Reader,
While I was completing my UEFA A & UEFA B licenses in England a few years ago, I was very fortunate to be mentored by some highly effective and impactful coach developers such as Ben Bartlett, Geoff Noonan, Kalam Mooniaruck, Allan Gillett and Ted Dale.
The process of testing session designs, learning from mistakes, exploring communication styles, and being critiqued can be tough at times, but what I noted in these coach developers was the detail they observed and how they delivered the message to push me to get better.
Types of feedback were based on organisation, interventions, technical detail or realism of my task design, and it always raised my awareness and helped me improve.
This week I was on the grass observing some of my coaches work, with the aim of providing constructive and critical feedback. Over the last few years, I have tested different approaches to delivering this, but I am becoming clearer about how to get the message across effectively.
One thing I noticed was ‘lost time’. With simple and effective organisation, we can maximise every minute of our practice, meaning the players get to play and the ball rolls.
One of our programme principles is to aim for 70% ball rolling time. Some might think this target is easy, some may say it’s ambitious. A lot can depend on the experience of the coach and how they plan, how they move from practice to practice, the length of coaching interventions, the number of activities they include in their session, and of course, how sharp the organisation is.
Three Things to Consider
- Plan activities within activities. It’s easy to move from one practice to the next if you simply have to lift cones off the pitch and move the balls to a new location to start the next activity.
- Use fewer cones! This may seem simple, but I regularly see sessions where the sheer number of cones used to mark out areas is over the top. Similarly, make sure to use different colours for different areas, avoid a “rainbow” of cones and keep things visually simple for players.
- If you’re delivering feedback to coaches, make sure you make a note of the timings of each activity, time in between the practice, time spent talking and any other breaks. If you have a 90-minute session, it’s very easy to dilute it to 75 with poor organisation or lose time through talking or lack of speed between activities. Suddenly the players could only practice for 50 minutes and 40 minutes have evaporated.
One thing to try this week
Have a colleague or team manager map the timings of your session. Even better, film your practice and work through this exercise retrospectively, this way you can time your interventions yourself and get perspective on whether you’re ‘over-coaching’.
While watching the session, observe player engagement, their body language or attentiveness. Do they really need your voice for two minutes? Or could you have summarised your point in 30 seconds?
One Critical Resource on the Topic
Check out this PDP guide on how to set up a training session with world-class coach educator and international coach, Rob Sherman. The article includes a collection of practical steps to ensure a seamless and simple structure to your session.
