The Heretic Coach

This is my last post.  I’m calling it quits.

I don’t think of myself as someone who just gives up on things so I’m going to call this strategic quitting.  That’s what author Seth Godin would call it.  In his book The Dip he writes about quitting the things that don’t or aren’t working so you have more time and energy to invest towards the things that you should stick at.

It’s been a tough two years writing this blog.  On my first year anniversary I asked questions about whether or not to keep going.  I stuck at it because I’d wanted to keep my promise to do this for at least two years.  Alas, it hasn’t worked out the way I’d wanted.  I was hoping for more conversations between myself and whoever you are out there.  But that hasn’t happened.  So what probably could have been three or four years worth of topics was burned through in two because there was never any real in depth discussions.

Some days topics were hard to come by.   Some days topics were there but the words were hard to come by.  It has just been hard.  Period.  Seth Godin might say I’m just experiencing the dip in my blogging career.  That’s the place you are when the efforts you are putting in are not matched by the results attained.  Of course, it could be what Godin calls a cul-de-sac.  It looks and feels a lot like the dip but unlike the dip, it never ends.  With the dip you continue to push hard and work at it and you do move out of it.  On to bigger and better things.  Sticking pays off.  In a cul-de-sac, you just go around in circles but nothing changes.  Sticking is futile and you possibly miss the opportunity to excel in something else.

How do you know the difference?  Godin says you trust your gut.

“It’s time to quit when you secretly realize you’ve been settling for mediocrity all along. It’s time to quit when the things you’re measuring aren’t improving, and you can’t find anything better to measure.”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/seth-godin-if-youre-going-to-be-average-you-might-as-well-quit-2012-9#ixzz29zmZ1t1Z

The Heretic Coach is in a cul-de-sac.  It’s not destined to be great, only mediocre.  And life is just too short to be mediocre.  I’m better off investing my time and energy into things that have the possibility to be great.  So that is what I’m going to do.

I want to say a big thanks to Guy Bisson who paid for this blog space and helped me set up The Heretic Coach.  It was great to have your support.

And thanks to those of you – whoever you are – for reading.  I hope it’s given you something of value.

Over and out.

I love books.  I love their feel.  I love their look.  I love to have shelves full of them.  On this Thanksgiving day I am very thankful for books.  I’ve read a lot of great books in the last few years and I’ve added a page to The Heretic Coach with a list of the ones I’ve found to be very helpful.  Many of these I’ve discussed or used in writing this blog.  For all the books that I’ve read, I have one on the go now and seven on my shelf that are just waiting to be read.  And I’ve got a wish list of another half dozen or so (Christmas is coming!).

What are you thankful for?

Next post October 22nd.

“To progress in a game is to learn; when we are actively engaged with a game, our minds are experiencing the pleasure of grappling with (and coming to understand) a new system. This is true whether the game is considered “entertainment” (e.g., World of Warcraft) or “serious” (e.g., an FAA-approved flight simulator).” – From the New Media Institute, www.newmedia.org

Last post I asked the question how can we as coaches make our sport training environments more cognitively appealing.  Cognitively appealing like good video games.  Good video games teach (and teach well) without those playing it even realizing that fact.  What do good video games do that bad ones don’t and what can we as coaches learn from that that we can apply to our own instruction?  Here are a few of the many principles of good game design that I believe also translate to good coaching:

Principle – Information on Demand and Just in Time

The Principle in Games – Human beings are quite poor at using verbal information (i.e., words) when given lots of it out of context and before they can see how it applies in actual situations (who reads the instruction manual that comes with a video game?). They use verbal information best when it is given “just in time” (when they can put it to use) and “on demand” (when they feel they need it).

The Principle in Coaching – A reminder that when introducing an activity you give the kids only the information they need to get the activity started.  Once they’ve shown you they know how the flow of the activity goes, then you can start to introduce coaching points and progressions.

Principle - Meaningful Play

The Principle in Games - Meaningful play is what occurs when the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game.

The Principle in Coaching – Do the drills and the activities that you choose blend seamlessly back into the game itself?  If you have practiced 2 against 1′s do you see their usage improved in the game?

Principle – Gameplay Balance

The Principle in Games – When players have multiple options or routes to victory, each option or route should have a risk-reward relationship that prevents dominant strategies.  A good game is a series of interesting choices.

The Principle in Coaching – Like the game itself, do your drills and activities only feature one right answer or do they feature a choice?  As above, if you are working on 2 against 1′s is there only the option to pass or does the player on the ball also have to make the decision about whether or not to dribble?

