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Here is what to expect:
Coaching Craft: 3 Ideas on how to develop your coaching craft.
Session Share: 5v3 Stepping in to play and a 5v5 conditioned game
Coach Project: Create a noticing plan for a football topic of your choice.
Your coaching craft is a set of skills, tools and techniques that help you express yourself as a coach. They allow you to share ideas, messages, and content with the players you coach.
Here are 3 ways you could enhance your coaching craft:
Noticing
Pre-session, think about what you would like to notice within your sessions.
Have you ever delivered a session with your attention on everything but the theme or topic you want to coach?
What is happening here? You are distracting yourself? You’re trying to fix everything too quickly and this dilutes the quality of the coaching you could provide to the players.
This firefighting approach (putting out fires/trying to fix everything) to coaching can drain you and leave you exhausted by the time the session ends.
As coaches, we should facilitate the learning instead of dictating it. We should be sharing problems from the game and creating a practice environment where the player needs to overcome them and the coaches offer guidance and support.
The solution to the chaotic coaching mentioned above. Narrow your focus and attention toward some core themes and ideas. Do this before you set foot on the grass and you will be clearer on what you are going after when you coach.
Take some time to plan:
1-2 important messages for the group.
Constraints that a unit in the team may need to overcome/achieve.
Challenges for individuals to try that link with the session themes.
Mix these ideas up each session, for example, you may provide a group challenge an individual constraint and a message for a unit in the team.
Here is an example:
Theme:
Using changes of speed to beat opponents.
Noticing plan:
Notice players using skill and speed to beat opponents and celebrate with the player when you catch them doing it.
Messages: Can you use a change of speed to eliminate an opponent?
Challenges: Can players go from slow to fast? Are players able to use fast feints to level up their disguise?
Constraints (rewards, restrict, review):
🏆Reward: The player who is best at using changes of speed earns an orange vest to wear to show they are on fire at what they have been asked to do.
🚫Restrict: Defenders to certain zones or areas that players have to accelerate through
👨🏫Review: Can you stop the defender still then use a change of speed to escape?
Pausing:
The pause does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a method used to stop the practice and offer some support, reflection or questioning. It is a great way to share a picture of something you have seen or to slow everything down to a stop so the player can process everything that’s going on.
Pauses work well with rewinds. For example, Stop the session and tell everyone to rewind by 5 seconds, 5 steps etc then pause. Do this to reset a key picture you have seen that you need the players to understand. From this point, you can offer support, reflection or questioning.
Be careful not to pause for too long, you need to hit the play button again relatively quickly. You have around 30 - 60 seconds to share a message or get ideas across. After this point, you might lose the player’s attention.
Don’t overuse the pause, from my experience you have 2-3 pauses max per session then players will start to get frustrated. Save pauses for take-home messages that are relevant to everyone.
You can use micro pauses with Individuals. Get on the pitch with them while a practice is going on and question the player. Try to understand what they have seen or their intent behind a decision.
If a player or group of players are frustrated, annoyed, or in a negative place the pause can be a great way to reset the mood by saying something positive or attempting to shift the player’s focus.
Pauses are great for improving a player’s game understanding and checking in on the actions a player took to achieve a set outcome.
Replaying:
A replay is an opportunity to go again. If you are working on an important skill or tactic (set pieces, tactical patterns, defensive shape) the replay of the action can be a useful tool in many ways.
If a player or group make a mistake then you can give them the chance to redeem themselves with a replay.
Offering a set number of replays per practice can be a great way to help the players self-correct, fix an issue that you have noticed, or discuss something the players have identified.
It offers a way of giving repetition without it being repetitive. Players rerun but it would not be an exact copy of the previous run.
Have coach-led replays and player-led replays. Player-led replays can be a great way for the coach to check understanding whilst giving some ownership over to the players. Coach-led replays are great for sharing key messages with players.
Replays increase the pressure to get an aspect of performance right. If you give a player the chance to replay or rerun with a consequence, then this carries the expectation of a certain standard of performance.
The replay is a good way of placing value on key technical and tactical aspects of practice.
CAUTION IF USING REPLAYS:
Context is important and the power of the message can be lost if you abuse the use of the replay. The replay is one of the tools that coaches can use to share a message. It works well alongside pauses and rewinds.
The pundit-type approach to coaching could offer a great way of condensing information to share with players.
Pre-session the coach creates their noticing plan around a coaching topic then uses pauses, rewinds, and replays as part of the coaching process to get these messages across.
"I always felt that our triumphs were an expression of the constant application of discipline. Once you bid farewell to discipline you say goodbye to success." - Sir Alex Ferguson.
Session Shares
5v3 Possession | Stepping In to Retain the Ball.
⚽️ Created On: @SSPlanner
Aim:
Creating opportunities for players to step into a congested space and retain possession of the ball.
Set-Up:
20 by 20 space plus a 4-yard zone added onto each side of the main playing box.
The game starts as a 5v3 in the central square.
How to Play:
A team of 5 ⚫️s starts in the central space vs 3 🔴 defenders.
The team of 3 🔴s win the ball and find their players on the outside.
2 players from the attacking team ⚫️s must transition to the blue zones, one on each side.
Scoring:
6 passes in a row.
A wall pass around a defender.
A regain from a defender then a pass out of the central square and the player who brings the ball in completes a pass.
Constraints:
🏆Reward: A second ball for good play that overcomes pressure.
🚫Restrict: Place a touch limit on the players bringing the ball into the practice.
👨🏫Review: Can players spot the right time to speed up or slow down the tempo of the practice?
5v5 | Conditioned Game | Create Scoring Chances.
⚽️ Created On: @SSPlanner
Aim:
Create scoring chances using combination play.
Set-Up:
50 by 35-yard space.
Set up the space but add on a 5-yard shaded scoring zone that’s split in half. (One for each team).
Optional: Half the pitch vertically to aid the scoring of goals.
Each team has 2 mini goals to attack and 2 to defend.
How to Play:
Teams play a normal game but there are three ways of scoring.
1️⃣ Dribble into the blue zone on one side and cross for a player to finish 1st time on the other.
2️⃣ A diagonal pass from one (vertical) half of the pitch for a straight run into the shaded zone (finish 1st time).
3️⃣ A diagonal run from one half of the pitch (vertical) for a straight pass into the shaded zone (finish 1st time).
⛔️Defenders are not allowed into the shaded zones. They can only defend the space in front of them.
Constraints:
🏆Reward: ➕If you score using all three methods in a game period you get a bonus goal.
🚫Restrict: ✔️Can you time a run to arrive at the ball? ✔️ Can you play an accurate pass into a runner’s space?
👨🏫Review: ➖Take away one of the scoring choices.
"Don't be scared to be ambitious. It's not a humiliation to have a high target and to fail. For me, the real humiliation is to have a target and not to give everything to reach it." - Arsene Wenger
Coach Project
Objective: Create a noticing plan for a football theme of your choice.
Considerations:
Identify the key aspects of performance you want to notice.
Outline some key messages that you would like the players to take away with them.
Create some challenges that you could issue to some individuals in the group.
Please feel free to get in touch or share your ideas, actions, and interventions. We would love to hear from you. If you have any questions, post them here; we will do our best to answer them.
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