How To Coach For Tomorrow, Even If You Only Started Yesterday
This Week’s Gameplan:
Keep your players present
Don’t fall for this stereotype
Winning Plays
It’s all too easy for your players to fall into a routine at training and end up on autopilot. Whatever the sport, small things like footwork and touch can make a massive difference. In the lower intensity environment of training, your players can get away with being a bit lazy on the small things. There is a solution that doesn’t involve you having to remind them to pay attention every five seconds.
Changing to a lighter or a more bouncy ball will grab your players’ attention as it starts acting in a different way. As well as getting your players to put more effort into their basics, it can also be a lot of fun. For maximum effect, do the same exercise immediately afterwards with the normal ball while they are thinking about good habits.
Forget The Angry Coach
I’m sure you’re familiar with the stereotype of the angry coach who is always yelling at his players. It’s just tough love and they really have a heart of gold and whatever other cliches you can think of. Don’t be this coach, it doesn’t make for a fun environment and it doesn’t even make the team play better.
I remember coaching a game of Under 15 girls and a parent told me that I needed to yell more. I was a bit confused at first, thinking they wanted me to be louder so everyone on the field could hear me better. Then I realised that they wanted me to yell at their kid and they weren’t really joking. In their mind, good coaching meant yelling at children.
Give Them Space
Decision making under pressure is a skill and needs to be practised like any technical skill. Constantly yelling at players doesn’t give them the opportunity to develop that skill and it can stunt their development as they get older.
Most players will learn to tolerate or ignore a coach yelling constantly but it will push some players further into their shell until they just don’t show up anymore. If the best case is that players ignore you and the worst case is that they quit, maybe it’s not that great after all?
If your players are so scared of making a mistake because they will get berated, they stop trying things in games. Teaching players to take calculated risks and giving them the courage to try again if they don’t execute the skill properly the first time will increase their confidence and they will enjoy what they are doing more.
Set The Tone
As a coach, you aren’t just a role model to your players, you’re also a role model to the parents / supporters of the team. If you spend your time angrily yelling at players for everything, then you are sending the message to everyone else that they can do it too.
Once you have parents yelling at other people’s kids, things can get pretty messy in a very short space of time. It’s a lot harder to try and bring things back to a calm level from there than it is to just prevent the situation from deteriorating in the first place.
There are few uglier sights in sports than a team of players that argue and fight amongst themselves constantly. It’s one thing for someone to get a bit frustrated and snap at a teammate in the heat of the moment but it’s another for players to constantly be nasty and aggressive to each other. They will learn from your example.
You Can Still Have Emotion
Even when coaching in low-stakes environments, it can be exciting to see players start to ‘get it’ and do things they wouldn’t have been able to do before. You can and should enjoy those moments because they are what it’s all about. Being passionate and angrily yelling at people are not the same thing at all and anyone trying to say they are isn’t being honest with themselves.
The Bottom Line
Being a good coach isn’t about how much you can yell and carry on, it’s about your ability to work with players individually and collectively to help them reach their best. It’s also about making sure that they enjoy themselves while they are training and playing so they want to keep on doing it.
It seems like a simple truth but I still see coaches around who haven’t worked it out. It won’t make your players better and it will make some of them quit. You can have authority and be in charge without needing to carry on like a pork chop. I’ll continue to share more strategies to make you a better coach in the coming weeks so that you can get your point across without needing to resort to ugly movie stereotypes.
Around the Grounds
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