How to write a rugby session plan

Most rugby coaches know roughly what they want to cover in training. The problem is the gap between "I want to work on our breakdown" and a session that actually changes breakdown behaviour. A written session plan is what closes that gap. It forces you to think before you coach, not while you coach.

This guide walks through the practical process of writing a rugby session plan from scratch — the structure, how to set an objective that means something, how to choose drills that serve the objective, and how to write coaching cues that players actually retain. It is written for coaches at club level, but the principles apply at any level.

Start with one objective

The single most common mistake in session planning is trying to cover too much. A session that aims to improve the breakdown, the lineout, and defensive line speed will improve none of them. Players cannot absorb three complex themes in 90 minutes, and neither can a coaching team deliver three well.

Start every session plan with one sentence: what do I want players to do differently at the end of this session compared to the start? That sentence becomes your objective, and every drill, every cue, and every coaching conversation in the session should connect back to it.

A useful objective is specific and observable. "Improve the breakdown" is not an objective — it is a topic. "Arriving at the breakdown with low body position and clearing the ball carrier's hips in the first two seconds" is an objective. You can watch for it, correct it, and measure whether the session moved the squad in the right direction.

The five phases of a rugby session

Once you have your objective, you need a structure to deliver it. Most effective rugby sessions move through five phases. The time allocated to each depends on the session length and the stage of the season, but the sequence rarely changes.

Choosing the right drills

Drills are tools, not the session. The question is never "what drill should I run?" — it is "what drill best develops this specific objective at this stage of the session?" A drill that does not connect to the session objective wastes time, even if players enjoy it.

When selecting drills, work backwards from the objective. If the objective is breakdown body position, the skill development drill should isolate that body position in a controlled environment. The unit drill should introduce a defender and a clearing role. The team drill should put the skill under match-like pressure. The drill selection should tell a coherent story through the session.

Time is also a design choice. Give each drill enough time for players to fail, be corrected, and attempt the skill again with the correction applied. A drill that runs for four minutes rarely produces a meaningful repetition cycle. Twelve to fifteen minutes on a well-designed drill, with active coaching throughout, is almost always more valuable than cycling through five drills in the same period.

Writing coaching cues that stick

Coaching cues are the specific phrases you use to direct player attention during a drill. They are not corrections — they are anchors. A good cue gives a player one thing to focus on during the next repetition.

Effective cues are short, specific, and tied to a body part or action: "hips below the ball carrier's hips," "eyes on the contact point," "chest to the ground before the clear." Ineffective cues are vague: "better body position," "be more aggressive," "work harder." Vague cues are impossible to act on because the player has no information about what to change.

Write your key cues into the session plan before training starts. Two or three cues per drill is enough. If you arrive at training without knowing what you are going to say when you stop play, you will default to general feedback — and general feedback produces general improvement, which means no improvement you can measure.

Consistency across the coaching staff matters here too. When every coach uses the same cue for the same technique, players hear it once and it reinforces across sessions. When every coach uses different language for the same movement, players receive conflicting instructions and the learning is slower. A shared cue library, used consistently across the season, is one of the most underrated tools a coaching team can build.

Planning for the players you have

A session plan written for 30 players that you run with 17 will not work. Always plan for the number of players you are likely to have, and have a version ready for significantly fewer. Know which drills require even numbers, which require specific positions, and which can flex. Arriving at training without knowing this leads to five minutes of reorganisation while players stand around — and five minutes of dead time is five minutes of lost intensity.

Availability also shapes what you can address. If your starting scrumhalf is absent, a session built around box kicking accuracy is not the right session. Plan for the squad you have. The objective can remain the same while the approach adapts.

Reviewing the session after training

The session plan is not finished when training ends. Spending five minutes after every session writing down what worked, what did not, and what you would change is one of the most powerful habits a coach can develop. Over a season, those notes become a coaching library — a record of what your squad responds to, where the time gets lost, and which drills produce the outcomes you are after.

A simple structure: what was the objective, did the session deliver it, what was the strongest drill, what would you replace, and what is the priority for the next session. That is enough. You do not need a report — you need a record that you can act on.

Using a session planning tool

Writing session plans on paper or in a spreadsheet works until it does not. The problems tend to emerge at scale: when you are planning across a full season, tracking what you have covered, sharing plans with assistant coaches, or trying to retrieve a drill you ran six months ago. A dedicated rugby session planning tool solves these problems by keeping everything in one place, searchable, and connected to your squad data.

CoachCraft was built specifically for this. Session plans are structured around the five-phase format, drills are saved to a reusable library, coaching cues are attached to each phase, and plans are linked to your squad calendar so players know what is coming. Assistant coaches work in the same workspace, and every session you have ever planned is a search away.

Whatever tool you use — a notebook, a shared document, or dedicated software — the principle is the same: write the plan before you coach, review it after, and build on what you learn. The coaches who improve fastest are almost always the coaches who are most deliberate about this cycle.