Most youth soccer coaches are not full-time soccer coaches. They have jobs, families, friendships, and responsibilities outside the game that shape their lives. So why do they still make time to coach?
Every coach has their own mix of reasons: love of the game, the chance to mentor young people, additional income, and the joy of being part of a team. These are powerful motivations. They can give coaching real joy and meaning, even during a long season of training sessions, games, parent communication, travel, and administrative work. But motivation does not make time unlimited. At some point, even a committed coach can be stretched too thin. That raises an important staffing question for clubs: When coaches take on more than one team, does the player experience suffer?
At Satori, we approached this question by considering more than 70,000 Satori Parent Survey responses from 2025 and 2026, representing nearly 9,000 teams across more than 40 youth soccer clubs, with an average response rate of 50%. The scale and representative nature of the data set is important because the findings are not being driven by only a few frustrated parents, a single club, or a single season. Instead, this is a large group of travel soccer parents from across the country providing feedback over time.
Here are the details of what we found.
Finding #1
Coaches with one team receive higher Coach Net Promoter Scores than coaches with two teams.
To measure parents’ likelihood to recommend their child’s coach, we use an industry agnostic Net Promoter Score (NPS) style question:
How likely is it that you would recommend your child’s coach to a friend or colleague?
Parents answer on a 0–10 scale, where 0 means “not at all likely” and 10 means “extremely likely.” Then, to calculate NPS, we take the percentage of parents who scored a 9 or 10, called “Promoters”, minus the percentage who scored a 6 or below, called “Detractors.”
For example, if a team has 10 parent responses, with 5 Promoters, 3 Passives, and 2 Detractors, the Coach NPS would be 30. That is 50% Promoters minus 20% Detractors, reported as 30 rather than 30%.
Using that method, the difference between one-team and two-team coaches was clear:
- Coaches with one team: Coach NPS of 39
- Coaches with two teams: Coach NPS of 32
A seven-point NPS difference may sound modest, but in youth soccer it can matter. For some families, that gap may be the difference between feeling good about staying and quietly wondering whether to look elsewhere.
Finding #2
Coaches with one team are also associated with higher Club NPS.
This matters because, in Satori’s survey data, Club NPS has been the strongest indicator of whether families are likely to stay with a club.
Using the same NPS method, we found:
- Coaches with one team: Club NPS of 23
- Coaches with two teams: Club NPS of 19
This shows that coach experience and the club experience are not totally separate in the minds of families. For many parents and players, the coach is the club.
That does not mean a coach is solely responsible for whether families stay. Facilities, communication, team placement, cost, player pathway, playing time, competitive fit, and overall club culture all matter. But the coach is often the person who translates the club’s values into the player’s weekly experience. When that experience improves, the club relationship usually improves with it.
Finding #3
Despite this lower effectiveness, two-team coaching assignments are very common. In fact, more teams have a two-team coach than any other setup.
In other words, one of the most common staffing patterns may also be one of the patterns most likely to reduce the player experience. This is not a small operational detail. Coaching assignments are one of the most important design choices a club makes. They shape the coach’s preparation time, emotional bandwidth, communication quality, game-day presence, and ability to build relationships with players and parents.
Finding #4
The one-team advantage appears even stronger after accounting for very low outliers.
One reason this pattern is especially interesting is that many of the very lowest-scoring teams are also led by one-team coaches.
That happens because newer or less established coaches often begin with only one team. Some are still learning the craft. Others are still deciding whether coaching is a long-term fit. They may not yet have the experience, support, or training needed to create a strong environment.
This matters because those very low outliers pull down the overall average for one-team coaches. That means the observed Coach and Club NPS gaps are actually wider for experienced coaches than the numbers listed above.
Finding #5, a twist in the Club NPS tale:
Coaches with four teams produce the highest Club NPS scores.
At first, that may sound like a contradiction. If one team is better than two, how can four teams often be even better?
The answer is that a four-team coach done well represents a different staffing model. In many clubs, a coach with four teams is not simply a part-time coach squeezing in more work. They are often a full-time or highly professionalized coach: someone whose schedule, identity, compensation, and role are more centered around coaching.
Interestingly, while four-team coaches have the highest average Club NPS, the highest average Coach NPS still belong to the one-team coach. The hypothesis here is that a full-time coach with four teams is more closely aligned with the club and parent’s may feel an added sense of importance with their child being coached by a full-time staff member.
What should clubs do with these insights?
The practical recommendation is not “every coach should have one team” or “no coach should ever have two teams.” Clubs face real staffing constraints, and there will always be tradeoffs.
A better principle is this:
Use one-team assignments as the preferred model for part-time coaches.
That principle, plus our additional findings, leads to four practical steps:
- Move as many part-time coaches as possible to one-team assignments.
- Since you will need more coaches, invest in coach recruitment and development.
- Where possible, create full-time or near-full-time roles for top coaches who want a larger coaching load. Up to four teams for a full-time coach has proven effective.
- Use two-team assignments as the fallback, not the default.
This staffing model has several expected benefits:
- Higher expected player experiences.
- More coaches means more connection in your community, which can strengthen relationships, referrals, and local club identity.
- Fewer overloaded part-time coaches, creating more flexibility when midseason coaching changes happen.
- More opportunities to professionalize excellent coaches who are interested in larger roles.
The core insight is simple: for most youth soccer coaches, one team is better than two.
That does not solve the next challenge. Clubs still need to identify, recruit, train, support, and retain more good coaches. But it does give us a clear staffing objective: build coaching roles around the experience we want players and families to have.
If youth soccer wants better player experiences, we cannot only ask coaches to care more, work harder, or give more time they may not have. We also need to design roles that help good coaches thrive.
