GOT MYSELF A NEW COACHING GIG

                                         

I've managed to score a coaching gig at one of the grammar schools in Melbourne for term 2 and I'm pretty pumped about it.

I'll be 1 of 2 coaches of the senior 2nds team for the school but it's a pretty quick turnaround with induction on Tuesday then training on the students first day of term 2 school on Wednesday, where the assumption is they'll be all over the place in terms of motivation and concentration on top of the fact that I won't know a thing about them and vice versa, but that's one of the many joys of coaching!

To make the matters tougher, the other coach now can't make the first few weeks of the season and if we can't find a replacement I might be on my own for a little while but no biggie.

So on the back of this latest development I started jotting down what Wednesday training might look like and here's what I come up with.

#1 - ICE BREAKER

Even though training is compulsory there will still be a huge range of why players are there from wanting to play footy, to hanging with mates to not wanting to be there at all, so I've got to make the very first experience for all players positive one.

I will start with a game that requires little instruction, is light but competitive and sure to bring plenty of laughs and smiles before any actual coaching takes place, hoping to attain their engagement that carries throughout the session.

If you can win them over early then you'll have a better chance of keeping them "in" over the long term.

#2 - WHAT DO I WANT TO FIND OUT?

The head of boys sport has already made a list of the 1st and 2nds teams based off of last year which I will get Tuesday at induction but I still need to find out specifically what I'll be dealing with from week to week, and I'll need to do that through the activities I use in my initial training sessions.

Specifically I want to see where each player sits in their own decision making and game intelligence and I'll try using a lot of game based activities to do this.

Again they will need to require little instruction so we can get more action and less talking in our 60mins so for this I have a 1 handball and 1 kicking specific activity designed for this, keeping everything "close" to focus purely on the immediate play around them.

I also have some larger area activities to use for the same purpose to see how players can read the game that's occurring in front of them, rather than right in front of them, as per the previous activity pairing.

#3 - WHAT DO I WANT TO EXPOSE THEM TO?

I'm going to make a huge assumption here in saying that I'm predicting that most of my players will have been exposed to a lot of cone-to-cone drills where a single problem can only be solved with a single solution and I want to move my players away from that type of thinking and into a more 1 problem-many solutions thought process, as they'll encounter during games.

Most times at training all players are faced with the 1 problem at the same time but in a game your 3 lines of players on the ground (backs/mids/fwds) are all facing different problems at the same time, so I need to design activities that reflect this.

I have some larger area ground activities in mind to tackle this but at the same time I probably can't go into full contact/full speed on the very 1st night even if they have been doing local footy already.

So there are my major 3 points I'll be focusing for session 1 next week, I'm intrigued into how the session ends up looking like I want it too (probably not even close!) and I'll no doubt let you all know how this goes.