Principle – Pleasantly Frustrating (aka Flow)

The Principle in Games - Good games adjust challenges and give feedback in such a way that different players feel the game is challenging but doable and that their effort is paying off. Players get feedback that indicates whether they are on the right road for success later on and at the end of the game.  This causes a level of engagement so deep and intense that this particular state of being has been termed flow.

The Principle in Coaching – Does the difficulty of your drills and activities match the abilities of your players?  Is feedback available for your players that tells them whether they are getting closer or further away from the learning outcome?

Principle – Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master

The Principle in Games – It is particularly important for a game’s audience not to experience frustration but success shortly after starting the game the first time. You have to capture their interest immediately – put a smile on their face within few minutes.

The Principle in Coaching – Related to flow, this is the ability to select drills and activities that can be picked up quickly but then played intensely for long periods because they are challenging.  This is what makes coaching an art.  Build your library.  The more drills and activities you have, the better chance you have of finding a good match.  Keep a mental diary.  Just because a drill or activity didn’t give you the response you were looking for doesn’t mean that it won’t work with another age or ability level group.

Principle – Cycles of Expertise

The Principle in Games - Expertise is formed in any area by repeated cycles of learners practicing skills until they are nearly automatic, then having those skills fail in ways that cause the learners to have to think again and learn anew.  Then they practice this new skill set to an automatic level of mastery only to see it, too, eventually be challenged.  Good games create and support the cycle of expertise.  This is, in fact, part of what constitutes good pacing in a game.

The Principle in Coaching – Good instruction is progressive.  However, do you spend the time necessary to make a skill automatic or do you simply move on to the next skill?  The key is demanding that standards be met.  We need to maintain high standards – you can’t move on until you can demonstrate mastery.  The goal then is to get the players practicing enough that they can attain mastery without getting discouraged and giving up.

Principle – Skills as Strategies

The Principle in Games - There is a paradox involving skills: People don’t like practicing skills out of context over and over again, since they find such skill practice meaningless, but, without lots of skill practice, they cannot really get any good at what they are trying to learn.  People learn and practice skills best when they see a set of related skills as a strategy to accomplish goals they want to accomplish.  In good games, players learn and practice skill packages as part and parcel of accomplishing things they need and want to accomplish.  They see the skills first and foremost as a strategy for accomplishing a goal and only secondarily as a set of discrete skills.

The Principle in Coaching – A great reminder that the more game-like our training can be – even if it is skills training – the more likely it is that the players will be able to see its connection to the game.  The more likely they are to see the connection to the game, the more likely they will be to be motivated to master those skills.

And a few other things on video game design worth noting from Megan Carriker at The Escapist (www.escapistmagazine.com):

- Good design guides players.  Bad design controls.  Great design invites with expressive power.

- Good design teaches.  Bad design lectures.  Great design helps you teach yourself.

- Good design does what the user wanted.  Bad design does what the designer wanted.  Great design does what the user didn’t even know they needed.

For coaches, I think these three points blend together quite simply to say empower your players.  Stop telling them what to do all the time.  Give them more responsibility in the training process.  Demand that they take an active and involved role in their learning.  Facilitate, don’t dictate.

I don’t know about you but I’ve found this very interesting.  I’m stoked to pay more attention to my training plans and apply these principles.  So, maybe you say that these things are just logical.  No brainers even.  Okay fair enough but let me ask you something then.  Are the players you coach spending as much time training to get better in your program as they do playing video games?

Next post October 8th.

“When we think of games, we think of fun. When we think of learning we think of work. Games show us this is wrong.” – James Paul Gee

The year was 1998.  Link was tricked by Ganondorf, the evil King of the Gerudo Thieves. He helps to turn the beautiful Hyrulean landscape into a wasteland.  Determined to make amends for this mistake, Link enlists the help of Rauru and together they travel through time to gather the power of the Seven Sages.   Does that sound at all familiar?  According to GameRankings.com, a site that ranks video games as far back as 1996, this story line represents the plot to the top video game of all time.  The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo 64 scored a 97.58% in its ranking.  At the other end of that spectrum with a measly 24.36% rating is the 2003 released Charlie’s Angels for Game Cube.

How could a game created for a system that’s older than Wii, Playstation or even Xbox maintain the number one rank?  Why is it that the over one billion dollar a year in sales Canadian gaming industry can’t knock off a 14-year-old game from the top spot?  The answer is simple in theory and difficult in practice.  It’s the difference between bad game design and great game design.

