Developing Creative Players...first you need to understand creative people!

One of the most common phrases I hear up and down the country is the distinct lack of creative players in the English game, currently possessing an English passport. Whilst we talk lots about wanting to develop this, the real question is, what do they look like and how do we foster these traits on the grass? I’m going to start by sharing some findings from a research study to help our understanding of just what it is we should be looking for within our children and I’ll attempt to add the football architecture to the plot.

1.   Associative orientation: The people with creative talents may well be more imaginative, playful and have a wealth of different ideas. They have an ability to be committed yet slide transitions between fact and fiction.

In the football world, have you come across the player that wants to talk about lots of different ways to approach things? The ones that when you show them a tactics board will move all the counters, proudly saying “...and then he could run here, and she could pass the ball down to him, and he could run into there and cross it here....” – recognise those ones? Try not to miss the conversations these players are starting, as whilst they might not be what you want at that time and a little frustrating, they are sharing a unique insight into the creativity of their mind.

2.   Need for originality: The creative ones will often resists rules and convention; not sticking to what is expected. Some really creative people will have a rebellious attitude because of a need to do things no one else does.

When you are setting up a practice and the focus of learning is on a particular skill, but one player doesn’t want to do that one, they want to make up their own trick and try something different - can you think of many players that do this? I can remember one boy I used to coach that used to drive me barmy doing this, not focusing on the learning I originally thought, but actually this is often where the best and newest ideas come from. The Cruyff turn? Ronaldo’s free kick technique? Ideas developed through play and exploration then honed through practice.

3.   Motivation: Creative people have a need to perform, are incredibly goal oriented and possess an innovative attitude. They often have the staying power and stamina to tackle difficult issues.

Match day comes round, you’ve been working in training during the week on ‘when to pass and when to dribble’ yet all of this seems lost as Mr. Creative decides to try and take on two players in the middle of the pitch, loses the ball and the other team score... I think we have all been there. Our immediate reaction as a rationale adult with a fully developed brain is ‘has he not learnt anything this week’ but for that player, they were just having a go at something new! Rather than worry about the score as the outcome, engage them in a conversation on performance and allow them to start making the links.

4.   Ambition: The people with bundles of creativity have a need to be influential, to attract attention and recognition.

It is very easy as an adult to confuse this with ‘showing off’, the player that likes to be centre of attention. Transfer this across different domains and think about this at school, through the eyes of the music teacher, drama teacher or art teacher. What does a creative child look like there? They may showcase their talents in a very different way and often the very best in those domains are not the showing off types. In a football sense, try and spot the players in your group that like to try different ideas, that aren’t afraid of getting it wrong in front of others. Under the surface their brain may be calculating different ways to make that attempt better.

5.   Flexibility: Creative brains have the ability to see different aspects of issues and come up with optimal solutions.

Coaches have the ability to facilitate learning across a multitude of different levels; helping players get better at football is one way but also helping them become better people is vitally important too. The way you structure your coaching can help promote this. For example, when splitting up the team into small groups to develop tactics and strategies to solving a particular problem you have set them, consider the outcomes closely. There are certainly the specific football parts that will be developed but it’s vital you listen to the process as much as the outcome. Who has a different view to other people? Who offers something that others haven’t considered? Who see’s the problem from a different perspective to other people? They might be your creative talents.

6.   Low emotional stability: Creative people have a tendency to experience negative emotions, greater fluctuations in moods and emotional state and a failing self-confidence.

There is no denying it, the most talented players of different generations are often the flawed genius, bringing with them challenges in other areas of their life, compensated by wild extremes. Do you recognise this in some of your players? We often associate these traits with different ages and stages of maturation, of which many are, but sometimes there is a knock-on effect to our coaching style also. How do we manage these young people? There is a great saying that coaches need to adjust their style of delivery to the learner, not the learner needing to adjust to them. Some players require an arm round the shoulder at times and if our default style is a little more towards the other end of the spectrum it is important we recognise this.

7.   Low sociability: The most creative have a tendency not to be very considerate, are often obstinate and will find faults and flaws in ideas and people.

The creative ones will view a problem through a different lens to the other players, not in a ‘concrete sequential’ kind of manner, but with more ‘random and abstract’ thinking. If they don’t see their team mates sorting out a challenge in a way they would, when they consider their ideas to be better, they will often demonstrate frustration and criticise the plan. Managing this in terms of developing their people skills is important, helping them understand that listening to different views can be beneficial and it shows good emotional intelligence and empathy towards other people.

