During the week the article linked below was published by AFL Media reporter Sarah Black:
The AFLW skills hothouse helping clubs and players grow
In it, she describes the Skills Hothouse, a set of learning sessions designed specifically for teaching skill.
Footy School.
Earlier this year I attended the AFL Coaches Forum (posted about here and here) that sounds like exactly what they're being taught here.
What they're learning is not new in elite coaching ranks and shouldn't be new to regular readers of my content over the years, so I'll go into some more detail on parts of what Sarah is writing about.
"It was more around this notion that we could still develop a community, a practice, where coaches and players start to appreciate and share what it means to be skilled, and how growth can occur in the game."
Skill is NOT what you can do in pre-determined, unopposed cone-to-cone training drills, it's how you can adapt to ever-changing conditions and problem solve and still have a high success rate under constrained conditions.
"They're the content experts. They know what a drop punt is, and whatever else. For me, skill learning is around the conditions that create the most effective practice of the skills of the game."
To create these conditions, you're looking at representative learning design which refers to designing training activity tasks that contain contextual information that you'll find in a game - reduce without impoverishing
"A lot of the topics we went into delved into that, going into the stronger underpinnings of learning, so then coaches can apply it however they want. Footy environments are always time-pressured, and you can always practice something and think you're going to get gain from it, when the likelihood is you won't, based on learning theory."
For everything you need to be prepared for, for a single game of footy, wasting precious time on 30mins of warm up cone-to-cone drills makes zero sense from a community football point of view, unless you're going to be as forgivable for your below-average training sessions as you are for your players' gameday performance as you expect them to adapt to the conditions of the game, yet your training doesn't reflect that in the slightest.
"Farrow takes players through the concept of learning drills (skills practice) and performance drills (maximising skills), and ties that in with an athlete's best and worst weapon – perfectionism."
Divide your sessions or training activities within the same session, into learning and performing biased. Learning training activities are usually free play-based with players free to make their own decisions and explore different solutions they otherwise might not, and there is psychological safety around this decision-making process - a rare commodity in community football.
For performance-bias you would design tasks that will result in a high rate of success, but I would still steer away from cone-to-cone drills that lack game information and this is where true coaching craft is a must.
"Football is a game of errors, the team who wins is the one who adapts the best," Farrow tells the players and coaches."
Sydney was a perfectionist/control-based team in previous years and have now embraced imperfection and chaos. This is also the problem with cone-to-cone drills - there is zero game information so the only thing you gauge success on is how may targets you hit and then how many is too many? They're also boring so the longer they go the more targets are missed but then that's when coaches extend it to "clean it up" = average coaching.
"The whole game is around solving the problem that's right in front of you, at that moment."
Do your warm-up but cut it to 15mins or so then get into some low pressure/complex problem-solving as soon as you can - maximise every minute you have out there.
"The definition of skill is technique plus adaptability, divided by pressure."
Try this in your bye week. 5 - 8 mins of cone-to-cone, unopposed kicking and track every kick for a hit or miss. Then do 5 - 8mins of a small sided-game and track every kick again. Look at the data then decided what was different between the 2 conditions and how that affected the kick success rate between the 2 training activities.
"Farrow hones-in on ground balls, showing a video comprised entirely of clips of the ball on the ground from the second quarter of Richmond's loss to Melbourne last year, then asks the players to break up into small groups to discuss what they see."
Find ways to training players for their specific positions instead of everyone playing every position during training - that way they're practicing position-specific decisions with position-specific movement solutions. Watch every AFL team pre-game on-field warm-ups doing this for some easy prompts.
"There's another discussion point around "gamification", and making training fun, creating a safe environment to fail and practice skills."
Include these in your training activities - opposition, decision-making, consequence/scoring system - and you're well on your way.
"One of the things we're trying to evaluate is the impact – it's one thing to have coaches say it's great, and players have equally said they've learnt a lot, but how does that transfer? There's a couple of things," Farrow said."
99% of community footy training is very generalised with all players practicing all kicks etc as mentioned above but this only provides general results and minimal, if any, game transfer. This is from coaches simply doing what they've always done but clubs and leagues should be strongly pushing and promoting coaching upskilling opportunities. Personally, every club should have 1 junior and 1 senior coach go through an AFL-backed coaching course per year, and present their findings to their other club coaches and that somehow followed up as well to get your accreditation points.
I implore you to give the full article a good read.