Listen to a couple of video game reviews.  First, one on Legend of Zelda:

“Like the titles before it, Ocarina of Time featured an overworld with towns to visit and dungeons to conquer, each containing a special tool for Link to use in conjunction with future combat and puzzle situations. This meant that each dungeon was progressively more complicated, given that each item would be useful after the level they were found in. Why is this a big deal? Well, as many adventure game fans know, it’s easy to create an item to use in a sort of mini deus ex machinapuzzle; it takes real skill to work an item into the plot and game design.” (taken from Thunderboltgames.com)

And here’s a review for Charlie’s Angels:

“And that’s what you do in Charlie’s Angels, make your way through some of the most rigidly linear environments since the days of 2D side-scrollers while punching and kicking one goon after another who only differ in the color of shirt that they decided to wear that morning.  In fact, the levels are so linear that you are constantly hitting glass walls that prevent you taking any other path than the one designated by the level designers.” (taken from TheGamersTemple.com)

There are a series of principles that have been identified that should be followed in the designing of a video or computer game.  So far I can’t put an actual number on the quantity of these principles.  I’ve seen everything from seven up to eighty-some.  What is clear is if these principles are followed well by game designers the end result should be a popular game which will draw in plenty of players and therefore make lots of money for the company that backs its design.  If these principles are followed poorly the end result is…well…Charlie’s Angels.  Sorry Bosley.

Okay, why this discussion about video games?  In a previous post, I talked about why I believe we need to embrace the technology and addictive trend of video games in the field of instruction for its potential to aid learning.  I don’t mean that I think Canadian kids should be playing more video games.  One information tidbit I found on the Net said that kiddie Canucks spend over 40 hours a week in front of a screen.  No, we need to get them playing more soccer on a real field using their feet instead of on a screen using their hands.  But as I believe I have seen happening over the years with the advent of video games is that coaches today have their work cut out for them in trying to keep athletes stimulated.  After all, how do you compete with the sensory excitement and cognitive appeal of a present day video game?

And that’s my point for this post.  Well, we can’t really do much about the sensory excitement of today’s games other than hope that real world scenarios are still more appealing than artificial (I stress the word ‘hope’).  However, we CAN work on the cognitive appeal of our soccer and sporting environments.  We can recognize that being a good coach is no different than being a good game designer.  That means abiding by the principles of game design.  Great game designers are always doing a good job of making learning happen and they make that learning fun and intrinsically rewarding.

So what are those principles?  Hopefully you’re curious but you’ll have to wait.  Next time I’ll talk about a few of those principles of game design and discuss how I think they relate to coaching and the design of stimulating learning environments for athletes.

Next post September 24th.

Sorry.  I’m empty this time around.  No inspiration or spark.  Nothing.

Jason DeVos has lots though.  Check out his blog:

www.jasondevos.com

Hopefully I’ll have something next time around.

I’ll try again for September 10th.

“Today’s learner is demanding to be taught in ways that they are comfortable with, they are digital natives not digital immigrants. They are no longer satisfied by traditional learning methods. In order to reach this learner we must provide them with tools that fit their learning style.” – Christopher D. Clark

Lately, I’ve been talking a great deal about the use of game play as a coaching methodology in soccer that I feel holds a lot of promise for youth players today.  It’s something that is relatively new to the mainstream and therefore still open for plenty of debate.  I’d like to build as much support for it as possible so please start by watching this.

If video gaming can be a promising new approach to modernizing education than I think the same can be said for using games in coaching.  Games are realistic.  Drills aren’t.  Games provide immediate assessment of your performance.  Drill don’t.  I just think it makes so much sense to look at using a more games based approach in both coaching and teaching.

North American society continues to evolve and the types of work that our children will grow up to do will be very different than that which our grandparents – or even parents – did.  And for that reason, as James Paul Gee notes, we need to educate them differently.  Again, I ask if video games could represent a medium through which to teach people to solve problems and be more creative, than why wouldn’t the same stand for the use of games in youth sport?

What about today’s young adults – the 20-somethings.  They’ve always had video games and a fair amount of digital technology available to them.  It’s what they know.  They are digital natives while anyone my age or older is more like a digital immigrant as we’ve often had to learn to be comfortable.  In a 2004 paper on the topic of game based learning,  author Christopher D. Clark notes that at the time of writing 50% of all Americans aged 6-60 played video games while 239 million video games were sold.

It is a pervasive industry.  There will be those who say that this is ridiculous and that using video games to instruct violates educational purity.  I think those people and their opinions are going to go the way of the dinosaurs.

