FISHTANKING AND WHY ALL COACHES SHOULD BE DOING IT

                                           

What has fish got to with footy?

Is Paul Salmon making a comeback?

What do fish tanks have to do with footy?

This all sounds a bit abstract but will make perfect sense in the 5mins it'll take you to read this and will help all coaches be far more informed of what their having their players do at training in the hopes that it will transfer to game situations.

Fishtanking for skill development essentially...

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GAME/TRAINING SCENARIOS - FIND A MARK DURING DEFENSIVE 50 REBOUND

GAME MOMENT - Open Play Defensive 50 Rebound

PREVIOUS GAME MOMENT - Open Play Opposition Forward 50 Entry

GROUND LOCATION - Opposition Back Pocket

GAME VIDEO...

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JACK RIEWOLDT EXPLOITS MAN ON THE MARK RULE VIDEO

                                                        

I am a big fan of the stand man on the mark rule and if you have the ball and can't move off the mark then what's the advantage of even having the ball?

I've got on file maybe 7 - 10 different ways I've seen players exploit the rule and/or use it to their advantage which just shows that players can adapt to new rules pretty quickly and coaches can find ways to make it work for them in different circumstances.

This weekend I saw Jack Riewoldt use it to fit his individual physical and technical qualities which is bit different from players purely using from a tactical point of view.

This definitely something any player of any ability can do, as long as you can mark the ball in the first place, which will enable you to keep the ball pretty much in constant motion and also give the opportunity to gain some extra territory in the process.

Check out the 2min analysis video of how this went down...

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USING SMALL SIDED GAMES TO MATCH YOUR DESIRED TRAINING OUTCOME/S

                                          

These points come from a study I read during the week which is based on Soccer but transfers fully to any team sport with relatively high player numbers per team such as footy, soccer, rugby etc.

Read through to the end to get some usable tips on how to make small sided games work for you and your players for more than simply "playing games" without a real purpose.

• Individual performance does not represent a teams success since high levels of cooperative behavior between teammates are necessary for success
• Smaller player numbers increase ball contacts and technical actions and is slower moving allowing more time for lower skilled players to react, decide and act on action affordances
• With outnumber advantage player numbers (5v4, 7v5 etc), there is increased tactical actions without the ball per player such as coverage/unity as well as depth mobility
• Smaller playing dimensions favor skills like ball control, dribbling and shooting actions as well as interceptions and ball repositions
• Bigger dimensions increase tactical principles such as penetration and defensive balance and defensive unity team possession periods become longer and the greater size also influences players perception of space, conditioning it's occupation/use as well as the distances between players and their interactions
• When possession was the goal, players held the ball longer and used shorter passes
• When there is an "x" amount of passes required before scoring rule then players played  faster in a more offensive manner
• In 3v3 with 1 defender, midfielder and forward per team, players performed position specific tactics under similar conditions than those normally associated with the demands of each playing position in full sized games
• When developing technical aspects (passing/dribbling etc) use fewer players
• To increase ball contacts per player set your player's game plan to maintain poss as much as possible finding open players and utilising easy to kick to teammate options
• For quality and quantity of tactical actions, use bigger playing area’s

GAME/TRAINING SCENARIOS - PRESSING FORWARD TEAM DEFENSE

GAME MOMENT - North Melbourne Open Play Forward 50 Entry

PREVIOUS GAME MOMENT - Open Play Transition Offense

GROUND LOCATION - North Melbourne Forward 50m Line

GAME VIDEO...

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NAILING PRACTICE CONDITIONS FOR SKILL ACQUISITION

                                               

These points come from Harjiv Singh who works in performance and development at the Orlando Magic in the NBA but also does a heap of stuff in the motor learning space and is what this focuses on.

• A skill can be practiced continuously (massed) or with rest-pauses/interpolated skill learning (distributed practice)  where distributed practice has a more positive influence on performance
• Practice alone is not sufficient for improvement and without knowledge of results, interest/attention, meaningfulness of the task to the learner, understanding of goals, intent to learn, readiness to learn and to some degree, game representation, this practice can be wasted
• Overlearning, or practicing past the criterion, results in better retention of that which is being learned
• Better learned skills are less prone to be disrupted by manipulated environment conditions and experiences in varying instructional/stressful conditions will contribute to high levels of skill
• Reinforcement increases the probability that the desired act will occur but random reinforcement is a more effective continual form of motivation than constant reinforcement
• Very high motivation impedes progress in complex tasks where highest performance is attained by individuals  with intermediate motivation/drive and as tasks increase in complexity, individuals with moderate motivation do better, showing there is an optimal motivational level for each task
• Reasonably hard, specific and attainable goals produce better performance than easy goals or a general goal to just do one’s best

The major takeaways that you can use at your very next training session include:

• Instead of doing activity #1 x 15mins, rest, activity #2 x 15mins rest, activity #3 x 15mins and finish, try activity #1 x 7mins, rest, activity #2 x 7mins, rest, activity #3 x 7mins, rest x 2 full rounds
• Either before or during each activity, ask/inform your players when/why that activity will be required in a game and if you want to get a little techy, record something on your phone/iPad fro an AFL game that shows exactly what it can look like
• Know how to optimally stretch each activity for your players where you might split your full group up into high/average/low abilities which will make this easier and allows support for ALL players, not just a fraction of them. 

YOUTH LEARNING WITH DARREN WENSOR

                                                    

When any football player, but especially a junior football player goes to football training, they are going to learn.

The activities that a coach designs and uses for their players is the content.

How that content is being taught/interpreted by the players depends on how delivery that content and how you have them try and put it into action.

It really is an outside school classroom with varied abilities throughout the entire group and thus the need to individually teach a lot of those players in some way, shape or form.

I believe sport coaches should read what they can on classroom learning, as well as school teacher's reading up on sports coaching, with a mix of the 2 being a brilliant base to work from as a coach or a teacher.

These notes on "kids learning" as I titled it, comes from a Twitter thread from a Coach Developer based in Sydney, Darren Wensor and he has a nice little weekly newsletter you can sign up for too. 

This a solid, short and simple round up some of the things to take into account when you're teaching kids.

• They can only process a limited amount of information at any 1 time so limit what they need to pay attention to to ramp up learning
• When teaching new content be sure to not overload the working memory
• Practice/eventual automation can reduce the burden of working memory which frees up space to learn new information
• Cognitive Load Theory refers to the working memory (what you’re consciously thinking) such as carrying out instructions from a coach
• Cognitive Load refers to the amount if information the working memory can hold at 1 time
• If an athlete tries to think about too much at once then their working memory becomes overloaded which lowers the ability to think and remember
• Beginners are already overloaded and are less able then experts to direct their attention
• Limit cognitive load via decreasing coaching cues (less is more, more concise), alter what feedback you provide (less is more, provide some athlete processing time), shield them from distractions (non-relevant information/narrow their focus) and be careful with novelty (too much novelty can make things over-complicated as they try to remember the skill and the drill)

A lot of these points really fly in the face in what a lot of us currently do as coaches and also barracking parents with constant talking/yelling which is our best interests but is probably just making things harder for our kids n the heat of the moment of game time when it's chaotic enough.

Happy to discuss and clarify any of these points if anyone needs/wants to. 

GAME/TRAINING SCENARIOS - CREATING WIDTH + LENGTH #1

                                                        

GAME MOMENT - West Coast Free Kick Center Square Ball Up

PREVIOUS GAME MOMENT - Center Square Ball Up

GROUND LOCATION - Center Circle

GAME VIDEO...

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