Sports Coaching Blog, Joshua Haigh

Joshua Haigh; 334313; Arron White; Fd Sport Coaching; Coaching Blog, Chesterfield College 

 

Sports Coaching 

LO1 Demonstrate knowledge and critical understanding of the coaching industry.

What is coaching??

Sports coaching is a key way to understand and put into practice the fundamentals, techniques, skill development and also tactics into a chosen sport, within sports team, or individual, to progress and improve the over skill level of the sport in hand achieving a goal or target set (could be personally or as a group target).

Sports Continuum- structure of performance lead coaching

(fig 1: sports continuum model)

(fig 1) This shows the sports continuum model, and the pathway through development starting at the bottom and working the way up to the top. It is a very simple and easy to understand ways of seeing the pathway and where the next step could be after each stage is complete or has been pushed to progress. 

You find the continuum is wider at the foundation level as it is about having a taste for the sport, something you may never have done before, getting a taste for a new sport and improving the participation numbers. This is where the most money is spent as this is where it starts, getting the kids into the sport, starting them off basic so they get a feel and a life, interest, for it. Some people may drop off and not enjoy it here and never return but there is a higher chance of people returning due to the foundation is about having fun. The next stage, participation, this stage is about once you’ve got that feel, that interest for the sport, progressing to this stage to keep playing but having the same fun level, but due to coming back this is developing the skills and always getting better in the sport, this may be through just participating once a week but this once a week is constant on a regular basis. People may stay at this stage and not want to improve and get better, just want to improve but keep having fun.  Progressing up the continuum you move to the performance stage, this is when you start to compete in leagues and competitions for prizes. With this progression costs and demands in diet, training, commitments, so this comes down to your own commitment levels, so this is important if you are serious to progress your skills and get better, so people with the other commitment levels or even family situation, money situation, income may stage at this level, to continue with a hint of competition but not want to move up or not at that stage to move up. Some players may be put off completely and want to stop the sport completely. Finally, the last stage, excellence, this is where you need to be of an excellence level in your sport to reach this stage, at the top of your game in your surroundings, getting spotted by academies or just progressing higher off your own back. But this is where the routines, training, diet and the sport is your life, with your overall commitment progressing onto the sport becoming your income and job. At this stage you are at the top and have to keep the performance level high to keep going or you could be easily dropped down and drop down the continuum. In some cases though the demands are too much for people and they just drop out and ‘loose the fun’ for the game and stop completely.

The continuum comes down to money; the most money is invested into the bottom to get people into the sport and as you progress and want to progress it’s about trying to get that money at the end, excellence, throughout as you put your own money in throughout the stages. 

LO2 Understand the coaching process and a critical understanding of associated philosophies



Kolbs learning cycle is a 4 stage learning cycle which runs along side of any coaching practice,

The four stages of the cycle are:-

1) build- this is the start of a new coaching or the revisiting of a previous coaching session, then putting this new session on, delivering to a group.                         

2) Reflect & review- this is the stage after your session and the part where the advantages and disadvantages are reviewed and then reflected on.
3) Re-structured - this is the part from when the review and disadvantages are then tried to be changed to then improve the overall session for the better.

4) Contrive- once the disadvantages have been gone over and improved then the session is then put on again to the same group but with the improvements added in, to then try to make sure the disadvantages are limited after.

This process can be carried out after every single session put forward, and can be then carried out for as many times as the coach needs for the same session over and over again, its a re-cycle able system that can be majorly beneficial for any coach, to take any session and improve. 

This learning cycle relates to the PLAN-DO-REVIEW and repeat process, as it follows a cycle flow, of planning before a session, the building part, then the doing the session, relates to the reflect and review, then the review of the actual session where advantages, disadvantages and areas of needs to improve, relating to the restructuring part of the Kolbs cycle and finally where the PLAN-DO-REVIEW has the simple 3 steps and continues, the Kolbs includes the use of a extra step of the improved session, then carrying on with that cycle.

With both these cycles, showing the easy way to find a better solution to improve a session, by delivering it and then being able to improve it, shows the benefits in comparison to doing a session having disadvantages and bad points but then the coach leaving it there on a bad session with no improvements and no chance of a second go at making the session better. Where as it is important for coaches to follow these cycles as if a coach is part of a coaching team and they put a session on to promote the club but put together a bad session but instead of changing it and improving it for the next session they keep everything the same, people will not want to come and pay for it as its not at the level they expected, therefore running the company out of business. Where as a improved session, which may of looked good and was very smooth to begin with could get a whole lot better and be even smother and better making the company much more prestige and business will become a lot better with the better session from just following the basic steps of the cycle, PLAN-DO-REVIEW and the Kolb's cycle. 