Here’s another example of the power of video games to instruct taken again from Christopher D. Clark’s paper:

“If there is any doubt that video games have influenced the way we learn real world activities consider this. I observed my seven year old nephew one day as he was repeatedly watching a replay from a football videogame when I asked him “what he was doing”; he said he was “practicing for practice”. When I asked him what he meant, he said that his coach had told him that when he was running the play that he needed to square his shoulders when “hitting the hole”, so my nephew was watching the instant replay to see “how Ricky Williams squared his shoulders when he hit the hole”.”

Clark also notes today’s learner is a digital multitasker, capable of making sense of large amounts of digital information from a number of sources at the same time.  Just look at the quality of some video games out there.  Or look at the simulations being used to train professionals in the military, aviation or in medicine.  Thing are so advanced and often so real.  I’ve said in a previous post that this video game generation, when they come out to participate in youth sport, is quickly bored with the drill culture.  Why wouldn’t they be?  It’s like a fly weight boxer going up against a heavy weight.  No wonder it’s getting harder and harder to get kids active.  They can stay cozy at home and have their senses well stimulated in front of a screen.

I think it forces our hand as coaches and youth sports program administrators.  We have to stay current or get left behind.  Game based learning is where it’s at.

Next post August 27th.

“Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them.  If he flew them, he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to.  Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.” – Joseph Heller

Last November I went through my learning facilitator training to deliver the new CSA’s Long Term Player Development compliant coaching certification courses.  It was very good to see.  The delivery of the courses has changed to a more modern approach that reflects a better understanding of how adults (people in general) really do learn.  If it had only been that that had changed then I would have said it was a fantastic evolution.

However, some of the content also changed and in particular the inclusion of something called the GAG method.  GAG stands for game-activity-game and represents a coaching methodology that the CSA would like us to use in working with youth soccer players at the community level.  I’ve talked about this GAG method in a previous post.  I’ve been a course conductor for delivery of these courses since 1996 and in that time I have seen four changes in the structure of the community level coaching courses and I think the addition of the GAG method, along with the enhancements in delivery makes these courses the most worth while they have ever been.

Back to the learning facilitator training (they don’t call us course conductors or instructors any more because our job, in the modern view, is to facilitate not dictate learning).  Obviously the LF’s doing their training with me were men and women with a vast range of soccer experiences.  Some had even worked with youth players at a national level.  We were talking about the value of the GAG method to player development.  One of these LF trainees was a university coach as well as a former National Training Centre coach.  He said that he can teach his university players all the tactics they need but the problem is the lack of skills that they have when they arrive in his program.  This was more or less supported by the Master Learning Facilitator for our training who himself is an employee of the provincial soccer association where I live and has worked as an NTC coach also.  Probably not surprising.

I don’t think it’s a secret – Canadian players are are not as skilful as soccer players from other countries.  Nor is it a secret that the majority of youth sport participants that partake when they are younger – including soccer players – drop out between the ages of 13 and 18.  And we’re being told now some pretty scary things about the health of our children as a result of their general lack of physical activity.  Check this out:

So those in elite soccer lament about not having skilful enough players.  Those in health and wellness warn us about our children not being healthy enough.  What does this have to do with the GAG method?

The CSA seem to be saying through their coaching certification courses that the GAG method is great for player development under the age of twelve.  It also says it is useful for development of players thirteen and older as long as they are at a low level of participation, like the community level.  The more traditional method is preferred for developing the abilities – especially skills – for youth players pursuing excellence.

Maybe then the number of kids that go on to survive the elite level of play in soccer will never be very large.  It certainly seems to be the nature of high performance sport in general.  But aren’t all advanced sport programs better off if there are more players to choose from?  Doesn’t a larger base provide more chances to find exceptional performers?  And does the traditional approach to technical and tactical development encourage the most participants possible to go on to realize their full potential as players?  Or do we use it only because it is always what we’ve done?

While I appreciate that the Golden Age of Learning is a key window of opportunity for skill development, I find it difficult to ignore the fact that not every professional or national level soccer player has played the game since they were three or four.  Some didn’t start until their teens meaning the missed their Golden Age for soccer skills development.  They were just good athletes who still had to develop the majority of the technical skills necessary to play at that level.  And they did.

And as I’ve discussed in previous posts, passion for a thing is crucial if you want to go on to be great at that thing.  You will never put the hours of time and effort into improving that thing if you aren’t passionate about it.  From what I have seen, the traditional training method for technical and tactical development does not motivate the average community youth soccer player to aspire to be a better player.  Nor do I think it promotes successful increases in learning relative to the amount of time invested by those players in training.  For the amount that they are coached, they still consistently make a lot of the same dumb mistakes that you try to fix over and over.

