GAME SENSE COACHING APPROACH TO AFL BOOK REVIEW

 

Shane Pill is a PE Teacher and Author who runs his own site called Learning Through Sport.

I've been following him for about a year and a half now and he's always putting out good information that has been through the trenches throughout his coaching and teaching duties covering a variety of sports, with AFL being one of them.

His thing is along the lines of game based training with a purpose so instead of just setting up a mini-game of football and letting the kids go, you would develop a game involving the skills you want to develop, use rules/constraints that highlight them, set an acheivable goal then let the kids/players self explore themselves through it.

It's definitely an athlete-centered approach where the coach acts more of a facilitator who creates the ideal environment to elicit the change/improvement you would like to see.

Throughout the gamed the coach then would allow pause breaks for questions and discussion about what's currently happening and to also ask players for idea's about how they can better go about it. 

He has plenty of articles on the site linked above so I would strongly encourage you to go back through those (I have) but here's a peak at what's in the book.

There are 6 basic levels to the book:

1. Games for Fundamental Sport Skill Development
2. Games to Refine Sport Specific Skill Development
3. Games to Develop Attack and Defense Structures
4. Developing Practice Plans
5. Developing a Game Plan
6. Task Cards/Session Plans

Each level sort of matches up to an increase in player age as you can see by the subjects of each level.

Each level starts with basic questions to ask throughout this level as alluded to above followed by 10 - 20 training drills that you can use for different scenarios/activity goals.

Each level finishes with a game simulation activity you can do suitable for the level these players are at.

I've used a lot of stuff I've read from Shane's articles in my own writings so if you like the content I release then you'll love this.

Every junior club should have this book and have it available for all junior coaches to use to base their training sessions on.