From The Touchline: I don't understand coach!

I always remember starting out coaching and delivering sessions in my early coaching career, the advice of my head coach at the time was: “ There are no failures, just experiences and your reaction to them.”

A piece of advice I have always kept with me because it is so true. One of the coaches that helps me out at training works hard at coaching the right things and delivering them to some of our younger teams but he gets nervous with pressure from parents watching if the players he is coaching don't immediately get what he wants them to do.

He would rather move onto something he knows they understand. This is something that affects a lot of coaches – they have to realise sometimes the players take longer to understand the session but with a bit of perserverance they will get it.

It is important you the coach understands it first and foremost and then get the players to do so – often they need to play it first just to realise what they have to do. I always refer to the old saying: “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand”.

My coach said to me last week after we had started a quite advanced session “It's not working, we need to move on.”

I realised the players were struggling and called them in to reiterate what I was looking for because I hate to give up on something I know they would be able to do that would benefit them – and sure enough within 30 seconds of the restart they were doing what I wanted.

My advice to any coach would be to use your own judgement and knowledge to work out how long an activity should be run before moving on to the next thing – trust me the results will speak for themselves.