The Grassroots Football Show is fast upon us and the question I have for you today is, when going to such an event as this, how can you maximise your learning and personal development as a coach? There will be loads going on, lots of ‘ big names’ delivering coaching sessions and plenty to watch and see, but what are you actually observing?
I’ve been to this show each year since it first started way back through the days in London and Coventry to where it has reached its’ home for the last few years at the NEC. I have seen many sessions from some excellent ones to some horrors. I remember one former England player / Premier League Manager delivering a session that was quite frankly one of the worst coaching sessions I have ever seen with children. What worries me is that if inexperienced coaches watch those kind of things and think they are the way forward the whole coaching world goes back 15 years!
Then you have the other extreme I have watched, another former Premier League manager deliver a top drawer session on working with a back four with a huge amount of technical detail and content. It then worried me that this session, pitched at U16+ in my opinion, would have been copied by U9 coaches across the land and we would have Mini-Soccer teams being coached in this manner! It’s about the balance.
So, you turn up, loads going on, you have a wander round the stands and exhibition area and get as many free things as possible; the standard stuff each year! You have a look at the programme and realise there are some sessions going on you would like to see. But what do you see when you take your seat?
Here are some top tips for ‘seeing’ the right things:
Copy the X’s and O’s - this for me is the first thing you need to get an understanding of; how many players is the coach working with, what age, what size is the area, do they have an overload in a particular area and if so, why. Get this scribbled down pronto as this isn’t the important part!
How does the practice start - try and get a grip of the mechanics of how the practice starts and progresses. Where does the ball begin, is it with the GK or somewhere else? What happens when the defending team get the ball? What are the rules of the game? Get this scribbled down sharpish as this isn’t the important part either!
This is the important part... Watch the coach. Listen to the coach.
When I was a younger and less experienced/greyer(!) coach, I would go and watch good coaches work, copy down their sessions, take them back to my kids like a hunter-gatherer to feed them with this new food. I would then proudly organise as per my diagram I had neatly copied and then wonder why it didn’t work!!
That’s because the devil is in the detail. Not the detail of the game so much but of what the coach does and what the coach says.
Therefore, when you are sitting in the stand watching an expert coach deliver, watch closely - where do they move? What are they focusing their attention on? How do they interact with the players? How do they feedback points for the players to learn and develop from - as a group? With individuals?
And then listen closely - what do they say? What questions do they ask? How do they phrase the question? What technical detail do they provide?
THIS is coaching.
