How To Coach For Tomorrow, Even If You Only Started Yesterday
Winning Plays
When you are laying out an exercise, match the colours of your markers as much as possible. It will make it easier when you are explaining it and when your players are moving through it.
For exercises run in parallel, use the same colour or pair of colours for a group and make them distinct from the ones in the groups next to them. You might have something like a line of green cones for a group, then yellow, then red and back to green.
For larger flowthrough exercises, group colours into roles. For example, all cones where you start a lead might be white and then all cones you lead to might be red. These kinds of exercises can easily break down if players get lost so any thing you can do to keep it flowing is valuable.
This may sound like it is a tip for children only but I can confirm from experience that it is just as effective for adult players, especially if you are working on more complex patterns. Adults are just larger kids, often with worse attention spans.
Participation above all
We’ve all heard the stories of the obsessive practice habits of Don Bradman or Michael Jordan and how it made them champions. So if you want your players to get better, they just need to keep drilling the same thing over and over, right?
We’ve only just started so you know that the answer isn’t going to be that simple. For a number of factors that we will break down, having fun will turn out to develop players better than mindless repetition. You’re probably not coaching the next superstar in your sport so set up your sessions accordingly.
Presenteeism is the Enemy
Presenteeism is the term given to someone being physically present but completely checked out mentally. I’m sure you’ve seen at least one person come to training just to get their name ticked off and proceed to do nothing much more than exist for the session.
It doesn’t matter what training you do if your players aren’t actively and enthusiastically participating. The old school approach may be to yell and threaten players into doing it anyway but that’s terrible for player retention. It’s also not much fun as a coach if you have to constantly badger your players to participate so it’s not great for coach retention either.
Play is the Way
All training sessions should have a degree of fun in them. What that looks like may change between age groups but it will keep your players more engaged during the sessions and make sure they keep showing up in future.
Just like hiding vegetables in food can make kids eat better, hiding skills practice in a mini-game format can make players play better. Structured games require skills to succeed, just the same as any ‘serious’ exercise does.
Setting up in a game format can introduce a soft pressure that makes players try to concentrate more and execute skills better and faster than simply going through the motions in a more boring format. A little bit of friendly competition can be helpful.
That isn’t to say that absolutely everything needs to be a game, especially as you get a bit older and want to work on more complicated tactics in your game. Having fun exercises spread through your sessions can help your players bring more attention and effort to the ‘boring’ parts of training.
Change Sports
This part will sound like heresy to an old-school approach but not every drill has to be in your particular sport. Anything that keeps energy and enthusiasm up is making a positive contribution to your players’ development.
You can go completely different and start throwing beanbags around or if you’re a kicking sport, start throwing a tennis ball around and so on. Besides keeping the energy up for the session, it can also offer a bit of sneaky fitness work. An activity that only requires general skills to play can get players moving around more.
Take the opportunity while doing these other activities to tie concepts back to your sport. That might be movement patterns or decision-making but there’s guaranteed to be something you can draw a parallel with. You can use these activities to reinforce or even introduce patterns of play into your regular sport.
There’s also some science behind getting players to do non sport-specific movements, especially in younger children (spoiler alert for a future issue). With a more sedentary lifestyle, children don’t have the same movement vocabulary as they used to and so their physical foundation can be lacking.
Working on other movements not explicitly used in your sport can work on these areas and help your players execute skills in your sport better. This is becoming more recognised these days and a great visual representation is the changing face of playgrounds to incorporate a wider range of movements.
The Bottom Line
Don’t have your players just show up to training because they are supposed to. A good training session should be fun and players should improve. These two aims are not mutually exclusive at all and actually serve to reinforce each other. It’s all about balance and it may take a few sessions to figure out the ideal mix with a particular group of players.
You may get queried by an old-school parent or player but be brave and back yourself. The results will speak for themselves in the end. Players who actively participate at training will improve and perform better than ones who show up to get their names ticked off a list. More importantly, if they associate sport with fun, they are more likely to stick with it.
This works for adult teams as well, training doesn’t have to be boring and serious. Adults have even more demands on their time that training is competing against so you have to make them want to show up.