COACHING LANGUAGE

                                     

I've discussed coaching language before a little bit on this site in the past and it's still very much a very underappreciated skill in any coaching job.

What you say and how you say it can have HUGE implications on how your players interpret it.

Any interaction between coach and player generally follows this loop:

1. What You Said
2. What You Think You Said
3. What the Player Heard
4. What Your Player Understands
5. What Your Player Remembers

It's a massive game of Chinese Whispers within specific football context and we all know how the same story passed down the line can change dramatically from the 1st person to the last.

Football has a similar but maybe worse issue in that coaches are telling 20 - 40 players the same message 1 singular way.

If you go back to the interaction loop above it's easy to see how that 1 message can get interpreted 20 - 40 different ways.

The language you use matters a lot more than you think and after 36 years of footy I've heard the same shit repeated each year around footy:

"I want you to come off f$&ked"...

"Hit'em hard!"...

"We owe these c$#ts!"...

Emotive language for sure but emotions are fleeting and to think that will carry a team of 22 different players for 2 solid hours in ridiculous.

I read about a famous soccer coach not long ago who basically said that coaches who use a lot of words are simply deflecting their actual lack of coaching ability and I tend to agree.

The simplier you communicate your coaching to your players, the better.

The simplier messages you coach to your players, the better.

I was watching a game review a coach had done for a player on social media earlier today and he mentioned "multiple efforts".

The player gathered the ball, handballed to a teammate that got defelcted, they regained the ball in the same motion and tapped it out to the original player they tried to handball to.

Now as everything was displyed in the same motion then there was only 1 effort, a continuous effort that involved multiple ACTIONS.

Seems pedantically picky doesn't it?

Well yes and no.

If you want a player to display multiple efforts then if they think that multiple efforts is actually mutiple actions in a single effort, then the actual multiple efforts you are asking for may never happen.

As a coach you than would perceive "multiple efforts" as a weakness for this player when in fact according to the player, they might say "but I tried 3 different things there - I picked up the ball, I handballed it, got it back and handballed it again."

What might have been missing from the player is the change of direction after that last handball/tap on from above to shepard an opposition player from pressuring the ball carrier.

As momentum is needed to be altered and a change of direction required, that would be classed as 2 seperate efforts - the gather/handball/re-gather/handball effort and the change of direction and shepard effort.

All up you're got 6 actions and 2 efforts in the space if 2 - 3 seconds.

For 2021 I challenge each and every coach to work hard on the language they use and the context they use it in which can be assisted through the development of a game model, instilling a team language/code and more individual or team line coaching, over full team coaching in games and during training.