So while the elite Canadian coach will most likely use the traditional training method to develop more skilful players, kids at the community level will continue to drop out of soccer because they are bored with it or not improving.  These factors I believe can also be linked to the use of that very same traditional approach.

To me it seems like a real Catch-22.  You really do seem stuck in a development paradox of damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

While maybe the true elite player can benefit more from the traditional method of training (I feel this is still open to debate), I think that the GAG method would be useful to youth players trying to pursue excellence as well as those who simply like to play recreationally.

I just finished coaching a couple of soccer teams – one boys, one girls – for a provincial summer games competition.  The province where I live is divided into eight regions and the tournament featured two pools of four regions each.  The region where I live would be considered one of the weaker ones for sure and there are some superb players out there on some of the other regional teams.

I picked players to represent these teams back in April so had almost twelve weeks in order to prepare.  However, I had only four training sessions and four games with each team in total over the first eleven weeks.  The last week we had three straight days of two training sessions a day.   So in three months we had ten training sessions and six games leading up to the Games.  Not very much.  Not very much at all.

We were already going to be behind the eight ball.  Geography and the players’ own community association soccer programming sure made it challenging for me to help them be properly prepared.  There was really no good way to help them build any fitness.  And I certainly couldn’t develop any technique in that short a period of time with so few sessions together.  It really only left me with one option – tactical training.

The four Sundays that we were together over the first eleven weeks we had two sessions a day.  The first session was a training session and the second was a game.  I had picked fourteen players plus two alternates for each team so could divide the group into two teams of 8vs8 for practice.  I used coaching in the game methodology while they scrimmaged against each other for that first practice of each Sunday.  I used a lot of questions during those scrimmage practices to help the players commit to taking a more active role in their learning.  I then used the exhibition game to reinforce the themes covered in the first practice.  Technique practice was accomplished during the warm-up segment of the first session and focused solely on passing and receiving.

The last week I mentioned we had a training camp and had a total of six sessions.  These focused on 8vs8 coaching in the game scrimmages, set plays and team building with some skill development done again through the warm-up segment (and featuring only passing and receiving).

How did we do?  Given that one of the two teams was very much a regional program and was therefore exposed to my possession style of play for the first time in their young soccer lives, we did not do too badly.  The other program was made up of mostly players from the association where I work as Technical Director.    So they were working on many of the same things but just at a higher level.  I was happy with the way we played.

Tactically, I felt the players understood the way I wanted them to play and for the most part recognized the situations when they should solve tactical problems in certain ways.  Even when they didn’t recognize it right off the bat they usually knew very shortly thereafter what it was they did wrong and what would have been a better solution.  When we played the weaker regions we looked quite good overall.  When we played the stronger regions, who gave us little time and space to play, our flaws showed.  Tactically we knew what to do but technically we could not execute quickly enough or effectively enough.  Passes got picked off or went to the opponent.  First touches were bobbled up into the air or under the body or went right back to the opponent.

The thing is, I think those players got it.  They can see now where they are lacking and that that is in their technique.  I believe they will be more open and motivated now to commit time, using a more traditional method, to develop their skills.  I don’t think I would have gotten the same results if I’d used the traditional method during that short period of time.  I did the opposite of what some best practices suggest.  I taught them tactics in the form of game awareness.  And the most important thing is that I believe the majority are now hungry for more.

The next question to answer then is what’s the right balance?  I know if I spend too much time on their skill development at this point I’ll give them better skills but then they’ll forget about the where and when of those skills.  It truly is what makes coaching an art and my addiction.

As a legacy of these Games, I am continuing to work with these players in a regional training program so that they can advance in their development.  This is the first time that players participating in the Games in this region will have had the opportunity to pursue this sort of thing.  It will also be my opportunity to see if I can now accelerate their technical development to match their tactical development.  Stay tuned!

Next post should be August 6th but I’m getting married on that day so figure I might be a little busy.  Therefore, the next post will be August 13th.

“Children need the freedom and time to play.  Play is not a luxury.  Play is a necessity.” – Kay Renfield Jamieson

A small toot of my own horn here.  I’ve worked very hard over the last ten years to ensure that the session plans I create for soccer have a theme and that that theme runs from the warm-up, through the skill drills, small-sided games and into the scrimmage.  I’ve always figured that in doing that the players will be better able to see the connection from activity to activity and take the concepts into the final game.  I remember once I had a player I was coaching make an out of the blue comment to me that he could see that each of my practices had a theme and that that theme got worked from start to finish.  He liked that about my practices.

