#SpCP13

I had my first experience yesterday of coaching on video. It was really quite daunting. It was for an assignment for uni. Although at first it felt quite strange, it actually turned out to be pretty helpful. 

I had to edit it right down to fit under the 5 minutes limit on the video, but it gave me a chance to watch how I coach, and see how I present when coaching, my body language and the way I interact with athletes. Although I think the session went pretty well, I think the film will give me a great opportunity to evolve and improve as a coach.

Last night I went to a coaches clinic run by skills coach Ganon Baker. The guys CV is impressive (Google his name is you don't know who he is). He's worked with some of the best basketball players in the world (LeBron James just to name one) and if not for a few unfortunate injuries, probably could have made it in the NBA himself.

Sitting there for a couple of hours watching him run drills and talk about his experiences and philosophies, you really understand why he is such a good coach. The guy leads by example. He is always energetic, always upbeat and positive, and the intensity of his sessions are insane.

He is BIG on maximising time. Warm up drills are quick, intense and fequently feature two ball dribbling drills to train both hands at once, and use several different skills in one drill.

A lot of his drills are also based on players reacting to stimuli and making decisions. He also likes players to learn and come to conclusions on their own. He talked about creating situations with problems in drills and allowing the players to come up with their own solution, or facilitate their own learning. I'm a big believer in these two methods. In a sport as variable and open as basketball, or most team sports really, making the right decisions in a game is imperative. Allowing players to come up with their own answers allows the players learn in a different way, and after all, encouraging player learning is what coaching is all about.

Ganon also talked about developing and identifying leaders in his sessions. Early on in his program, he will teach his players the majority of his drills and make sure they know them by name. He will then tell the players to set up and run a particular drill in the next 20 seconds, and he will just sit back and watch. From this, he can see which players take charge and identify the potential leaders in his squad.

I found it interesting that his approaches to both grass-root and elite-level coaching did not differ too much from each other. He likes to just sit back and watch in his first session with any athletes and make notes on their strengths and weaknesses. He mentioned times when he had to do repetitive technique drills with NBA players, drills that are designed for 10 year old kids, because they just skipped that stage of their development. He said no matter what level you play at, fundamentals are key.

He also mentioned his approach to male and female players. He says other than not being as hands on with girls, his approach remains pretty much identical. Fundamentals first, intensity in sessions, player decision making and self-learning. He said he didn't do as many athleticism-based drills with women and as he does with men due to females lower absolute physical capacity and athleticism. Another difference he said between males and females was that men tend to overestimate their skill, while women, especially girls, tend to shy away from the spotlight and underestimate their talent. So he tries to pull boys back a bit, and encourage girls to embrace the spotlight.

Many of his coaching methods have been discusses in class by Keith, and it was such a great experience to see such an experienced and acclaimed coach demonstrate the concepts in a practical setting.

I can't remember the week, but in one of our tutorials Keith used a method of 'performance restriction', or 'limitation', I guess you would call it.

We've been playing basketball in our tutorials, and I'm quite an experienced basketball player. Keith put limitations on my ability to compete in our games. I was only able to use my off (left) hand to dribble in one game, wasn't allowed to shoot in another, and could only pass, not dribble or shoot, in another. This really brought out my competitive fire, and I found myself putting in a lot more focus and energy into these games then I had in previous weeks. 

I'm a competitive person, but the amount of focus I put into these games was at the same level that I normally reserve for high-level competition games. This was strange for me to do in a tutorial against players with very little basketball experience and skill.

Alright, so I’ve been ridiculously busy with uni, professional development, work and other things over the past few weeks and this blog has unfortunately suffered due to my schedule but numerous things have stuck in my mind from this class. I’ve decided to go away from the week by week approach, seeing as I was so disciplined with it, and start to post just the key things that have either stuck in my mind or made me think about my coaching style and strategies.

Week 3 was all about "Planning Programs", ie. planning training programs for athletes.

In the lecture, Keith discussed the components of training programs which we have covered in our units, but are still important in planning programs nonetheless. The thing that stuck in my mind though was about block periodisation.

Joe Friel, in his blog (linked at the bottom), discusses the concept of block training returning superior results to linear periodisation in training programs in endurance sports, specifically rad cycling. He says (and with references cited at the bottom), that linear periodisation takes up to twice as long to achieve the same results as block periodisation. 

Now block periodisation may be great for endurance sports, but is it practical for team or skill-based sports? Block periodisation may help a team-based athlete develop their base fitness level, but could the lack of the skill component in the training limit the transfer into game scenarios? Could introducing block training with skill components inclusive cause a greater response in team-based athletes? I think I need to do a bit of research and find out..

So I've been a bit slack with the whole blogging thing. It's now week 5 and I'm only up to week 2. Oops. I have been keeping notes on each weeks takeaways from class.

In week 2 my main themes I took away from class were from the tutorials. We spent the class in a computer lab looking at different online platforms on which we could develop our e-Portfolio assessment (I obviously chose Tumblr). 

While looking at sites like SlideShare, Prezi and SlideRocket, I thought that using these sites could be a good way to interact with athletes. I coach junior basketball teams (aged 15-18) and can at time find it hard to consistently engage the athletes. Using an online medium, I could construct and design the training program for the season, and email out a link to the players so they have constant access to our program, presented in a concise, easy to understand format. If there were to be a change due to unforeseen circumstances, I could easily edit or change the program and email out the new link. No hard copy. No complicated graphs. No information overload. Simple.

I have decided to trial this for next season, starting in May.

Alright, so the way I've decided to do this is to blog my takeaways or thoughts from the class every week. I'll try to blog them each Monday, to give myself to reflect on the content over the weekend.

Since it's now Week 3, I'll have to retrospectively blog my thoughts from the weeks, so here's Week 1's takeaways:

On Friday we had our first tutorial session in the UC Gym. The tutorial consisted of some little ice breaker games to get to know the other class members. Then the unit convener, Keith, got us to play some small half-court games of 3 on 3 basketball.

Now basketball is my main sport of interest, so hearing Keith, whom I assume is not very experienced in the sport of basketball, instruct us using very generic coaching terminology and not basketball vernacular/lingo was an unusual experience.

This got me thinking about the effect of sport-specific terminology and how it could influence athlete involvement and interaction with the coach. I coach local junior basketball teams, with players who have a decent skill level but little experience in the sport. I regularly use basketball lingo during sessions and games as it's just been part of the sport for me. But it made me think whether the lesser experienced players I coach had been exposed enough to the sport to understand what the terminology actually means, or whether I'd be better off trying to avoid the vernacular  or at least making sure the players understood it. 

So as part of a unit for uni, I'm required to create an "e-Portfolio" using an online platform. We are required to blog our learning experiences throughout the semester to build the portfolio.