I coach League of Legends players who are usually stuck somewhere between Gold and low Diamond, with most of my sessions focused on solo queue rather than organized five-player teams. I spend several evenings each week reviewing VODs, watching live games, and turning messy matches into a small set of habits a player can actually practice. Most people who contact me already understand their champions and know what objectives do, so I rarely spend much time covering basic mechanics. My real job is finding the two or three decisions that keep costing them games.
I Start With the Player’s Actual Decision Making
I usually begin a first session by reviewing one normal ranked game instead of asking the player to show me their cleanest win. A loss that lasted around 28 minutes often tells me far more because frustration exposes habits that disappear when everything is going well. I pause frequently around wave states, recalls, jungle tracking, and objective setups rather than commenting on every missed skill shot. That keeps the review useful instead of turning it into a running list of mistakes.
One mid-lane player I worked with last winter believed his main problem was mechanics because he kept losing fights around the second dragon. After watching two games, I noticed he was arriving late because he repeatedly stayed for one extra wave with less than 40 percent health. His champion execution was fine once the fight started, but the fight was often lost before he entered the river. That distinction matters.
I like asking players what they expected to happen before I explain what I saw. If someone says, “I thought their jungler was top,” I want to know which piece of information created that belief rather than simply telling them the jungler was actually bot side. The goal is to improve the process behind the decision, because the next match will have different champions, different timers, and a completely different map state. Memorizing one correct answer does not fix a repeated reading error.
I also separate mechanical mistakes from judgment mistakes because they require different practice. Missing a cannon under tower after 12 minutes is not the same problem as taking a fight with no information about the enemy support. One belongs in controlled repetition, while the other belongs in review and awareness work. Mixing them together usually leaves players practicing the wrong thing.
Good Coaching Should Reduce Confusion
Players often come into coaching with too many ideas competing for attention. They have heard advice about tempo, priority, vision, trading, wave control, roaming, tracking, spacing, and dozens of matchup details, yet they cannot decide which one deserves attention during the next game. I try to narrow that down to one primary focus and one secondary focus for a block of roughly five ranked games. More instructions usually make performance worse.
For players who want structured outside help, I sometimes point to resources that present LoL Сoaching as a dedicated service rather than treating improvement as random advice gathered from clips. A defined coaching format can make it easier to identify recurring problems and give practice a clear direction. I still think the usefulness of any service depends on how well the coach connects feedback to the player’s actual matches.
A top-lane player I coached earlier this year had a notebook filled with matchup notes covering more than 20 champions. The information was not bad, but he was thinking about so many details that he regularly missed obvious jungle timings and poor recall windows. I asked him to stop adding matchup notes for a week and track only his first three wave plans plus the enemy jungler’s likely starting side. His games became much easier to discuss because we finally had a stable practice target.
Short goals work better. If I tell a support player to improve vision, roaming, lane pressure, recall timing, and teamfight positioning all at once, none of those ideas gets enough attention. If I tell the same player to check the minimap before every forward ward for the next 6 games, I can review a behavior that is specific and visible. That gives us something concrete to measure during the next session.
I Treat VOD Review as Pattern Hunting
One isolated mistake rarely interests me as much as a mistake that appears three times in one match. A player can miss a flash, misclick a ward, or take a bad trade because of a momentary lapse, and I do not build an entire lesson around that. Repeated errors are different because they usually point to a weak rule or a missing habit. Those are the problems I want to find.
I once reviewed a jungler who lost control of the map around 15 minutes in nearly every game we watched. He blamed his teammates for not moving first, and sometimes that criticism was fair, but his own resets were consistently happening 20 to 30 seconds before major objectives without enough time to establish vision. He was walking into contested areas after the enemy had already taken space. We spent most of that session discussing setup timing rather than pathing.
I keep notes while reviewing, but I do not hand a player a page containing every mistake I found. Instead, I group problems into patterns such as late recalls, unnecessary side-lane exposure, poor target selection, or fights taken without cooldown information. A player might make 14 visible mistakes during one game, yet several of them can come from the same underlying decision rule. Fixing the rule has more value than memorizing 14 separate corrections.