As you will notice, some of these traits sound positive, such as the motivation, but others can sound hard work within a team environment. The challenge for you as a coach is to recognise these exist and then manage them, not stifle their creativity. Managing your own frustrations is an important part and understand that by setting the right environment, you have the ability to foster some absolute creative geniuses, maybe not in the professional football sphere, but in their wider life. And that is really important.

Nick Levett

FA National Development Manager (Youth Football)

@nlevett

Øyvind L. Martinsen. The Creative Personality: A Synthesis and Development of the Creative Person Profile. Creativity Research Journal, 2011; 23 (3): 185.

'8 questions' to consider before the new season...

“I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process.” (Shelby Foote)

For a coach, to be reflective and have self-awareness is incredibly important. It helps you understand where you come from, what has influenced you and appreciate your own actions. I came across a few of the questions below, linked to teaching, that can have great influence for your own development as a coach and before the new season kicks in it might be worth considering some of these. Ultimately, time spent thinking about the answers will help make it better for the learner.

1.   Why are my most powerful sessions powerful?

You go to coaching, deliver a session and the children love it. You go home feeling electric, on a self-fulfilled legal high having organised some learning that gave some young people a wonderful experience and a great time.

Other weeks you deliver a different session, they aren’t well received, the children act up causing you more stress and you leave feeling deflated.

So what’s the difference? How can you take what works from the good sessions and extend to others? Was it you, your manner and approach? Was it the practice?

2.   What simple tools are available to me to help personalise instruction?

Learning is a fluid process and different fads come and go but one thing that will never leave is personalised learning for individual learners.

Providing learners with the right environment to learn, whether this is through small group work to develop a tactic or strategy, the type of questions you choose to ask to different children, or using different methods of assessment to chart the development of the players is bang on current trend – a trend that is not going to go away. So what are the ‘easy to access’ tools that can help with personalising learning?

Choice boards – http://www.teachingwithsimplicity.com/2013/07/choice-board.html

Exit slips - http://www.readwritethink.org/professional-development/strategy-guides/exit-slips-30760.html

Flipped training ground - http://www.washington.edu/teaching/teaching-resources/flipping-the-classroom/

Project-based learning - http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/feb08/vol65/num05/Project-Based_Learning.aspx

Self-directed learning - http://www.selfdirectedlearning.com/teaching-self-directed-learning-tools.html

Some of these ideas increase in complexity quite quickly but having a look at a variety of concepts and matching them with your situation is the key. If you are volunteer coach, with a full-time job and a family, you may choose a different option to a full-time coach whose job is to develop players.

3.   Where did I waste time last season?

There is something you do that wastes time and it may not be obvious. Letting a quick conversation with a parent eat into valuable practice time? Move cones around mid-session for different pitches that could have been planned better before? Start putting children in bibs once they are ready to play? Talked too long to the group on an intervention?

Try to highlight them, or work with your co-coach to spot them, and take them out the equation.

4.   Where did my best ideas come from?

The practices and games that really flow, that captivate the attention of the players and hook them into a feeling of enjoyment and progression, where did they come from?

Your colleagues? A course or in-service training event? Books, the internet or social media? Other coaches you have seen work?

Select the ones that worked, do more of them, and less of the ones that didn’t. If in doubt, ask the children what they thought.

5.   How can I use my strengths?

You may not be organised but you might be incredibly creative when making up practices. Your sessions might not look neat and tidy but you understand the game is messy and therefore vital for learning and development.

You have a personality that inspires children to want to try really hard but you aren’t so good at reflecting on what went well within the session.

So how can you use what you do naturally well to your advantage, recognise the other parts and work on them, to improve your overall performance?

6.   How do I respond to stress?

This question appears a strange one but you know the season won’t be without it and if you have run a team or coached for a long time, you know it occurs! So what strategy do you employ when times are tough?

Do you shout at the children more often? Take it out on your own son or daughter more than the other players? Play the weaker players even less if you are trying to hang on for a draw? Think more about your coaching and game day plans? Complicate things a lot more than they need to be?

Be aware of how you respond in pressure situations and challenge yourself to act differently before it happens, pre-empting your behaviour and ensuring that it fits with your philosophy and goals for the season.

If giving equal playing time for children is what you stand for as a coach, find tactics to ensure this still happens in the games that might be closer in score line. How can you manage your own expectations before the event, and that of others?

7.   What has changed since last year?

It is highly likely that a few things will have moved on, both from a process perspective in terms of how you go about running a team and possibly the actual foundations of this too – the format of football, the approach to competition, the rules that we play etc.

