Connecting, themes and learning
How I connect what the players are doing in training to a bigger picture to help their learning
How do we, as coaches, get players to concentrate on specific areas at training? Imagine you’re taking a photo. Although what you’ve got within your whole frame is important, you can bring certain areas into focus.
What you bring into focus, changes the picture.
I’m remembering James Clark’s guest post, when he discussed framing conversations and observations around the session’s aims.
When I coach, I often have session themes or focuses. These not only help me concentrate on specific areas but they also help players isolate different parts of the game and (I hope) see their improvements more clearly.
It’s important to let your players in on the trick. Communicate to them what the session’s theme is.
You don’t have to do that at the start. You could set up a series of activities and let them guess what the focus is.
That’s a fun way of getting players to explore ‘the why’ behind each activity and what they’ve learnt.
You can also communicate session themes by being careful with your language. Only asking questions or praising players around the session focus, is one way.
I’ve started making the switch to having a core focus over a few sessions. I refer to it as a training block. These training blocks have been: pressure, support, tactical warfare and space invaders.
Prior to this, each week might have had a different focus. Whilst this was good; I was picking aspects I felt the team needed to improve on, it often felt too fragmented.
I often also failed to properly communicate the theme, meaning that sometimes the message was getting muddled or lost.
Reflecting and improving is a vital skill for all coaches. Standalone sessions are still important, but I now use blocks of training as well.
Using session blocks, there is a core theme, but each training could involve different aspects (scrums, attack, rucks etc). This means for the players and myself there is a common language or use of terms across the block.
Players can get familiar with co-creating language, using terms and connecting them with the gameplay. I’ve found it also makes the sense of learning and improvement more impactful - simply because we’re not leaping from aim to aim each week.
Priming the session
As well as crafting sessions that relate to each theme. I also like to use prompts to help players. I try to use a variety of media.
One example is when players arrive at training. There may be a question written up for them to answer or think about. This question will relate to the session block.
It’s important to warm up players mentally as well as physically. A prompt when they arrive at training, helps get them thinking. I’ll also sometimes just remind them of the theme and what the session may contain.
When writing questions, I’ve posed the players questions that aren’t too difficult. The team has just arrived from work/life and onto the training pitch, therefore I’ve tried to set questions that warm them up rather than scare them off.
You wouldn’t set up a warm up activity that was too physical, so I apply the same principle to any mental warm ups.
Another way I prompt the group is within the group chat. I will sometimes post videos that apply to the session block. Often I will set up a gif guessing game. I will post several gifs that become clues.
Players aim to guess what the session block is. I find it engages me, gets me excited about the next block of learning the team is about to undertake and it gets players guessing.
After all, playing, learning and coaching should be fun at every level.