Putting Coaching on the Agenda

Schools spend much time, energy, money and resources on their games programmes.  Administration, facilities, equipment and kit are often first class. Thousands of coaching sessions and matches happen every week impacting on tens of thousands of children.

But coaching often lags behind.  Particularly if it is provided by willing, non-specialist teachers, for whom it is not the most important thing that they do.  Or by forty somethings (or fifty somethings) who are trotting out tired old sessions from twenty years ago, without any burning desire to update.

What do these sessions look like?  They often have an undue component of running,thinly disguised as conditioning and served with a substantial side order of lack of imagination.  They will be orderly, based on prescribed skill drills and coach led approach.  They will, typically, have more talking than doing.  They will be liberally punctuated by the omnipresence of coloured plastic cones.

Why is this?  Little of the creative energy of schools and teachers is expended on the issue of what great coaching looks like.  It's often a game of every man for himself.  Technical update may come from occasional training courses, but the method of delivery is in the gift of the individual. Attempts at planned experimentation are rare: initiatives to measure the effect of coaching behaviour are rarer.

Many school coaching teams have regular meetings.  Often weekly, certainly termly.  So, what is on the agenda?  Organisation? What time the bus leaves, what the kit regulations are, where the first aid bags live and who pumps the balls up.  The result is match administration of a high order.

But how often does coaching find its way on the list of discussion topics?  How much time is spent sitting round, scratching heads, discussing approaches, considering experiments, measuring impact or sharing new approaches?  Surely this is the graduate level discussion.  Did teachers really go to university to discuss where the touch judge flags should be kept.  Or what the sanctions for wearing the wrong socks should be. It might be reasonable to expect that coaching would dominate the passionate discussions of coaches, and that the tedious details of bus departure times might be swiftly disposed of.  And yet the opposite is frequently the case.  The urgent trumps the important.  The bus leaves on time and the coaching remains mixed. Without quality control.

Where could the discussion start?  Try timing the amount of teacher talk in the session, and compare between coaches and between sports.  Try timing the average length of coach intervention and instruction.  Count the number of times each player touches the ball.  Count the number of errors, and decide whether the task is too simple. Measure the amount if time spent on games.  The list goes on...

So, if you value coaching and you are interested in whether it changes player behaviour, try leaving the comfort zone of administration behind. Work in the top 20% of your ability.  Get into stimulating debate and experimentation.  Make sure coaching is always on the coaches' agenda.