With both cycles they are both not flawless, they will not always give the best possible outcome, may not constantly improved the overall appearance and contents within the learning objectives and the first very basic session right at the beginning may actually be the best. So this is where the advantages and disadvantages of the cycles become clear:-

To begin with, the clear advantage from running the cycles through with session is that the first run through of a session looks clear and good on paper but on the first time it become clear, floor space, planning of areas and numbers is all over the place slowing down time and creating a lot of lag time  but if when the session is finished and the simple steps are taken on board the second session could be improved as the first was based on the basics, numbers, space and time but the second session will take into account the errors occurred therefore being able to cut out these problems allowing then to be limited or cut out. On the other hand to the advantage there will be a massive disadvantage of if it improves the session massively that first time, then maybe the session time, a coach may constantly keep trying it and changing it, therefore taking away all the character it had at the beginning and the 'fun' factor of the session, and more like a military operation therefore people will look and not want to take part its meant to be learning along side fun. This is the over use of the cycles making it very rigid and stiff and trying too hard to make it hit the perfect marks, causing people to loose focus and fun then eventually not actually turn up any more.

In addition, if a coach is in a rush to complete these cycles and want to put a session on fast, the cycles will be rush and not thoroughly gone through, rushing each stage to just come out with a end result to get the session going. This has a major flaw of that if it is rushed the planning may miss a step and if a step is missing, for example, the reviewing stage, if a very quick independent review was gone over, the coach can not see the main things outsiders see and the improvements needed, so the coach may think they have come through the improvements of what they see, not what is needed and the session is a flop and fail again, wasting the time again. Therefore the coach will have to then spend time on having to do the cycles all the way through again, therefore using more time and maybe more money to put on the sessions.

In the long run, it is very important for the coaches to thoroughly go through the step by step, with external viewing as instead of 5/6 goes through to improve the session, if a coach goes through the cycle step by step thoroughly going over a lot or all the points the session could be as good as improved in 2/3 goes through saving time, money and the risk of loosing participants.

LO3 Demonstrate a critical understanding of the key principles of coaching practice

A humanistic way to coaching is very basically structuring a coaching session around the type of group you have whether that is through age, ability, disability, or focus of the group. For example, a rugby session would need to planned differently for a wheelchair users compared to a person who can walk with no problem. Also, the age is a few factor which links with growth of performance because naturally you begin to develop key factors of the sport at a younger age and as the group get older you can teach the more fine arts and technical sides of the game to improve and develop a certain participant.

A coach may take his own practice back down to the very basic level to accommodate for basic learners, for example younger children or less able who have never performed the sport before.

Whereas a coach can exceed his way of coaching for a group who are more advanced, therefore being able to develop skills and really get into the tactical and technical side of how to win a match instead of playing for the fun (playing for the fun will be apparent in the first, performing basic fundamental skills too prove and increase participation).

These two polar opposites to coaching relate to the sports continuum pyramid as coaching for a group who are there for fun and new to the sport relate to increasing population and the coach accommodating for this foundation level, giving them the basis to push up the continuum if they want to, which allows the coach to improve the participant and accommodate for them progressing and improving.

It is important for a coach to engage in the Humanistic Approach to coaching as if they coach begins and runs a session which caters for more advanced learners who have been playing the sport but they deliver it to a infant school who have never really played the sport before as the participants will not have the fundamentals and groundwork of the game locked down and will not then understand why it's being progressed further, therefore wasting the whole session for them the participants not to get anything out of it but also the coach won't have got there feedback they wanted.

Also, it is important a coach knows the sport they are delivering to the group because how will a group are beginners to the sport ever understand and be able to develop a skill if the coach who taught them the fundamentals at foundation level didn't even understand the sport. So a coach needs to take on and study the sport before delivering any session related to the sport for both their benefit, to develop their coaching in the sport but also the participants development, so they get the right fundamentals to then progress and understand the sport in more depth to improve their personal performance.

LO4 Apply the principles of teaching to coaching situations

The session chosen to deliver in the group was the basic of rugby, passing running forward causing the over lap and creating easy space to score in the corner where it is the easiest through passing. This session is focused on the communication, through the way of causing a advantage for the attacking team to score easily by moving the ball into the free man who has all the space to score.

