From the start of October until mid-November I was reading the bad boy in the image above by Dr Fergus Connolly who has worked EVERYWHERE such as the EPL, NFL, NBA, AFL and in World Rugby too.
He's regarded as a "Mr. Fix It" type, and his views on sports science and preparation is years ahead of his time.
I have about 20 blog posts to come on this book, all 450 pages of it but I'll softly touch on a few here that we'll try implementing this season with my own team.
STRATEGY V TACTICS
An often overlooked part of coaching is the language and actual words used to instruct players.
These 2 things sound and look the same but they are very different and knowing how they're different is very important if everyone is to be on the same road.
Strategy is a plan or set of goals.
Tactics is the specific actions/steps you'll take to accomplish the strategy.
Without strategy you'll amber through as you're not really playing for anything but to win but you're not always going to win so there's need to be more that the team and the players are judged on.
Without tactics you're basically hoping that everything just works out, which we know is not a great long or short term solution.
To go a few steps further you then have the grand strategy that is looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead but all 3 steps need to addressed consistently.
GAME MODEL
Most team sports have 4 macro moments being offense, transition defense, defense and transition offense.
As a coach you need to organise and articulate your standards and tactics in each phase of play.
The offensive macro moment will refer to construction, penetration and execution.
The transition defensive macro moment will refer to disruption, organisation and direction.
The defensive macro moment will refer to dispossession, termination and isolation.
The transitional offensive macro moment will refer to movement, direction and space.
You need to detail how you'll carry out each point of each phase and this is essentially your play book.
This will also make it easier to evaluate each aspect post-games.
In training design and implement more training drills and/or games that train multiple macro moments rather than spending all your time on 1 or 2 of them.
TIME AND SPACE
The ultimate of everything you try and do is to create time and space.
This sounds easy enough in theory but you need to know that space creates time but time does not always create space.
Sit on that for a second.......
To create space in 1 area you need to compress players in another and this needs to occur all over the ground but needs a team first approach as only 1 player can get the ball.
If a player gets enough time then they can achieve almost anything, regardless of ability, but creating space gives them this time.
PRACTICE VS TRAINING
Piggybacking off the first point in this post, you also need to know the difference between practice and training.
Practice is a method of learning existing skills.
Training is the acquisition of new skills.
This is good to know because at local/amateur level there is varied level of skill and game sense between your playing group that can consist of 60, and in our case up to 80 players.
What this can allow you to do is to break your playing group up into practice and training groups for each part of your game model instead of hoping that everyone just gets it from talking about it pre-game for 5mins.
Lower level players might do a lot more practice of lower end skill work while your top end players might do more training to expand their repertoire of skills and game sense.
I bet you thought that would be the opposite way around hey?
Essentially both groups will swing from practice to training at different stages.
You can use data from your player profiling that we discussed earlier this week too.
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