Once.  In ten years.  One person.

Maybe I’m just doing it wrong (I think I said that last post too but maybe that is the problem)?

You can put together a great training session.  Work from simple to complex.  Individual to team.  Less realistic to more realistic.  Add in progressive elements like someone painstakingly reconstructing a whole onion one layer at a time.  But as skilful and as thoughtful as that practice might be the kids still don’t seem to make the connection.

You flow masterfully through your session connecting one activity to the next.  Even Jose Mourinho would be singing your praises.  And then you get to the scrimmage and you wait with the anticipation of a kid on Christmas Eve.  You’ve created a masterpiece and now let the players show you just how masterful your coaching was by carrying out the theme precisely in the scrimmage.  But frustration ensues.

It’s like something happens during the water breaks between activities.  The players forget.  Maybe they’re lobotomized by aliens while you’re picking up and putting down the cones?  You anxiously encourage them, Remember what we did earlier? Frustration creeps in. Remeber? We did this earlier, right? Finally, after the players fumble through the scrimmage like it’s the first time they’ve seen a soccer ball and there’s no sign whatsoever of your precious theme, the anger boils over.  We did this in the warm-up!  And again in the skill drill!   And again in the small-sided game!  We’ve done this all session!  REMEMBER!

Why don’t they see what we see?  Why don’t they get it?  Why, why, why!

I’ve always felt that I could teach pretty much any tactical concept to an adult and they’d understand it and that I could teach pretty much any technical concept to a kid and they’d be able to do it.  I guess the rationale then is that that adult can understand the tactics but might not be able to go out and execute the skills and that kid might be able to execute the skills but not understand when and where to use them.

Professors instructing undergraduate physical education teachers realized this back in the 60′s.  A physical education teacher could progress through a wonderful lesson teaching the skills of a game like volleyball – bumping, setting, spiking for example – and then not see one iota of those skills in a game featuring the very same players that just learned the skills.

Those very same professors then asked the question: what if you started with the game?  Or some form of the game.  What if you helped introduce the players to the basic concepts of the game, like game objectives and rules?  An interesting position for sure.

Aime Jacquet, former French national team coach, is credited I believe with saying one of the most compelling statements that I think I’ve ever heard in soccer: no technique, no tactics.

I’ve been a firm believer in this.  It’s hard to execute the tactics if you don’t have the skills to carry them out.  The more tools you have in your tool box, the more ways you can go about solving problems on the field.  As Abraham Maslow said, if all you know how to use is a hammer, then everything tends to look like a nail.

But I think we need to make something clear here.  Not having technique does not stop you from playing the game.  It will only stop you from carrying out the tactics necessary to maintain your team’s strategy.  Don’t think so?  Just go out to the soccer fields on a Friday night in the summer and you’ll see lots of adults who’ve never played soccer or learned any of the techniques of the game playing on teams in leagues.  It is very possible to play the game and not have any skill.

The Golden Age of Learning should be the key time to help young soccer players develop as many tools for their soccer tool box as possible.  The problem that I can see is that learning skill involves repetition and repetition gets boring for the average youth soccer participant.  Boring certainly does not equate with continued participation.  It more likely equates with dropout or at least transfer to another activity that is not deemed boring.

So it’s a best practice to teach skills to young players and not over coach them in tactics.  For the majority of youth soccer participants, I’d like to challenge that best practice.  Over the years, we’ve also talked in soccer about how the game is the greatest teacher.  That’s a best practice as well.  I find these two best practices contrasting.

My position then hasn’t changed, just maybe evolved.  Yes, give kids the tools.  But first make sure they understand what the tool is, why it is used and then show them how it is used (and in that order).  Traditionally, we show kids how to do the skills first and then where and when to use them second.

I guess you could say like an onion, learning a single skill is only one layer of that onion.  You can pull the onion apart and present one layer at a time or you can start with the whole onion.  Let the kids develop an appreciation for it as a whole before they begin to dissect it.  Pull the onion apart and give the kids only one layer and they may not understand how that layer fits back into the whole onion.  It has been taken out of context.  It is no longer meaningful.  They have no way of relating to it.  It’s just one single layer of this thing called an ‘onion.’

But we see it.  We’re familiar with the onion.  After all, we’re the ones who’ve deftly taken it apart for the kids to put back together again.

