Focus – Teaching New Skills

Coaches need to teach with focus. They need to model that behavior for parents to avoid overloading kids with too much information. Coaches and parents that are constantly feeding young players directions like, “faster”, “keep you eye on the ball” and “be ready”, all at the same time usually have an overall negative effect.

Coaches that do this during competition is one thing, but behavior like this is during practice is not productive. Trust me, I’ve learned the hard way. It doesn’t help because it doesn’t allow the kids to focus on improvement.

We are going to walk through the steps every coach should follow to teach new skills with focus.

From the first day of practice, coaches focus on classifying players based on their relative skill level. While that is a perfectly reasonable and effective first step, the real skill in coaching is how you respond to that evaluation.

Early in my coaching experience, I was eager to share all the techniques and skills I had learned over the years. I felt like I was going to burst at the seems with all the great knowledge. It was exactly what I thought I was missing when I was a kid.  I had so much to offer.

What I failed to realize is most young players are just trying to understand the game. They were not ready or even interested in all the insight I had. Many were overwhelmed by the situation. They were dealing with so many  other new experiences; new kids as teammates; other parents ‘cheering’ on those other kids; new coaches they didn’t know if they should trust; and other factors.

I quickly learned that kids don’t and can’t respond to overload. I needed to focus on one skill at a time. Therefore, I started at the beginning, focus on teaching the foundational skills first using the following process with each skill.

Step 1 – Baseline

Before the teaching began, it is effective if you use a common drill or game that can measure that skill. A simple example in basketball is shooting free throws.

Have each player shoot 10 free throws and record the score before you do any instruction to improve that skill. Coaches ,or players, should record how many  each player made. This will serve as a baseline for progress they will make eventually.

Step 2 – Teach Skills with Focus

Remember, kids are still learning the game. By virtue of their physical and mental maturity, they don’t know how little they know about swinging a bat, throwing a ball, shooting a basketball or even running. Moreover, we are all still learning about the biomechanics and performance. Therefore, you can’t teach a new skill by describing it in one long monologue, don’t try it. It won’t be effective because the kids get distracted  and stop listening.

Coaches need to show some patience. Dedicate time to teach one skill at a time. Allocate practice time to walk through the mechanics with enough detail for them to understand the purpose. It would be great if they could watch someone modeling the motion and understand what repeated success looks like.
Naturally, they still need to mimic the same motion, slower and more deliberately. Remind the kids, they are unlikely to have the same success initially. Your job as a youth coach is to make sure players are focused on earning success and not get discouraged.

Step 3 – Practice Skills

Once players have a reasonable understanding of the skill, they need repetitions. That is when coaches need to create the opportunity to repeat that skill as many times as possible but much closer to “real time”. The goal at this point is to provide more opportunities for trial and error. Players will learn how to adjust their positioning and adjust their movement, but you have to encourage that testing with focus on one skill.

Coaches only need to monitor, looking for success including correctness and alignment to the skill taught. When you see struggles or frustration, get them to think about how to fix it.

Again, you need to be clear to players, they will not dramatically improve in just five minutes of practice. We need to encourage hours of practice with focus.

Step 4 – Connect the Skills

The last step is the fun part. We need to put players in natural, game like, scenarios that allow them to connect the skill to the overall game. These opportunities should be just a natural part of the game. However, now you can alter the rules or scoring to highlight the successes in the skill you just taught.  For example, if you just practiced on passing in basketball, you can make perfect passes worth points when they are successful and are executed perfectly (or as close to ‘perfect’ you can expect).

Summary

In the same way, coaches need to provide focus when teaching skills. We, at Play My Kid, are not going to be able to give you everything to know about keeping parents happy and you should not be looking for a silver bullet.

Just like when you are teaching your players to be better players, it is your responsibility to make sure parents let their kids enjoy and learn how to play. Yes! I said, “let” their kids enjoy and learn how to play.