What kind of coach are you? Differences among the sports

Do you teach to be independent or to be dependent on you?

British table tennis champion Matthew Syed describes great coaches as being “able to design practice so that feedback is embedded in the drill, leading to automatic readjustment, which in turn improves the quality of the feedback, generating further improvements, and so on.”

For example, Michael Johnson’s coach Clyde Hart introduced feedback into Johnson’s sessions by wiring a beeper through track speakers to give Johnson pace feedback in every session for 15 years. Like a metronome in music, it helped him to judge his rhythm and speed, enabling him to instantly judge his form at key checkpoints and refine his technique and tactics.

Golfer Jack Nicklaus illustrated this point when he said, “Jack Grout taught me from the start. He said I need to be responsible for my own swing and understand when I have problems on the golf course how I can correct those problems … myself without having to run back to somebody. And during the years that I was playing most of my competitive golf, I saw Jack Grout maybe once or twice a year for maybe an hour… But he taught me young the fundamentals of the game. He taught me how to assess what I was doing. When I made a mistake, when I was doing things, how do you on the golf course fix that without putting yourself out of a golf tournament and then teaching your- self” (Patterson and Lee, 2013).

In the same in soccer

Looking at professional coaches’ central role in soccer, a ‘traditional’ approach to coaching has also been described by a number of studies in English Premier League (EPL) soccer clubs. This ‘is characterized by a highly directed, autocratic and prescriptive approach to instruction’ with limited player independence (Cushion et al., 2012).

For example, when the amount of time EPL coaches spent on different tasks during practices was measured, some interesting results showed up. Instruction (60 percent) was by far the most common activity, proportionally followed by praise (15 percent), with observation (13 percent), occupying less time and far less time used for the coach asking questions (3 percent). The remaining nine percent of the time was made up by the coach managing and hustling the session along (Potrac et al., 2007).

This somewhat contradicts the lessons that Jack Nicklaus gleaned over the years about being able to think and work things out for himself. With 60 percent of the time being used for instruction-including feedback-it suggests too much information and talk in sessions. The overuse of praise could also be regarded as a sign of unspecific feedback that can dilute its motivational effects.

In a similar study of top-level football coaches in Norway, they employed silent observation two and a half times more than English coaches (37 percent as opposed to 15 percent). Encouraging individuals to work things out for themselves is one thing, but perhaps the real craft for team coaches is to set up situations in which groups can respond and fix problems.

(Source: Ben Oakley, 2015)

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