Coaching the Player Who Trains Twice a Month

Every community squad has them. Shift workers, new parents, students home at weekends. They turn up on Saturday fit enough to look fine and conditioned enough to last forty minutes. The problem is not commitment. It is that your session plan assumes a training history they do not have.

Stop treating attendance as a discipline issue

The default response is a rule: two sessions a week or you do not get picked. It feels fair and it costs you players you cannot replace. A better frame is exposure. What matters is not whether someone showed up, it is how much contact, high speed running and decision load they have absorbed in the last three weeks compared to what Saturday will ask of them.

Track it simply. A tick per session with a rough minutes figure and an RPE from the player is enough to see the gap. When a player has done 90 minutes of rugby in three weeks and you are about to give them 60 on Saturday, that is a five-fold jump. That is the number that hurts them, not the missed Tuesdays.

Give them a different session, not a smaller one

When an intermittent attender does turn up, the instinct is to fold them into whatever the squad is doing. That usually means they get the tail end of a session built on last week's work, with cues they never heard and a shape they have not walked through.

Flip the priority. For that player, one session should deliver three things in order: contact exposure, high speed running, and one tactical reference point they can carry into the weekend. Everything else is optional. Ten minutes of graded contact and a couple of genuine top speed efforts protect them more than an hour of unopposed shape they will forget by Thursday.

Be explicit about the third item. Pick the single decision they will face most on Saturday, whether that is the first defensive read off a scrum or where they fold to at the second ruck, and rehearse only that. One clear reference beats four muddy ones.

Be honest about the ceiling

The conversation most coaches avoid is the one that helps most. Tell the player plainly what their current exposure supports. Forty minutes off the bench with a clear role is a real contribution and a safe one. Eighty minutes at eight is not on the table this month, and it is not a judgement on them.

Players almost always accept this when the reasoning is exposure rather than loyalty. What they resent is being quietly dropped without ever being told why. Set a return path with them: three consecutive weeks of training, then a longer shift. Now the standard is theirs to meet rather than yours to enforce.

The weekly habit

Take two minutes before selection to check exposure across the squad, not just availability. You will spot the player who has been at everything and needs protecting, and the one who has been at nothing and needs a shorter shift. Both decisions are easier when you can see the numbers instead of guessing from memory.