“They Have Been Telling us the Answer for Years: ‘Please Sir, Can We Have a Game?’”

The industry of sport coaching is a recently evolved one.  Before the 1970s, few teams had anything that could be described as a coach. Other than to transport them to the game. Indeed, many would have been offended by the implication of the concept.  Perhaps more shocking, cones had not been invented.  Any rudimentary team organisation was overseen by the captain. “Game Plans” and “Systems” were in their absolute infancy.

Fifty years have seen a huge cultural shift.  No self respecting team would be without a coach, whatever its performance level.  Player dependency is absolute: coach centricity is unquestioned.  At all levels of every game, the expectation of all is that the coach gives the instructions, and the players follow them.  This is not just before the game. It has become the industry norm that the coach maintains a constant commentary of advice and observation (to players and officials) throughout the game.  Research identifies that some coaches shout for 80% of the match; this is a practice that should not be mistaken for professional conduct. 

The mechanism by which the coach demonstrates his omniscience – the coaching – has conventionally been heavily dependent on the unquestioned primacy of skills.  The adoption of the word “drill” to describe unthinking repetition of a sports technique has changed forever the character of coaching sessions.  Such drills are the obligation of sports learning. Rarely is it suggested that such practice should be fun, but it is positioned as the necessary route to skill mastery.  Learning is a duty, not a pleasure. 

Left to their own devices, players of any age start a game.  They never get the cones out to invent a drill.  The industry of education should be informed by this. Engagement comes from the freedom and unpredictability of the game. Counterintuitively perhaps, the universal request, “Can we Have a Game, Sir?” meets with surprising reluctance.  “At the end”, “If there’s time”, “When you have learned the skills”.  The implication is of a frivolous, purposeless activity that does not contribute to the worthier goal of skill development.

There is undoubtedly some place for developing neural pathways through repetitive practice.  However, there is no learning without engagement.  Weaving skill practice in short bursts within a wider diet of games  might achieve both.  But games are essentially chaotic. They defeat the best efforts of coaches to make them predictable and patterned.  If practices don’t reflect this chaos, then techniques learned amongst coloured cones soon collapse in the game environment.

The landscape of coaching is shifting. Sometimes uncomfortably. But this brings with it a confusion which is twofold: there is uncertainty about the character of the coaching session to improve performance.  And there is also a wider acceptance that progress only comes with learner engagement, which is improved in an open ended situations which allow experimentation and creativity.  Schools and clubs vary in the importance they attach to developing effective games coaching, and to generating pupil enthusiasm. 

The most important thing a school can achieve in its games programme is a philosophy of coaching that goes across all staff, every sport, both sexes and a range of abilities.  Pupils have always been happy to advise on what engaging sports session looks like; the industry of coaching and education has been slow to listen.