29: Grow Coach Newsletter
Football Coaching: Developing your coaching craft.
A warm welcome from JustCoachMD. We are happy to have you on board. We are looking forward to providing you with helpful content.
Here is what to expect:
Coaching Craft: Improve your questioning.
Full 60 Minute Practice: Playing through Midfield.
Coach Project: Turn your coaching points into questions.
Being open to skill development is a sure-fire way to improve your coaching craft. Just because you have completed your coaching badges does not mean you have finished learning.
The learning and refining are just beginning. Be a student of the game and experiment with different skills. Here is an area of coaching craft every coach could get better at.
Effective Questioning:
Why do we ask questions?
Coaches ask questions for different reasons, some have been listed below:
Solutions
Possibilities
Connections
Differences
Patterns
Causes
Coaches who are good at asking questions are often able to:
Leave the person feeling good: Regardless if the answer was right or wrong the coach praises the player’s intent to provide an answer.
Allow some thinking time: Top coaches will pose a question and then give the players a chance to go away and think about the answer. Even better the player gets to apply their answers and feedback following a break in play.
Turn your coaching points into questions: Instead of listing off the key factors for the topics you coach. What if you turned each coaching point into a question before you delivered? How might this challenge your players? and change your style of coaching.
Ask how and why type questions: How might and why will questions require a deeper level of thought and often a more detailed response. Less experienced coaches often use lower-level questioning such as what is and where was.
Gives feedback about their responses: Coaches who demonstrate good questioning skills can provide feedback to the players regarding their responses. This could be confirming an answer, posing another question or sharing some possibilities. If you catch people doing things well they are more likely to remember it.
It is important to note that asking good questions takes time. Coaches must be aware that a higher-level question will require a high level of thought. This can eat into playing time. Remember the players are there to play.
Key Tip: Pose a question about a game challenge and ask the players to work on showing you the solutions to the posed question. This helps the player laser in on potential answers.
For example, a coach could set up an activity for the players and ask them:
‘How might they overcome an opponent that presses man to man?’
‘Show me how you could overcome this.’
Give the players 5 minutes or one round of the practice you set up and once you decide on a break, ask for the player’s responses. This means that you start to do most of your coaching in the breaks of play rather than using the stop-stand-still method.
Categories of questions:
The questions you use can be broken into categories (Kagan, 2005).
Skinny questions: Require a yes or no answer with little to no thinking. Also known as closed questions.
Fat questions: Usually require more thinking time and have more than one answer. Often referred to as open questions.
High Consensus: These types of questions mean that you would get the same or similar responses if you asked them in a group setting.
Low Consensus: This is a question where you would get a variety of responses and ideas.
Review questions: Require the players to recall or remember information.
True questions: Call for more thought and detail.
The best combination of question styles are fat, low consensus and true.
Handling Don’t Knows:
There will be times you will ask a question and you will receive I don’t know, a blank face or total silence. There are a variety of strategies you could implement to overcome these moments.
Here are 4 ways to solve this issue:
Forced Choice Offer: If the player tells you they don’t know, give the player a list of choices one of which is the correct answer, if the player gives you the correct answer, follow up with a ‘WHY’. This will make the player explain their thought process. If they still can’t answer then ask their teammates to share their ideas.
Pair Up: Pair the players up with another person who doesn’t know and see if they can share ideas to come up with a response.
Use Prompts: Provide prior information about a session where the learning took place, remember when we … use some reminders and cues to trigger a memory from the player to recall a response.
Rephrase the question: Simplify the question to help the player arrive at a response. So if you ask a player to look for hurtful passes and they keep passing sideways, you might rephrase it to ask instead, why are forward passes hurtful to the opponent?
In Summary
Questioning is a powerful tool that all coaches should look to master to develop independent players who can problem-solve without being told what to do. Turning coaching points into questions is a great way to provoke thinking.
Be mindful of ball rolling time, and the amount of time you dedicate to questioning. Players will learn far more from being in practice than they will from you asking them to imagine it.
