Dan Lycett on Coaching Contact
As part of 'Tackle week', I chat to Head of PE and Sport St Davids College, Dan Lycett, about coaching contact on Challenging the Game podcast. Here's some thought-provoking moments.
“Part of our contact work and whole curriculum revolves around functional movement, it’s about trying to get kids to be better movers.
We have what we call a squishy room. It's an old squash courtroom with loads of soft gymnastics equipment. In that room, we get children to explore, try different things and to fail and try again.
Our attempts are to build psychological safety around the physical nature of physical education, and being physically active. So a pupil might say: ‘I want to try and do a somersault or a cartwheel or a dive forward roll.’
It might go wrong repeatedly, but it's a really safe environment. So when we go into something like rugby, they've done more failing than they might have done otherwise.
We also do a lot of grapple work, this takes place inside and outside of a game. Games might include holding someone up or ripping the ball.
We’ve started a game with a collision. Our language was about how fast the rucks were. If the teams rucks were over a certain speed, it was a turnover.
Straight away, the players were trying to find space pre-contact, so the collisions were lessened. Then they thought about how they fell and presented the ball.
I think it's important to create more fun or small-sided things where players can make decisions in the game. The players’ sense of autonomy and choice is important in them building up their perception of skill sets and their own repertoire of how to solve problems.”
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