What Does Great Coaching Look Like?

One of the greatest challenges facing the leader of a coaching programme, in any environment, is controlling the quality of provision across the organisation.  Ensuring a continuity of message, and consistently effective delivery is the essence of the role of Director of Sport. In walking the playing fields, courts and halls to measure this assumes that quality coaching practice can be relatively readily identified.  So, what should it look like?

 A pitch that has a sea of equipment, and enough cones to land a light aircraft, may flatter to deceive.  It may not address the question: what engages the players, and builds effective learning? Great coaching can be delivered in a variety of different ways, but there are stable generalisations of what best practice looks like.

 The industry of coaching has developed an obsession with neatness.  Carefully choreographed practice activities; neat lines of players attempting tasks in turn; routes for players to follow carefully defined by cones; closely regulated activities with clearly prescribed outcomes.  Playing fields can look like a sea of orderly activity, and it is easy to mistake this for best practice in sports coaching.

 But sports are not orderly, and are essentially chaotic in nature.  So, are they best learned in an environment of predictable neatness?  There is little science to suggest that it is.  Once beginners have an elementary mastery of an activity, then practices become more effective the more closely they resemble the demands of the game.  Techniques learned in isolation rarely survive the challenge of skill transfer to reproduce themselves in the heat of battle.  Players can become more effective at single outcome practice activities, without becoming any more effective in games.

 Games take place in an ever changing atmosphere of movement, with the constant pressure of the presence of opponents.  Skill is only one factor of the effectiveness of games players, and yet dominates the diet of practice activities.  If the practice environment is to enhance player effectiveness and enjoyment, then it must more closely resemble the way games work.

 So, what are the alternatives?  What might the playing field look like?  Firstly, it might be a hive of constant activity.  Movement, activity, physically demanding.  Secondly, there should be enjoyment.  Smiles on red faces are not stimulated by running round the field, dribbling round cones or standing in queues.  Thirdly, the noise should come from the players, not the coaches.  The coach might be stood amongst a throng of moving players, adding occasional advice and questions.  The opposite of this is the frequent sight of a bunch of players gathered around a coach who is delivering endless technical instruction as pupil attention gradually wanes. 

 And there should be games.  After all, that's what it says in the timetable. Few schools list "Random Cone Activity", though that is often what they deliver.  Pupils might frequently enquire, "Can we have a game, sir?", though rarely ask "Can we have a run round the field, and then get the cones out?"  There is a curious reluctance on behalf of some schools to harness the engaging power of play.

 There is an odd tension between whether games sessions in schools should be a pleasure or a duty.  And an inclination towards the latter.  Maybe one of the most effective tasks that a Director of Sport could discharge would be to change what the playing fields look like, and to make clear to the coaches populating them that the success criteria are engagement, activity and challenge.  Skill development is part of the games cocktail, but only part of it.