Reader,
Many will argue that in order to be highly skilled and creative in football, you have to be able to find solutions, adapting to your environment quicker than others.
Skill is contextual, and if we’re to develop better players, we need to find ways to challenge them to solve problems in the environment.
Often in coaching, we see reductionist approaches to practice design, breaking the game down into its parts in order to reduce complexity.
Without a doubt, task design is a spectrum where skilled coaches can move up and down it relative to the context we work in.
If we want to develop decision-makers, we need to create practices that put them into situations that replicate the game, or potentially at times, are harder than the game itself.
Being able to dial the challenge point up or down based on the needs of a diverse group of players is a skill that takes decades of practice.
So how can we set our players’ problems to solve within the practice?
Three Things to Consider
1. Resist the temptation to answer your own questions.
Without a doubt, it can be tempting to over-coach or provide answers without allowing space for players to respond.
Remembering of course, that a player being able to answer a question doesn’t always mean they have the skill or ability to execute it in a game, but ‘question and answer’ can be an effective intervention tool for coaches on the grass.
2. Take a principled approach to session design.
If you want to put players in a position to find solutions to football problems, aim to ensure the key elements of the game exist in your practice.
Whether it’s direction, incentives (goals), or consequence (if I lose the ball, I need to react to get it back), these principles can guide you to ensure realism remains.
3. Know why.
If you do break the practice down, heading towards a focus of higher repetition, less opposition or fully unopposed, understand why you’re doing it.
Avoid copy and paste and ensure that if the task heads in that direction, you have a clear rationale why, and you ensure good detail in what you’re trying to achieve with the players.
One thing to try this week
Consider your own coaching principles when it comes to your session design.
It could be valuable to write down the areas that are non-negotiable in ensuring a quality practice and good outcomes for the players.
Whether it’s inspired by the ideas above, or you create your own in your language, this could be a useful exercise in thinking about how you plan practices.
One Critical Resource on the Topic
Check out the PDP Coaching Course, Foundations of Session Design, which will walk you step-by-step through all of the key considerations around session design to help you support players to solve problems.