This is also why I like reviewing games from the same role and a small champion pool. If someone sends me one jungle game, one support game, and one mid game on three unrelated champions, the patterns become harder to separate from role-specific problems. Two or three games on the same role give me a cleaner picture. Consistency makes review sharper.
Mechanics Still Matter, but I Practice Them Separately
I do not ignore mechanics, especially for players whose champion requires precise combos or tight spacing. During one session with an ADC player, we spent around 10 minutes in practice tool checking attack movement and cursor placement before reviewing ranked footage. His teamfight decisions were reasonable, but his movement became rushed whenever two enemy champions entered his screen. That was a mechanical issue we could isolate.
I prefer short practice blocks because an hour of mindless repetition usually loses quality. Ten focused minutes of last hitting, combo execution, or movement drills can be useful if the player knows exactly what success looks like. I sometimes ask players to record a small sample so we can compare their execution across several sessions. The practice has to connect back to something that actually happened in a match.
Champion mastery also changes the kind of feedback I give. If a player has 200 games on one champion, I expect much cleaner knowledge of damage limits, matchup windows, and common cooldown interactions than I would from someone with 15 games. I do not expect perfection, but I do expect familiar situations to require less mental effort. That extra attention can then go toward the map.
I am cautious about telling players to change champions whenever they struggle. Sometimes a smaller pool is useful, but swapping picks does not repair weak recalls, bad objective timing, or poor threat assessment. I have seen players move through five champions in a month while repeating exactly the same decision errors. The champion was never the main problem.
The Best Sessions Change What Happens After Coaching
I judge a session by what the player does during the next several games, not by how much information I managed to say during an hour. Before we finish, I usually ask the player to repeat the practice goal in their own words and tell me what it should look like inside a real match. If the explanation is vague, my instruction was probably vague too. I would rather correct that before they queue again.
One player last spring ended a review with a simple rule: no side-lane push past river unless two specific enemy threats were visible. It sounded almost too basic, but his previous three games had included repeated deaths from pushing one extra wave without information. During the next review, we could immediately see where he followed the rule and where he ignored it. That made the coaching conversation much more precise.
I also expect improvement to be uneven. A player may understand a concept during review and still fail to apply it once a ranked game becomes chaotic, especially after two early deaths or a difficult lane. I usually treat that as part of the learning process rather than proof that the lesson failed. Repetition under pressure is what turns an idea into a habit.
Rank changes matter, but I do not use a short winning streak as proof that coaching worked. Five good games can come from favorable teammates, comfortable matchups, or simple variance, while a player can also make better decisions during a losing stretch. I care more about whether the same avoidable mistake is appearing less often across 10 or 15 games. Rank usually follows more slowly.
What I Want a Player to Notice on Their Own
The moment I enjoy most is when a player pauses a replay before I say anything and identifies the problem themselves. That tells me they are starting to build an internal review process rather than depending on another person to diagnose every mistake. A coach should gradually become less necessary. That is a good outcome.
I encourage players to review short sections instead of rewatching every second of every loss. Looking at the 30 seconds before a death, a failed objective, or a poor recall often gives enough context to understand what created the situation. Three focused clips can be more useful than watching a full 35-minute replay without a question in mind. The review needs a purpose.
I have coached enough ranked players to know that most of them do not need fifty new concepts. They need clearer priorities, a better way to recognize recurring mistakes, and enough repetition for one good decision to become automatic. My sessions work best when the player leaves with less to think about, not more. That is the standard I keep coming back to whenever I review another game.
I would rather see a player fix one repeated mistake over 12 games than collect a page of impressive terminology they never apply under pressure. League changes constantly at the level of champions, patches, and matchups, but the ability to review your own decisions stays useful. That is what I try to teach every time I open a replay with someone. Good coaching should eventually help the player coach themselves.