In coaching, there are only two things fully within a coach’s control: the programmes, sessions or practices planned, and the behaviours that the coach chooses to present to the participant(s). These combine to make up your coaching practice and so it makes logical sense to focus on these to ‘control the controllables’.
This guide will introduce you further to the key components that sit within coaching practice and link you to further learning to enhance your coaching.
Mo is a father and is a new coach of his son’s U8 football team. A keen fan and watcher of Monday Night Football, along with many of the other parents, Mo feels he has a good idea of how the game should be played and tries to impart his knowledge on to the children. He has been trying to coach the team the sort of tactical detail he watches on TV but has found that the boys don’t seem to know what they are doing. Especially during matches.
This has led to some frustrations and losses, despite Mo’s best efforts at shouting to tell the boys where they should be during the game. After some time and careful consideration, he realises that perhaps his view of football as an adult is somewhat different to what the children understand it to be. It’s been so long since Mo was that age, it’s difficult to remember what the game was like then for him. There’s less players on the pitch nowadays!
This leads him to reconsider what he is coaching. Is it perhaps too complicated? Is it what the children want to do? They seem to enjoy doing their own thing with the ball a lot of the time. Mo notices that there are different responses to the way that he behaves during training and games from the team and individuals. He starts to wonder what impact his own behaviours have and if there might be a better way to coach his participants.
Mo also thinks that maybe he has felt some pressure from the other parents and other teams to win matches. After all, there’s quite a big crowd at the games with all the parents, grandparents, aunties, and uncles from both teams who can make quite a noise. The first questions that his friends and work colleagues tend to ask after the weekend is, ‘Did the boys win? What was the score?’.
He also doesn’t sleep well the night before a game anyway and a heavy loss takes until Monday or Tuesday to be forgotten about whilst the kids seem back to their lively selves by the same afternoon. He starts to question why he feels like this and wonders whether he is being subtly influenced without realising. The starting line-up, minutes on the pitch and substitutions are all things that have caused Mo concerns and occupied his thoughts both before and during the match. He starts to examine why this is and consider what he can do about it.
Although fictional, Mo’s story is not uncommon to the many thousands of coaches across all different sports in the UK. By regularly engaging with such guiding questions, coaches can more successfully select their methods and approaches to coaching and start to better understand their pedagogy.