So then lets both start on the same page.  The place where both kids and adults can connect with what they see – the game!  As a coach, you can take a small-sided game and give it a condition.  Something that will consistently bring out a specific type of problem that you want the players to solve.  And if you’re working with young kids then errors will definitely happen.

If they are errors of motivation, those are easily enough addressed.  If they are errors of decision making (i.e., tactics) then those can be corrected in the game.  No need to go to a drill.  But, if they are errors of skill and they happen frequently then now you have a reason to stop the game and move more to a drill-like activity.  This activity is designed to isolate the skill and provide the repetitions necessary in order to make the skill a habit.

Here, though, is where I see the greatest benefits to the kids.  Because the error happened in a game, the kids can see why the skill is necessary and where they should be using it but they can also clearly see that they don’t have the ability to make the skill happen and so their game play suffers because of that.  Now that single layer that’s been pulled apart from all the other layers has context.  They can now see how and why a repetitious drill designed to isolate a particular skill has relevance.

Here’s the second greatest thing about this.  Because the kids can now see the purpose of the skill drill, there is more motivation to do it.  If you also add in the caveat that the sooner they master the skill the sooner they can get back to the game then there is even greater motivation to succeed at the skill.

And then when you do go back to the game it is a great opportunity for you and the players to see the improvement in learning.  Are they better at the skills the second time around?  Because they understand the what and where of the skill, are they more thoughtful about it’s use?  Learning takes place before your’s and their eyes’ because it is contextual.

I think this method is pure brilliance and I’ve been using it consistently now for just about two years.  I find the results so far to be encouraging.  Don’t get me wrong.  The average youth soccer player is still not skilful enough but I think that can also easily be the result of other problems like not enough time with a ball or lack of consistent quality coaching.  What I see from the players that I have worked with using this methodology is a greater appreciation and understanding for how technique and tactics marry together.

Their interconnectedness is complicated and I think as coaches we do the best we can to make it simple by introducing only single layers at a time.  But that is a disservice to the players.  Soccer is messy.  It’s complex.  It’s not always predictable.  So we’re better off sometimes not trying to make it less busy or chaotic.  I think that’s why when we use the traditional approach and get to the end scrimmage we don’t always see the results that we would like.

Because it’s often harum-scarum the game IS the greatest teacher.  We as coaches need to embrace that and stop trying to deconstruct it.

No technique, no tactics?   Meh…I’d say no game appreciation then no technique.

Boy, I’ve been on a roll today.  Hopefully I can carry on where I left off next time.

Next post July 23rd.

“Between the ages of 8-12 a child is ripe for the learning of skills (and knowledge). Teach the right skills at this time and the child will become a physically gifted adult, but teach them wrongly and it will be at best a difficult struggle to unravel them in future to produce optimum performance.” – PPOnline.co.uk

The Golden Age of Learning.  You’ve heard of it no doubt.  Depending on who you talk to it falls between the ages of 8 and 12.  The Canadian Soccer Association even uses it as the tag phrase for Stage 3 – Learning to Train – of their LTPD.  But try to get more information than this on it from the World Wide Web and you’ll run into a cul de sac.  Here’s the typical statement that you’ll find floating around out there:

This is the “golden age of learning” and the most important age for skill development.

Great…thanks!  Um…could you elaborate?

Okay, so the gist of the story is that children, during this time frame, have developed in such a way that they are optimally ready to develop technical sports skills.

That’s all good and well but has anyone tried to tell this to the typical Canadian youth club player?  Maybe I’m just doing it wrong.  The players in this age range that I work with get desperately bored with repetition, don’t do enough soccer anyway to get the repetition and sure as heck don’t do any practice at home to continue the repetition.

I just don’t get it then.  For the homage we pay to this period, it just doesn’t add up.  There should be a landslide of information out there on the what and how and why and when and where of the Golden Age of Learning.  But there’s not.  Just a lot of broken records.

Meanwhile, there’s still the issue of the players that I’ve seen along my travels who with each passing generation seem to have less ability to stomach repetitious training.  So then build your technical training into games you say.  Fair enough.  Set up within the game some conditions in order to get the focus on skill development and repetition that you need, right?  Absolutely, but be careful.  Next thing you know, you’ve got yourself something that’s more like a drill than a game.  And while kids may be naive, they’re certainly not stupid.  A game is a game and a drill is a drill and they certainly know which one they like better.

