Traditional Coaching Methods or is there a better way?

The majority of methods used by coaches to develop football skills in our young children consist primarily of skill drills with lots of repetition of the skill to be learned. This is done on the notion that as a child first attempts to learn a new skill, the body begins to lay down a neuromuscular or motor pattern of the movement that the player can access whenever he plays football. The young player, in terms of skill acquisition, is viewed as a motor pattern learner and so the theory goes, by repeating or practicing the movement or skill, the pattern eventually becomes engrained into the players neuromuscular football related arsenal of skills. Possibly the coach may have demonstrated the technique to be learned.

There are several problems with this very common approach. The first problem arises when the player has to use the skill in the ever changing environment of real football play. Techniques learned by the player on their own usually don’t transfer into effectiveness in match play or games. WHY? Because essentially the player has to relearn the skill (almost from scratch) within the ever exchanging context of playing the game.

Consequently it makes you wonder whether the skill would have been better developed within the game context in the first place in order to minimise the transfer time. Secondly and perhaps most importantly this motor programme approach grossly underestimates the abilities of children to learn highly complex movements quickly if given the correct environment & stimuli. Furthermore, by trying to duplicate the demonstrated movements of the coach, the player-learner will be less likely to experiment and find their own ways of manipulating their body (and the ball) in order to be successful on the pitch. History shows that the best players developed their own way of playing and being skilful.

By playing hours of conditioned ssg and the coach using Q&As,giving nuggets of information, the children develop a real understanding of the game. Physiologically, performing successful skills in football is a highly complex task involving coordination, strength, spatial awareness, body control in the context of the immediate challenge facing the player. To young players, each of these challenges is unique and the children need as much game play as possible to decipher game situations and find solutions using their new skills their own way. ( Rick Fenoglio, Sports scientist at Manchester University)

Problem with adults is they have forgotten what it is like to act and think like a child and so they expect them to behave and play like adults. In time children will become adults but let them grow in their own time. Jean Jacques Rousseau once said “Nature decrees that children should be children before they become adults. If we try to alter this natural order, we will reach adulthood prematurely but with neither substance nor strength.”

In football terms as an example, this could relate to adults always talking about passing and moving the ball, when infact a child under 10 still has problems with recognising space and movement. Young children will chase the ball around the pitch and that is fine, it helps to develop motor skills, fitness and the need to chase the ball which is exactly what they are after. A 6 yr old looks at the ball as his/her toy, children are selfish that’s normal, so best to let them chase the ball and in time with help from the coach, THEY discover that it not always up to them to chase the ball. Coaches spend loads of time trying to stop this natural way of playing, when 99% of the time the children wont stop because for them it is natural and if they have managed to stop them, what are the children doing, standing in fixed positions on the pitch not moving?

When there were not so many cars on the roads and children did not have msn or xbox, they played football with friends in parks or the streets. This not only helped them develop it also created a real long and lasting love for the game. In todays society we apply too much pressure, too many instructions that we have the highest drop out rate in Europe. Today children have many other activities to choose from and street football has more or less disappeared from the UK, so the time spent playing and learning football has certainly decreased over the years. So it is important that we provide them with fun coaching sessions that help them develop at their rate in their own way, this will help to keep them in the game for much longer, but will make better players in the long run. Developing players is a long term process, don’t try and rush it or you may burn out our promising young players.

You can take a lesson from history, it says that ALL our best players learnt their basic skills from street football, no adults coaching, but the freedom to be creative. Now that brings me onto the next point, I always get accused of not coaching. Let the game be the teacher is not something I completely agree with, there is a need for coaching if we want our players to improve its just how I go about coaching that maybe I differ from most. A guided Self discovery method is what I believe in. All I do is set up the questions to be answered, then the players have to answer them, this method is far more likely to help players learn for the long term. In studies it has shown that a player remembers 19% of what they have been told 3 months ago. Where as they remember 32% of what was demonstrated and explained. Yet in cases where they were given the opportunity to generate the information on their own, but with help from a coach, fully 65% of the information was remembered.

What is crucial in any type of learning is stimulating the mind. Think back to school and you will probably remember the really good teachers, they kept you interested and stimulated your mind. Football coaches need to do exactly that if you want to get the best out of players. This is not easy as you have a whole team with different likes, abilities etc.

Posing questions that make the players think about the answers, but are open ended questions, that would normally start with why, how, what. These questions make players discover the answers and quite often they find an answer to a problem they have not realized before. Let children experiment with the ball and without it, but don’t criticise mistakes or you may put them off trying again, instead encourage them to have another go and can you find another way of solving the problem.

Traditional methods give the answers to the players i.e. you should do it this way, but what if that way is not the best way for that player? Football has many roads to get to the same place, which road suits them best is the one that they take.

Repetition is important for a player to learn, but as a coach you need to find other games to coach the same topics, or your players will become bored. That is the beauty of using ssg, there are so many different games to choose from and in each game you can adapt the rules to help challenge your players.

The whole point in me writing this is for you to be aware of what and how you coach your teams, so hopefully you can improve your coaching methods. Understanding children and how they learn is probably the most important part for any coach to learn. This method is not easy, it takes time to develop the ability to ask the right questions at the right time, something I still have to master, but just like the children learning to play football, it is a long term process for us coaches as well. The more you develop as a coach the more you will enjoy it.

Dubs.