and I'm knackered!!!
Days 1 and 2 have been really enjoyable. It's always a bit difficult to fit straight in to a group that mostly know each other, most of the guys on the course did the Module 1 together in April, but it's been really easy. The age range goes from early 20s to 50+. There's some guys that have only recently started coaching, some that have no youth coaching experience, and a couple that are already coaching at pro clubs. The 2 tutors are both excellent. Chris and Rich are both really experienced and have their own unique style. They're both very funny in their own way and they bounce off each other all the time.
The course itself, developing the practice, promises to be about 70% practical and so far that's pretty accurate. The pre-course reading explains all about how repetition of the correct things is key to the development of young players, how the neural pathways are defined by those repetitions and how, what and the way we teach could make all the difference to a players development. I'm finding it fascinating! The classroom stuff has been re-capping Module 1, discussions about the pre-course stuff and a lot of talk about constant, variable and random sessions. A great demo of this was done on day one starting with the constant session. We had to set up in lines of 4 starting with two at one end, one in the middle, and one at the other end. It started off with player one passing to player two and then following his pass. Player two received the ball, turned and passed to player three. He then followed his pass to the other end. Player three then passed back into the middle (player 1) and so on. The first progression was that the central player moved so the could receive at an angle. The variable session was basically the same exercise, but had three teams all passing though a central circle. This introduced some interference for the central player. The final session involved a game situation with the pitch split into thirds, with the midfielders acting as the central player, receiving the ball from the defenders and trying to turn to play to a forward. So far the practical content has been mostly about demonstrating these different ways of coaching similar sessions to achieve different results and introduce different levels of complexity.
The message has been that for a player to developer properly and be able to make decisions in a game, we need to first teach them the technical skills of the action we're after and then gradually introduce opposed versions into a game scenario. This will lay those muscle memories and neural pathways so the actions they need to perform don't even need to be thought about, they just happen!
I'm really looking forward to next weekend and the rest of the course.
The only downer is that I'll miss my team's first ever 9-a-side match because the course is being run at the same time the season starts. Surely the county FAs and the leagues could get together and arrange not to do this???
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