How To Coach For Tomorrow, Even If You Only Started Yesterday
This Week’s Gameplan:
Coaching with your sun
How to pick a winner
Winning Plays
Are your training sessions held in the great outdoors? Have a look up and find out where the sun is before you get started.
When you bring your players in to talk to them, set yourself up so that you are facing the sun, not them. If your players are squinting when they are looking at you, they can’t focus on what you are saying. This is especially applicable to smaller children, as their smaller stature means they are looking up.
When you are laying out your exercises, think of how the players will be moving and rotate the layout to try to minimise the sun.
It’s a small thing to be aware of but it can have a huge benefit.
What makes a good exercise?
Just like deciding what’s for dinner, planning what exercises to do at training can be tricky. There are so many options out there and you don’t always know how it will turn out. We will be covering a lot of the aspects of both exercise and session planning in the coming weeks but today we will be starting with some solid tips to get you started with exercise selection.
At this stage, you are likely looking on the internet for sessions. If you’re lucky, the organisation you are volunteering for will have a stash of exercises that you can reference but that is not common in smaller clubs. When you’re starting out, it can be hard to tell if the exercises you find are going to be helpful to your specific situation.
Keep it Simple
Players of all ages get restless standing around while you explain what you want them to do in an exercise. The more complicated it is, the longer you have to talk to explain it and that is when minds start to wander.
When an exercise is too complex, players have to spend time worrying about what the next step is or where they have to go. Let them use all of their attention on the important things like skill execution.
Keep Them Moving
Players who are waiting for their turn start to lose interest and, if they are kids, they will start to play up. Try to minimise time spent waiting in lines, so vary the final structure of an exercise depending on the number of players in the session.
If the exercise is a flowthrough exercise, then you can add or remove stations to give you the right balance between work and rest for your players.
Otherwise, consider running the exercise in parallel. Not only will it reduce issues from players being bored, it can also introduce an element of healthy competition.
When an exercise is simple and the difficulty is at the right level, it will flow and it’s easier to build a positive atmosphere. Conversely, an exercise that constantly breaks down because players are lost or unable to execute skills they aren’t ready for yet can lead to a negative atmosphere. Players yelling at each other does not make a good session.
Appropriate Difficulty
A good exercise should sharpen existing skills and work on developing new ones. If it requires skills the players simply don’t have, it will break down and players will be demoralised.
If in doubt, err on the side of making it easier. If an exercise is easy for players, you can increase the difficulty by challenging them to perform it to a higher standard.
Modifiable
Changing an exercise after you have been doing it for a while by adding extra steps or modifying the parameters can help you dynamically increase the difficulty and keep players engaged. Changing an exercise lets you do it for longer without it getting stale.
You may also see this referred to as ‘progressions’.
This is another reason to keep your exercises simple. A simple exercise can be changed easily with minimimal downtime as you go, keeping players engaged.
Adding progressions to existing exercises is an ideal way to get experience and work your way up to designing your own exercises from scratch.
The Bottom Line
Don’t get sucked in to thinking you need to make really complicated exercises to make a good session. Your players will get the most out of a session where they are fully engaged without too much waiting and where they feel challenged without being overwhelmed. If in doubt, a simpler and easier exercise coupled with your enthusiastic encouragement is always going to be the best option.
Bonus Tip: You can borrow exercises from other sports and modify it to suit your own sport. This is especially useful if you are in a more minor sport without a lot of inspiration available online.
Around the Grounds
Have you got a burning question or need some advice? Drop us an email and it may be featured here (or be the subject of a deeper analysis in the main section).
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