Use the drink breaks to pose questions and gather responses. Use in-session stoppages to reinforce key messages when something has been achieved. This provides feedback to the player in a positive way because they have been caught doing something well, which makes it much easier to recall those sorts of memories.
"Average football players complicate the game, great players simplify it”. - Thierry Henry.
Full Practice: Playing Through Midfield to Score
Technical Practice | Passing and Receiving to Score.
⚽️ Created On: @SSPlanner
Aim:
Work on a variety of passing patterns to score.
Set-Up:
In a 20 by 20 yard square position the players as shown. One ⚫️ in each square.
Attach a zone to slide in an attacker toward the goal. Put a GK 🟢in a large goal.
How to Play:
⚫️s perform the passing pattern suggested by the coach.
💬 If you have bigger numbers: Add a 🔴 team who work in the opposite direction repeating the same patterns.
This means there would be 2 players per mini-square and more chaos.
Passing Patterns:
1️⃣ A Zig Zag pattern that passes through each quarter of the larger square.
2️⃣ A Zig Zag pattern with a set pass for the 3rd player in the sequence to play back to the 1st player who slides in the attacker.
➡️ Each pattern aims to create a scoring chance.
Constraints:
🏆Reward: Race to 5 goals, the first player to get 5 goals gets a 1-0 head start for their team in any game at the end of the session.
🚫Restrict: 💡Players have a maximum of 4 passes to combine in any way they see fit and create a scoring chance.
🔂 Players then move around to the next square.
👨🏫Review: The type of passes required at different points during the pattern.
➕ Ball Speed.
➕ Timing of movement to receive the ⚽️
➕ Quality of 1st touch.
➕ Pass into Feet 👣 or Space.
2v1 and 3v2s | Playing Through the Zones to Score.
⚽️ Created On: @SSPlanner
Aim:
Play through the zones to create a scoring chance.
Set-Up:
2 areas are set up.
One area is a 20-yard by 10-yard zone (split in half), plus a 10-yard scoring zone and 2 x mini goals.
The second area is a 10 by 20-yard area with a 15-yard scoring zone added on, there is a 🟢 GK in this zone and a larger goal 🥅.
How to Play:
⚫️ Act as defenders they are fixed in the zones shown.
🔴s are the attackers they play their way through the zones to score.
🔴s play through the zones and try to score in the mini goals or large goals.
⚫️s are the defenders they win the ball and pass to the next pair of waiting attackers.
⚫️s cannot track the🔴s into the scoring zone.
Constraints:
🏆Reward: Wall passes and 1st-time finishes are worth two goals.
🚫Restrict: Attackers only have 10 seconds to score.
👨🏫Review: Spotting the right time to stay on the ball to draw in pressure to play around it.
7v7 | Conditioned Game | Playing Through the Thirds.
⚽️ Created On: @SSPlanner
Aim:
Play through the thirds to score.
Set-Up:
56 by 30-yard pitch split into thirds.
Funel the pitch and have a large goal with a GK at each end.
How to Play:
⚫️ vs 🔴s
Teams have to play through the thirds to score.
The game starts in the build-up zone. Two players build up against one and progress into the middle third.
Teams must make at least one pass in the middle third and then progress into the final third to score.
Four attackers can move into the final third to combine and score and four defenders can recover to stop the attack.
Constraints:
🏆Reward: If a team played through the thirds and scores - they get to keep the ball and have another go.
🚫Restrict: Two-touch limit in the middle third.
👨🏫Review: In the middle third can you receive, turn and be forward-facing?
"When people succeed, it is because of hard work. Luck has nothing to do with success." - Diego Maradona
Coach Project
Objective: Turn your coaching points into questions.
Considerations:
What do you know that you need the players to understand?
Think about what the game picture may look like to support any answers to questions. (Example- what would creating space look like on the field?)
Ensure you create a range of questions with varying degrees of difficulty.
See below for an example of a question matrix. Use this to help you write great questions.
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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