Day four was basically the groups putting on their sessions and then receiving feedback from the rest of the guys (and gals) on the course and from the tutors. We were the third group on out of eight, so I watched the first session, listened and contributed to the feedback and then our group set up for our session. We were only given approximately 20 minutes to put our sessions on. We (myself, Jason - a very good coach and although still young has a lot of experience, and Damien - very similar to me and coaches a kids team as well as an adults team) sat down to discuss what we were going to do and how we'd put the session on.
We thought about a constant, random, variable practice, which starts with a simple practice of a technical subject - the constant part. You then move on to a variable practice which focuses on the same technical subject but introduces more options or some kind of interference or obstructions. The random part is normally by putting the subject into a game like scenario. The other option we had is what is known as a whole-part-whole practice. This is where you start off with a game and set a target and let the players play (I spoke about this in an earlier blog). You then break the session down and focus on the particular aspect of the game you want the players to work on. Once you've completed the "part" session, you put it back into another game scenario and see how it differs from the first one.
Because we only had 20 minutes, we chose to do a "part" session on "counter-attacking from deep" and explained in the intro that this would be the part of the whole-part-whole. Jason and I have both done similar sessions with our own teams and Damien was happy for us to lead it. I won't go into the actual session details now (I'll post it another day, unless people want to see it sooner rather than later) but suffice to say it went really well. All the guys playing in the session really enjoyed it and we got some great feedback from them. The only real criticism came from Mark, one of the tutors, and that was that our subject was "counter-attacking from deep" and the way we set it up meant that the defending team was always organised, even though there was potential for a 4v3 overload in favour of the attacking team. We talked about ways of tweaking it so the defence wasn't always organised and that one of the defenders would need to make a recovery run. It was some great advice and I'll certainly incorporate it into my sessions when I do this subject again.
To get through everyone's sessions as quickly as possible we decided as a group that we would just grab our lunch during a session we weren't involved in. I tried to be part of as many as possible and I'm paying the price now. My legs are REALLY stiff!!! The other sessions were all really good and all very different. The good thing was that you could see everyone on the course had taken on board what we'd been taught and used either a whole-part-whole or constant-variable-random session. They were split fairly evenly between the two as well so it made it even better.
Once we'd done all the sessions we went back into the classroom, finished off our paperwork and got our books signed off. There was some great feedback given, all very positive, and well received. We then watched a couple more slides just re-capping and then we were done. The funniest part of the whole four days was when Richard (the ex-pro tutor) was about to do the summing up and one of the candidates did a really loud yawn. As you can imagine there were jokes flying around and we were all in hysterics for about fifteen minutes.
Overall, the course was brilliant. It's a really worthwhile course for anyone that coaches football, regardless of age group. There were a couple of guys there that don't do kids coaching but still got a lot out of it and will use what they've learnt with their adult teams. If you already coach or are thinking about coaching kids, get yourself booked on one of the YAM1 courses as soon as you can. You WILL learn a lot and you WILL think differently about what you coach and how you coach it. And you'll become a better coach for it.
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