Two moments from the same midfield. One player sees the run early, tries the through-ball, over-hits it — turnover, groan from the sideline. Another player, same run open, takes the tidy sideways pass instead — no groan, no comment, nothing. The first got the football right and the mechanics wrong. The second got the mechanics right and the football wrong. Only one of them heard about it.
The distinction is worth naming, because everything downstream depends on it:
Execution errors — the right idea, and the body didn’t deliver. The pass was on; the weight was wrong. These are mostly fixed by repetitions, not by commentary. And in a young player they’re partly biology: a growth spurt scrambles coordination for months at a time, so a 13-year-old’s execution is noisy in ways that say almost nothing about the player they’re becoming.
Decision errors — the idea itself was wrong, or missing, regardless of how cleanly it was executed. The safe pass with a runner open. The dribble into three defenders with a teammate free. These are the actual coaching material, and the conversation about them starts with information, not blame: what did you see before the ball arrived? What were the options? Which did you pick, and why? (Often the honest answer to “what did you see?” is “not much” — which makes it a scanning conversation, not a courage one.)
The trouble is that sidelines react to what’s visible, and only execution errors are visible. The brave pass that dies looks like a mistake; the empty sideways pass looks like composure. So match after match, the punishment lands on the choice and spares the cowardice — and kids draw the obvious conclusion. Play shaped that way looks disciplined. It’s actually just afraid, and it has stopped learning.
The sorting is for afterwards, and mostly for adults. Mid-game, a mistake of either kind needs exactly one thing: the next minute. But afterwards — watching the match back, or resisting the urge on the car ride home — the question that develops a player is never “why did you lose the ball?” It’s “what did you see, and what did you choose?” Judge the choice by the information available at the time, not by how it ended: a good decision can end in a turnover, and a bad one can end in a goal.
The honest part: the line between the two blurs in real time, and a young player shouldn’t be classifying their own mistakes mid-match — that’s carrying a clipboard into a game. The rule of thumb is for the adults: praise the idea separately from the outcome, fix execution with reps rather than words, and make sure the safe-but-empty pass gets questioned as often as the brave-but-lost one.