How each player has their own individual needs
Coaches should tweak their coaching activities and approach to the needs of the players in their group – especially those going through change.
By Keith Davids and Fabian Otte
Understanding that each child in a coaching session is experiencing their own process of change and may respond differently to the demands placed upon them is key to good coaching, says Professor Keith Davids, expert in skill acquisition at Sheffield Hallam university.
“Take children who are heading into adolescence – the period a young person develops from a child into an adult,” explains Davids.
“As we know, adolescence is a really a major time of perturbation [change] to a child: psychological perturbation, emotional perturbation, physical perturbation.
“There’s going to be a lot of variation and fluctuations in the way that some children will perform at certain times because the system itself is growing, developing, changing.”
Adapt your practice to individual needs
Appreciating that children are growing and changing – particularly between the ages of 10-19 - is key to how a coach responds to individuals and also how activities are tweaked and changed to meet player needs, explains Davids.
“You might design a wonderful session, which requires a lot of conditioning and a lot of effort. But if they've had a tough day at school and they're in adolescence, they may not respond in the same way every time.
“During adolescence the child’s system is being perturbed by hormones. The child might need sleep or find that they're tired.”
“There’s going to be a lot of variation in the way that some children will perform because the system itself is growing, developing, changing.”
Coaches must be aware that each young player will experience change at different times along their journey. Getty Images\ Maskot
Have empathy but find different ways to challenge individuals
Davids, who has over 30 years teaching and research experience, believes coaches must have empathy for each individual child’s developmental journey, but stresses that this doesn’t mean the individual player can’t be challenged. It may just mean a different challenge to the one planned.
“I'm not saying that empathy means you have to really treat them very gently all the time,” explains Davids, whose approach is underpinned by the theory of ecological dynamics.
“You still need to work out where the challenges are for each child, but it’s about finding how much challenge it should be.”
Problem-solving games that allow each individual to explore and find solutions are effective for finding appropriate challenges for each child, explains Davids.
“A session should engage and grab their attention straight away.
“It’s good to have an exciting, dynamic game that engages everybody and has some problem-solving involved.
“An activity that requires thinking and interacting with each other is good. Kids love competing, so consider an element of competition.
“But once you've hooked them into that session, you can then set up the session to work on other problem-solving activities.
“This might be done in a less frenetic way, that meets the need of certain individuals.
“All the time keeping an eye on how they're coping.”
“You still need to work out where the challenges are for each child, but it’s about finding how much challenge it should be.”
Fluctuation in performance of professional players
The issue of developmental change and fluctuation of performance is not unique to children in the grassroots game, but also impacts on professional players, explains Fabian Otte, goalkeeper coach at Burnley FC and researcher in skill acquisition.
“Even in professional sports, the best players in the world are not performing at the same level on a given day,” explains Otte, who has also coached professionally in Germany and New Zealand.
“Obviously consistency is a lot higher at the top end of the game, but you still get this fluctuation between performances for the top-level players.”
Fabian Otte (pictured) working with goalkeepers at Burnley where he is first-team assistant goalkeeper coach. Image courtesy of Burnley FC.
Otte, who works with Burnley’s first-team goalkeepers and received his PhD in skill acquisition earlier this year, believes coaches must observe the state of each individual at the start of each session and adapt their approach accordingly.
“The key to understanding this is to grasp it on the day as quickly as possible and then to adjust the approach to coach, communicate or set-up the training environment.
“Even when we train here at the professional level, there may be days when it's cold, windy and rainy and the players come onto the pitch and you can see that the training session planned - where players may be standing around a little bit more - is not the appropriate one for the day, because players are cold quickly or they may be tired from the game before.”
Adaptability and having a library of other activities or approaches to the session are key to meeting the needs of players on any given day, explains Otte.
“Quite quickly you need to observe how the players come onto the pitch and how they behave,” he explains.
“And in an instance, I may have to change my entire training session and be quite adaptable as a coach based on how the players turn up.
“To understand the state of the player and to have this empathy and to quickly realise this and then adjust accordingly is, in my opinion, an important part of being a good coach.”
“Quite quickly you need to observe how the players come onto the pitch and how they behave”