October 1st 2012 - 1st Practical Session

October 1st 2012

Today was the 1st practical coaching session in 'Coaching Toolkit' module, therefore nobody knew what to expect.

We was told to get into groups and devise a small 15-20 minute session on how to improve a particular skill. That skill  depended on what sport we chose, and what sporting action we chose. For example a sporting action in Football would be shooting. Dribbling (Football) was the action our group decided on. Once we decided which action we was going to use for our session, we then had to break it down and coach to improve a particular aspect of that action. When we broke the action down, we chose to concentrate on coaching the participants' footwork. 

The session started off really well. Most of the participants did the drills correctly, however a couple of them were using the wrong technique. At this point we stopped, stepped in to coach the correct technique and then the session presumed. We thought to progress the session we would reduce the distance between the cones they were dribbling through, this however was probably the wrong thing to have done. The participants struggled to do the drill correctly from the start, so after we received the feedback from Nigel, we realised we should have progressed it by increasing the distance between cones.

A good session from a coaching perspective, but it could have been a lot better. This has made realise that progressing a session doesn't always mean to make it harder, sometimes it may have to be made easier.