40 minutes.

“But I’m not going to be one of the coaches where it’s like, ‘You need to do 40 minutes’ high-intensity S&C!’ if you’ve just taken an absolute battering on a Sunday against quite a physical team. You know what your body needs, and I’m going to give you the time and space, but it might actually be that you need a bit of a rehab session.

“It’s the player’s choice what they want to put themselves through in that 30 or 40 minutes, but ultimately, if you’re not doing the S&C, then you need to pick it up in the week somewhere; you can’t just not do it. So it’s trust in the players.”

‘It’s about football fitness’

Jack Randall, new first-team manager at Moneyfields, already knows he can trust his players. He has been part of the coaching team at Moneys for three years, and was appointed to the top job in May after Karl Watson’s departure.

Knowing the players already means he does not need to do some of the groundwork Jowett has had to put in, but he is having to think very carefully about his own persona on the field now he is in a new role.

“How can I use what I already am and then give the other bits of my personality they’ve not had to see?” he asks rhetorically.

Planning a pre-season for this squad presents some special challenges. Like Leafield Athletic, the players have other jobs outside football, and although Moneyfields has a men’s senior team as well, they are not one with a significant amount of money behind them.

And Moneyfields missed out on promotion to tier three by the narrowest of margins last season. They finished second in the FAWNL Division One South-West, and then lost the promotion play-off to Norwich City on penalties. It means that Randall is planning a pre-season with roughly 40 per cent of content focusing on fitness, but a very specific kind of fitness.

“We played a lot of teams last year that sat in the way of us and they weren’t really going to chase us around too much. It was more how can we move them opposed to how can they move us? So when we’re trying to impose ourselves on the game, fitness is massive.

“But for me, it’s about football fitness. We’ve got triathletes, we’ve got girls that can do all sorts in there, but it’s more around the actual football movements and how long can you sustain them.”

He believes that this fitness work will give his side the edge they need to take that next step.

“The last thing we want is to go backwards. I want to make sure that we’re progressing and going forward all the time.

“It’s the same goal for us: to get out of tier 4. We still think we deserve it and we can play in the top level. We want to get there.”