One of the delights of coaching at a Professional Club is the level of debate and discussion that goes on between more experienced coaches. My session yesterday was not delivered by myself but by a coach coming in for an interview for one of the vacant coaching slots we have available for this coming season.
With the new U9's still in the early stages and most of them off on holidays, they joined the U10's again to make a better number in the group. The lad coming in to deliver, nice guy, asked lots of questions of us, the kids and the Academy; a very good start. Once into the session, he had a great manner with the boys, very impressed with that, lots of demonstrations but maybe some more learning to do.
However, whilst he was doing his thing, it gave Del, the lead coach of the U9's, Geoff, the Assistant Academy Manager and myself, the chance to throw some random ideas around, with conversation ebbing and flowing from the importance of self-reflection (hence for me, this blog), how vital it is to spend time with good coaches to learn and how to plan for flow/tempo/structure of coaching sessions. Within the mix was also a very eloquent 'rant' from Geoff about how players in this country aren't technically lacking of our European counterparts, but skilfully deficient instead.
An important part of gathering feedback on the session that took place, beyond the subjective opinion of the three of us, is to ask the children. That for me is a vital test on the session - What did they like? What didn't they like? This is a clear indicator on whether or not the session has been well received, what they enjoyed and what they found confusing.
Whilst doing my day job, I had an excellent meeting with an American child development expert I have been doing some work with; a fascinating guy. We have started work on developing a model around the interactions between coach/player/parent/game and the detail that underpins the relationships of each with the other. One of the things we started to discuss was developing a process so that players can evaluate your coaching, because if you don't know what they think of it, how can you improve right? An iPad app, for example, for there and then feedback.
For some coaches this will be scary, and quite a brave thing to do, as this will potentially open themselves up for things they don't want to wistfully hear. But how can you improve if you don't ask the children? Finding the way they can be honest and constructive in their feedback, without fear of repercussion, that produces some information to help us all get better is the challenge. Hands up who wants to pilot this?!
On our Holiday Programme last week, we gave each player a Player Board - a big sheet of A2 paper each, pinned up in our indoor break area. Coaches had a sheet too, and players could give us feedback after each session on what we had done well etc as coaches, what they thought of the session. See: http://www.ministry-of-football.com/holiday-programmes/
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting way to tackle coach learning and education and I'd be very happy to be part of any pilot scheme you may have planned.
ReplyDeleteCurrently coaching in Kingston, Surrey.
Picking up on your point on instant feedback for coaches from the players, this type of thing is happening in some schools now, with gifted and talented students completing ofsted type tick sheets during certain lessons and questionnaires being given to the students to provide feedback.
ReplyDeleteThis is definitely the way forward and has changed the way a friend of mine teaches kids with different abilities. Definitely something that could be taken to the training pitch!