Understanding these are likely to change and what you need to do to prepare correctly can change how you planned for the previous season.

Equally, how have other things moved on, like technology? Can you work with your players in a different way by taking an iPad to training, loading up some clips from You Tube of Messi or Ronaldo in action and showing these as a means of demonstration when you are talking about improving their dribbling?

Better still, can you set them the task of finding out these skills and bringing along to coaching or match day to help improvement?

Every year things change – new software, new politics, new rules. Stay ahead of the game and adapt your planning and delivery accordingly.

8.   What’s my focus?

Without doubt, your focus should be on helping your children. But what does that mean to you? And in pursuit of that, there are loads of other smaller goals along the way – to give game-based learning a chance, to improve the quality of questions the learners receive, to focus more on player-centred outcomes.

Plus you probably want to develop a better relationship with your players, get better at coaching and enjoy the experience more than the previous season.

Having a focus doesn’t mean you don’t make these sort of commitments to yourself, that’s also really important. So pick a topic, try and learn more about it and have a go – Google it, skim Twitter, ask colleagues, read books.

It’s crucial that you then reflect and think back and be honest with yourself about how it all turns out. Above all, enjoy getting better too!

It's more than balls, bibs and cones, it's about people.

It’s just about ‘people’…

The more I think about things now, the more I’m coming to the conclusion that the development of young people in sport comes down to one key thing; relationships between people. The content of the technical components, the actual information you provide to help a learner improve, qualifications, the size of the pitch and all those other bits are often secondary. And I think this extends beyond sport into everyday life and business too.

I turned on the TV earlier this week and stumbled across ‘The Undercover Boss’, a programme where the Chief Executive of a large company goes incognito and down to the floor level of the organisation to find out what really goes on, the thoughts and feelings of the people that work for them. This episode happened to be about Biffa, the national refuse collection company. As ‘Mark’ donned his stubble and glasses he learnt a very clear lesson, demonstrated in the Boardroom – ‘this company is built on the foundations of good people’ and if you treat the people well, guess what, productivity increases, staff retention increases and costs are lowered. And for CEO’s, often that means profitability goes up too.  This finding has been replicated across all the episodes I’ve seen.

Think about the people in your life that make a difference, what are they like? How do they make a difference? What do they do differently? What can you remember about your teachers from school? I’m guessing the memories will either be very positive or very negative and often based around how they made you feel as a person?

I’ve interviewed A’ Licence and Pro Licence coaches for jobs they have applied for to work in primary schools and not actually appointed many of them, despite being way more qualified than the ones we have selected. Why - because it’s much more than the piece of paper. Does that coach have the ability to enthuse, inspire and captivate the imagination of young people? Do they actually like working with children? That’s ultimately what we are looking for in a coach. Would that coach be appropriate in a different setting, possibly yes, but we are at a crucial time now in the development of sport where we need the right coach with the right age group.

The person delivering the coaching, their make up and them as a person can essentially make or break everything. If they have the right traits, their character can ignite and accelerate a young person’s curiosity, learning and love for the game. If young people acquire these facets they will source the technical components themselves or ask questions of other people to find them out.

If they aren’t the right character as a person, they can do severe damage long-term to that child and put them off playing sport for life. The knock-one effect can then carry to their children, due to the impact of socialisation.

Who the ‘right person’ is becomes a debate but I feel you can drill it all the way down to being a good human being. Putting the interests of others before your own, helping out young people on their voyage towards self-discovery and just being nice to children goes a long way. We learn in the modern world through collaboration, interacting with other people, so the coach that can facilitate this beyond just being ‘the font of all knowledge’ him or herself is on to a winner.

Within grassroots football, we are developing more than footballers; it is about developing better people. All the dynamics that being involved in a team sport can bring you - understanding people from different communities, working in small teams, developing tactical and strategic thinking, allowing creativity to flourish, recognising that different people have different skill sets that make a team function and become high performing. These are all skills now valued by the modern day businesses.

It is often helpful to understand yourself before you can start to help others. How has your journey impacted on your own life? What has been the speed bumps along the way that has shaped you as a person and your character? If you can start to understand these you can then start to understand helping others. Emotional intelligence it might be known as, and if you like reading, try Daniel Goleman’s work as a starter for ten.

Coaching by its nature involves the interaction between people and the coach needs to allow the recipient to become part of the process; ultimately, we want to develop an independent thinking learner that can take responsibility for their own learning (when they are ready). 

We can then go a long way to developing a generation of young people that can flourish in the future, whatever sport, work or life throws at them.