The first session, in truth was a rushed planned session, no real focus and no real thought of the key points we wanted to give to the group. The ability to think through the session and the context was very good and able to be built into a good session, but with very little coaching, as it went from a very quick warm up, into working in two teams playing attackers vs defenders. Working on passing, moving the ball and scoring a try in the open space which was created. That was the full context and ran round over and over, with a lot of goes for all the participant.

When the session finally comes to a close, this is when feedback and the bad parts of the session shone through. When the group were asked what were the outcomes and key points of the session, a few were said but the full clear view wasn't clear really and struggled to be understood. The group came to many outcomes, firstly the session was based on a level of rugby players who have experience in the sport and is aware of the rules and techniques needed to play. Also, the basic view of the session looked poor as there was a lot of space used for a small number of players in a large amount of time, therefore it looked like there was a lot of messing around and fooling around but in theory it was down to tiredness and lack of energy to keep going for the full time as it was the same thing over and over again.

As bad as it sounds above, there were some advantages come out of it, when people were performing the drills the participants with no knowledge of the sport begun to develop a slight understanding, but also due to the limited number and large time frame the drill was continuously going with everyone getting a lot of goes and turns through.

All these parts of the reflect part of the cycle, after the performing the session, the review of the session the group then took all these views of the first session on board to then go into a reflect and improve of the session to then put on again after much more thought and filling in the session for it to improve and try and remove some of the negative put forward on the first session but also make the key points clear to all included.



LO5 Demonstrate the ability to adapt a session to ensure an inclusive coaching environment

As the discussion and more session plans were written up, it was easy to understand that the session needed more in it to flow and be put as a coaching session, things that the coaches could stop, explain and coach to the group instead of the one drill with very very little actual coaching. After going through and discussing the actual things the coaches wanted out of the session and what they wanted the participants to learn key points to the session were drawn up:

• pinning- where an attacker will draw in a certain defender to create the space for there team.
• communication- communicating between both defenders/attackers to be more precise in movement
• over lapping- when there are 3 attackers and 2 defenders, the last attacker can overlap into the space to create the chance for a easy score over the other side with no defenders around.
• team work- working as a team to either score or stop a score, having a job and role and working to achieve that role for the benefit of the team.

This is when the group came up with a warm up:

This was to work on the communication, and reaction time to think to make a decision to perform. It was two teams, one team defenders and one team attackers, with two gates at one end and the same at the other. The defenders had to run through their gates and try and tag the attackers to stop them, where as the attackers had to run through there gates and run through the defenders gates to score there team points. This would be a two on two thing, two attackers and two defenders, working on the communication through the teams trying to trick the defenders to score but also defenders working on pinning the attackers they would go for and sticking by them by communicating between the two.

After the warm up, a drill that fills the space but also layers the work they worked on in the warm up and then layering more skills, over the top of the warm up drill before playing the game designed to substitute for actual rugby game. The drill was:

To begin with the drill was to get in fours, work on actual rugby pass, passing backwards and moving forward as a team to get to a end objective. This was added to just build up a based rugby pass and movement for a group with very little rugby skill or knowledge. This then built into the drill, this drill is called attacking lines, on a marked out pitch, working in two, attacker would carry the ball towards a cone, pass to there partner, who would run to a staggered cone further in front, when to the cone they would turn and pass to the partner who had over lapped round to the other side to collect the ball. This would continue until the far side where one of the two would collect the ball in space and then being able to run and score in the space in the far corner from where the drill begun.  

This split up of time, coaching, helping with basic rugby skills and most of all the key coaching points were worked through and covered. This allowed the session to flow, with layering of build up of skills and aloud the participants to build up slightly there skills and way of playing rugby, instead of being put into a game but able to work on skills and techniques with coaching guidance.

The final game was the drill used before in the first session done, but worked a lot smoother and the group decided to use a smaller pitch, and the use of stopping, coaching points and then letting it go aloud people to get their breath back but also understand why they were doing the drill and why and how it needed doing to create the best benefits in a game situation. This only then needed to last to fill the last bit of the session, and then didn't become tedious and boring as it was a final piece to put all the skills learnt into one.

Overall in conclusion, it was clear to see where the process was used and worked, as before it was clear no planning was done with no thought into the advantages and disadvantages and outcomes for others in the session. Even though the last session had disadvantages, the cycle used made the second session a lot more filled, the key points were referred well through out and the session flowed with layers to each drill with more time to coach each skill but also pick up on needs of the participants to be able to do the session. This session can now be even more improved by the use of the cycle again to further the outcomes and understanding for both coaching and participants.