From Coach Driven to Self driven

I am a big believer and advocate for all sporting teams out there to be self driven, athlete centred as opposed to Coach driven, athlete compliant approach.

All the teams I coach my focus is on having a athlete/player centred approach to everything we do, on and off the field. It is my firm belief that the individual player knows best about there own game and what they need to work on to improve, and the team also should no best about what they should be doing collectively to improve as a team. So how do I go about this, well that really depends largely on the group of players in front of you, some players will embrace this model of a player centre approach or player empowerment very quickly, other will take much longer and may never embrace it.

- At the start of any season, or at the start of my time with a new team, I like to sit down with the group and have a bit of a goal brainstorming sessions, where together as a collective we set out the goals and the plan for the season or time ahead. Basically the road map for where we want to go as a team if you will.

- The next step along the way is to encourage engagement from everyone and a leaderful team if you will, but inviting different players or groups of players to take on different roles within the group or look at different aspects of the game.

- At training the drills tend to be for me more Game based, as opposed to Skill based. I believe that the focus should be on teaching the skills of the game within the pressure of actually game scenario's. If you watch a training session I run what I like to call Game Skills Drills (GSD's) or Game Scenario Drill's.

- During these drills, I will often pause them getting everyone to stand exactly where they are then I will pose open ended question to the players such as, What could we be doing better? What other alternatives could we use in this scenario?

With your questioning you are encouraging the self driven approach and the team collectively to think in a 3 dimensional way.

During the first 10-15 minutes of training I also like individual players to drive the skills practice session where we are working on specific individual skills, I encourage each member of the team from week to week, to come to training with specific aspects of there game that they would like to work on, and where possible I pair them up with others who also want to work on that specific skill.

Implementing a Athlete/Player Centred approach wont be easy, and in the end if you decide as a coach to go down this path you are in effect doing yourself out of a job, because the ultimate outcome from this approach is that the team becomes self sufficient and the players together are able to coach themselves. What you are effectively doing is going from being the centre of attention within the team to being behind the team and players pushing them forward. Now some players will try to pull you back into the space where you want them to be, you have to be prepared to hold your nerve and stick to the plan, no as I say in the end it could make you pointless to some degree.