BUILDING TRAINING ACTIVITIES BY ADDING LAYERS

I'm coaching the senior women again this year so I'm going to way back to November last year to day 1 of building out a training activity that we have gradually built and layered as the season has gone on.

STEP 1 - INTENTION

The intention is the end point so picture what that is and then work backwards from there.

In this case I wanted my players to look off-the-line as often as they can when they have the ball in hand.

To encourage this search behaviour, I needed to design a task that requires that very same thing in training.

I can't just go into a game and expect them to do it just like you don't go straight to a full car license when you're 16 and have never driven before.

I need to work as far as needed to make off-the-line options as obvious as possible and this in itself starts the learning process, with the gradual progression and frequent exposures hopefully adding more learning points and the shift to long term memory (real footy IQ).

STEP 2 - MAKE IT OBVIOUS

You're looking for low complexity here which means as little moving parts as possible BUT you still need to retain SOME (doesn't have to be all) game information for transfer purposes.

In the case of day 1 here it's a 2v1 with kicker having 2 options to choose from initially but that decreases to 1 as the defender deliberately choses to go with 1 of them leaving the obvious option to go to.

I always have a player on the mark too which is vastly underrated game information missed a lot of local training activities but not noted in the image.

I start this by kicking the ball the designated kicker to a) Get some extra marking practice and 2) The 2 offensive players then have to time their leads appropriately.

Also, as coach-umpire, I'm pretty hard on players going off the mark, getting called to play-on and taking away the control that the mark gives us, so I umpire accordingly all throughout this training activity (and in general!).

STEP 2 - INCREASE COMPLEXITY SLOWLY

STEP 3 - LAYER

5v2

5v3

6v3

5v4

6v4

8v4 End to End 

So there's a great way to build out your training activities because if you've started and ended on the same activity from season start to season's end then you haven't provided an environment where your players can learn, grow and improve.

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