photo by Piotr Makowski on Unsplash
I witnessed a difficult situation for a coach and group of youth players during a game recently, and felt for all involved.
They were clearly outmatched for skill 1, being well beaten and the coach was becoming increasingly frustrated.
At each break in play, the coach kept going back to scribbling on the tactics board and proffering “x & o” jargon…his frustration being expressed with increasing hostility towards these young people.
Things just got worse when play resumed and, judging by the looks on faces, the game couldn’t end soon enough for all involved.
If we zoom out from this particular event, we see the coach “performing” their role as they would have seen and heard portrayed via media coverage countless times throughout their life…as the “chess master” moving the pieces around the board to come up with the match-winning/changing move, along with some degree of “the spray” to “motivate” players.
Unfortunately this portrayal of coaching is both incredibly inaccurate and incredibly limiting, especially when it comes to coaching young players.
Despite admirable efforts, coach education and development in the child and youth space has thus far failed to perturb the powerful messages and stories (“narrative”) that shape and entrench coaching culture.
This culture is characterised by the presence of a blind spot around the vital importance and value of relational and skill 1 development aspects of coaching. They are over-shadowed by the “chess master” and “motivator” archetypes.
What we have learnt is that online content/resources and sporadic workshops that barely skim the surface of these coaching blind spots are NOT sufficient to amplify there value and quality in child/youth coaching practice.2
Therefore, creative experiments for tackling this “wicked problem” have to be pursued.
…which are unlikely to be the kind of things you just “roll out” on a broad scale, creating tensions with national bodies and institutions’ MO.3
Therefore:
- What would you suggest?
- Where have you seen “weak signals” of promising alternative approaches?
- Who should lead new initiatives, and at what scale - local? state? national? global?
- What level of funding and resource is required? Where should this come from?
I have founded the WayFinders Network for the purposes of navigating these wicked problems in society. Get in touch if you would like to explore these questions together.
graph in background sourced from here
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“skill” is used here as an over-arching term for players that display characteristics such as: coordinated and adaptive movements (on and off the ball, individually and collectively), “emergent” decisions (by successfully perceiving~acting on “what’s in front of them”), game sense/intelligence etc. It is far broader than just the biomechanics of throwing or kicking a ball and/or accuracy in hitting a pre-determined target, which is the common meaning when people say “he/she has good skills”. ↩︎ ↩︎
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more formal research and publications are also proving insufficient, but this is part of a broader trend of inefficacy when attempting to use these “ways of knowing” to shift “sticky” socio-cultural patterns. ↩︎
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a token “pilot” before the mass roll-out is also misguided, and should not be conflated with experiment-based approaches. For more on the latter, see the wisdom of Sam Rye here and here ↩︎