Petanque Coach on YouTube: Free Coaching Tips, Interviews, and a Learning Community

Most of the pétanque content we link out to on this site is equipment - boules, bags, cochonnets. This one is different: it's a shout-out to a free coaching resource we think is genuinely worth your time if you're trying to get better at the game rather than just better equipped for it.

Petanque Coach is an English-language YouTube channel built around bite-sized coaching content for players at any level - a useful complement to reading about technique, since it lets you actually watch a throw, a stance, or a shot broken down instead of just picturing it from a diagram.

What's on the channel

Two numbered series anchor the channel, alongside a fast-growing library of match footage:

• "1% Pétanque Tips" - a numbered playlist of short, focused improvement tips, each one aimed at a single, specific thing you can change about your game rather than a broad "how to play" overview. The series reached #16 in December 2025 and hasn't added a new numbered installment since, though similar one-off tip and mindset videos keep appearing without the numbering.
• A numbered interview series - conversations with UK and European club and tournament players about their playing career, influences, and strategy. The series reached its 14th episode (guest Kai Sheffield) in October 2025, with earlier guests including Matt Blyton, Herve Bavazzano, Jason White, and Dean Ashby, among others; no new numbered interview has followed since.
• French tournament match footage - over the past year the channel has leaned heavily into recorded and live coverage of French departmental and PPF-circuit events, including matches from Bourg Saint-Andéol, Ruoms, Carcassonne, Auch, and Bram, now making up a large share of what's posted week to week.

That combination is what makes the channel worth pointing readers to: the tips series gives you concrete, actionable technique points, the interviews give you the kind of "how do strong players actually think about a point" context that's harder to find written down anywhere, and the match footage lets you watch those ideas play out in real competition.

The Petanque Performance Academy

The channel's companion project is the Petanque Performance Academy, a free community hosted on Skool. It's founded and run by Kevin O'Rourke, a pétanque coach with 44 years of competitive experience at regional, national, and international level who now lives and coaches full-time in southern France. He describes the community's purpose as bringing together "the best coaches, advice, strategies and coverage" to help members progress, in a space explicitly framed as open to players of every ability rather than just competitive regulars.

As of when we last checked, the group had around 134 members and a short set of ground rules - constructive disagreement is welcome, politics, hatred, and personal disputes are not. It's a low-key, sign-up-and-join kind of space rather than a paid course, which fits the channel's general approach of removing friction between "wanting to improve" and "having somewhere to actually do that."

Why we're pointing you here

We don't have any financial relationship with Petanque Coach or the Petanque Performance Academy - no sponsorship, no affiliate arrangement, nothing changes hands if you click through. We're listing it here for the same reason we'd tell a friend about it: if you've read our pointing or shooting technique guides and want to see the ideas in motion, or you'd rather learn from watching real points get broken down than from more text, this is one of the better free places in English to do that.

Where to find it

• YouTube: youtube.com/@PetanqueCoach
• Free community: Petanque Performance Academy on Skool

If you're new to the sport entirely, start with our own beginner's guide to pétanque first - then use Petanque Coach's tips and interviews to put faces, throws, and match situations to what you've just read.