Coaching Methods - Which One Are You?
I have witnessed lots of training sessions in football with many different coaches, and I have found that there are generally two different types of coaches – the Facilitator, and the Teacher.
The Facilitator merely sets up the drill, and lets the game be the teacher – whereby the participants learn from their own mistakes with minimal coach intervention. The common phrase thrown about to support this style, is that you learn from your mistakes. That may be true, but if you don’t know you are making a mistake, then how can you learn from it?
The Teacher on the other hand sets up the drill and then starts the coaching. They step in regularly with correct coaching points, offering demonstrations and asking questions to help their players understand. In my own experience, this method is far more successful than the Facilitator as the players are being corrected by somebody who knows best, rather than letting an inexperienced performer try to correct the mistakes themselves.
Using myself as an example, when I first started coaching in 2010 I was very much a Facilitator, a session leader, if you will. I called myself a coach, as many of you do, however the amount of actual coaching I undertook in my sessions was actually very little. I am strong enough to look back at myself and admit that what I did then wasn’t what was best for my players, but under the persona we all adopt when coaching, I made it look like I was correct. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I know that the experience I have gained through a number of things I have done since I started coaching, has made me a much better coach. I have become more immersed in the game, and in sport development as a whole, and being able to put my knowledge back into my coaching will have a positive effect on the players I work with.
The most popular style in sports coaching is the Facilitator. Because of this, players are being expected to improve by making mistakes themselves, and thus correcting them. But how can they correct them, if they don’t know what the right way to perform the task is? This is when a good coach will step in and demonstrate the correct technique and offer coaching points, sometimes using question and answer, to aid understanding. However, this can be time consuming – stopping each group to deliver the coaching points, and a lot of coaches get bored of saying the same thing again and again to players, so don’t do it. But surely that is what coaching is – getting your knowledge over to somebody else in a way that they understand it, and can use it, in order to improve their performance?
The development of young people in sport is directly related with the behaviours of their significant others – namely teachers, coaches, parents and peers. But what behaviour aids the best development? Is it simply enough to ‘be a good role model’ or just be knowledgeable of the sport in which they coach?
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