In preparing for this, I searched long and hard for anything I could find on the Golden Age of Learning.  Here’s a segment from a website I came across written by a guy called Jack Blatherwick:

In the United States, we might say, “Repetition after repetition is boring, and I want kids to have fun.”  The Russians would answer, “Our kids do have fun.  They can’t wait to do repetitions on-ice and off, feel the improvement, and have success in competition.”

No one can deny that it’d be a lot of fun to have skills like Ovechkin, Kovalchuk, or Tiger Woods — or for that matter, Itzhak Perlman, or any great musician in the world.  Their childhoods were not boring.  Passion wasn’t lost because of their early specialization.

If a youngster is bored with hockey and wants to quit, it’s probably from lack of skills to compete successfully — not from over-emphasis on correct technique.  We think we’re making the experience fun with games that amount to grand productions — but in fact,  competing without skill is a surefire path to lost confidence and withdrawal — the grander the production, the greater the feelings of inadequacy.

I agree with the grand production thing.  Adults get way too involved in what should be simple kids play.  However, I think this guy’s got his rose coloured glasses on if he thinks the typical North American 9-year-old is going to be tickled by doing repetition.  I think the 9-year-old who is in love with repetition is the exception and does go on to become Ovechkin, or Woods or Messi.  Either that or I should move to Russia and start coaching kids there.

As I said, I find that over twenty years ago kids were more willing to do repetition.  They may not have liked it but they were more willing to do it.  Now they just outright complain, protest and question why.

“What time is it?”  ”Are we almost done?” “Can we do something fun?” “Are we going to scrimmage soon?”

This is the video game era and we coaches are competing with technology and story lines that no prettied up drill could ever hold a candle to.   While some of us may be very lucky to work with the few unnatural kids who like doing the same thing over and over again, the majority of us will just have to do our best developing the rest.

So how exactly do you develop the rest when video games have kids hooked like junkies on action packed high-fidelity?  It’s a tall order and one to talk about next time.

Next post July 9th.

“And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can’t be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical knowledge immersion in a particular field.” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

From the last post, I was thinking about two of the questions around kids and the concepts of improvisation and imitation.  Can children improvise or only imitate?  Albert Bandura, in his Social Learning Theory, says we learn by observation of people and things and in so doing imitate what we observe.  This is a presently a popular contributing theory to our understanding of the way we learn.  Children play house or doctor and imitate what they see the adults around them doing.

Yet the act of imitating in that manner may require a child to improvise.  For example, in playing doctor, a child may need to pretend that a toy is a certain piece of medical equipment.  I was reading about the act of improvising in pre-school children’s play and it was suggested that the best toys for developing this concept were ones that did not have set rules or specific functions about how they were to be used (e.g., as far as putting things together goes a jigsaw puzzle is far more one dimensional than Lego blocks in its usage).

However, in order to improvise that medical tool, say out of Lego blocks, the child would have to understand its purpose and therefore would have observed it being used in previous visits to the doctor.  In this instance imitation and improvisation are not separated but much at all.  You can pretend your way to creativity.

Riding a bike would be another interesting progression of this.  A child would probably develop a desire to learn to ride a bike by observing others doing it or trying to do it (Social Learning Theory).  In this case seeing others isn’t enough for the child to be able to pretend to use the skill, like using the imaginary medical tool made from Lego.  There is a real skill application required here.  Practice, and therefore repetition, is required.  Only after enough hours of practice in the basics of riding a bike have been established can a child then go on to do something improvisational like riding with no hands.  So I think that the improvisation of an applied skill in children comes after first imitating it.  You can’t pretend your way to creativity here.

The other question was how long does a child have to imitate that applied skill before he/she can improvise.  It’s probably somewhere in the range of less than 10,000 hours and more than a few hours (depending of course on the skill) but I really don’t know.  Guess I’ll keep searching for answers…any help you out there can provide would be great (hint, hint).

Well, that still leaves me wondering about the nature of improvisation in tactical or strategic skills.  Is it different than in applied skills?  Maybe in my example of learning to ride a bike, I neglected the role of tactics/strategy.  While a key applied skill in riding a bike is balance, is it not also important to understand on what surface that balance is most easily maintained if riding without hands (e.g., asphalt vs grass).  Or is that just part of the learning that occurs through repetition of an applied skill on your way towards improvisation and therefore it really isn’t strategic or tactical in nature?

I don’t know.  A thought worth revisiting at some point though I think.

What I do know is that the notion of the Golden Age of Learning is interesting to me when you consider the place of imitation and improvisation.  And that I’d like to confuse myself about with more questions next time around.

Next post June 25th.