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I'm a diamond terran and I've been doing a lot of free coaching for my newbie friends for a couple years.
Mostly other terrans, occasionally protoss.
One of them plays zerg and she just bought the game. When we play teams together she's already really good about injecting and being active on the map with units, but she doesn't know timings or builds nor does she have mechanics.
All I can mostly recommend to her is to just ladder more, and help with her replays, but she has ladder anxiety.
When I coach new terran and protoss players I start them out by focusing entirely on making workers, basic units like marines and stalkers, expanding, and not getting supply blocked. As they learn to macro properly and get dem APMs, I move them on to teching and attacking.
With zerg it's not that simple because you have to inject and transfer queens and make hatcheries.
I can play random on ladder at a plat/diamond level, and my zerg isn't bad, but most of that is just from good mechanics and having played a lot, and I don't know how to break it down to someone who knows literally nothing about the game.
what do I dooooo
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I'd say don't push her to play on the ladder and give her simple builds to execute against AI's and on the ladder when she's comfortable. If you make her transfer queens and focus too much on injecting, it's possibly too much to remember all at once, and perhaps not as fun. Keep it simple and focus on the fighting part of the game.
When she's comfortable moving around the map and fighting, then help her notice her injects and make her do the queen transferring thing.
Learning the mechanics is not what keeps people playing. What keeps them playing is learning first hand WHY you need the mechanics. Transferring the queen is a margin thing that gives you an edge - but new players don't need just an edge - it probably isn't enough to change the outcome of the game.
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Speaking from experience as a silver-league out-of-practice zerg, the biggest problem new and out-of-practice Zerg players encounter is USUALLY forgetting to inject; if she's already good with that, you don't need to give her the crutch of having her make more macro hatches as both giant mana-sinks for queens and also as a safety net for when they forget to inject for a while. Tie some of her build stuff to queen production and have her make up to 4 queens non-stop to open: her natural should be up or building with the first queen along with gas, the second queen should come with a pack of drones and either a roach warren/baneling nest or a third (depending on if she's pvz or pvt), third queen comes with a third for sure and should push creep toward said third while grabbing a lair, evo chambers(have her hotkey them to 0 and turn on the little hotkey tabs so she's always aware that they exist) and additional gasses, fourth queen should be the last time she needs to build drones for full saturation on minerals and she should decide Muta-Ling-Bane (which calls for a macro hatch) or Roach-Hydra-Infestation Pit (could be for infestors, Swarm Hosts, or Hive and vipers) for her first composition once it's finished.
From there, she can go on to learn 3 more things: #1 Spread Creep with any queens not attached to a hatchery constantly. It's as important as map presence and larva count for zerg, as it's one of the race's primary ways to make informed guesses on their opponents' strategies; #2 expand behind her attack path; #3 learn the secret art of the Zerg Rapid Tech Switch if her tech choice has been hard-countered.
Again, I could probably benefit more from coaching for map activity, injects, and general mechanics than she could, but at bare minimum I have a concept of where I'm going and why, even if I get there way too late thanks to bad Overlord production and low larva counts.
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EPT
