Reflective Essay: Planning A Coaching Session

A coach will usually sit down and plan their upcoming session in advance of them arriving to deliver the session. Nash (2014) saw planning as a coaches attempt to predict what will occur in the future sessions, therefore when circumstances arise the coach is prepared for the situation. This is what happened when my group planned our in house session, the group consisted of George Morgan, Jack Glynn, Mark Gravett and myself. To plan for our session we created two different plans, one for delivering to the whole group and another for half the group, this used Nash’s view as we tried to predict a future circumstance. Planning coaching sessions is a valuable skill that can help a coach create a framework for a potentially successful session, this

The other two coaches arrived before the session and the three of us talked through what was going to happen before, during and after the match. This meant that once the players arrived and had been taken for their warm up I took their first main drill of duo’s and because the session was planned before the players arrived the transition between the warm up and the first drill was very fluid and this is a direct result of planning and preparation by the coach. Although the session was planned it was not seamless as the behaviour of a couple of the players was not acceptable and did not meet the context anticipated, to adapt to this situation I conducted myself in an appropriate manner. This links to social learning theory as children tend to replicate the behaviours of significant others (Jarvis, 2005), therefore by behaving in an appropriate manner the coach can act as a role model for the children which should have a beneficial effect on the players behaviour. I started to see an effect on one of the players in my next session a few weeks later, however one player was still misbehaving so one of the coaches made the player go in goal during a shooting drill, as the player did not want to be there he made an effort to behave. As a result of the two sessions being planned the coaches were able to deal with the situations that were not envisaged as

To maximise the effectiveness of the sessions I tailored each one around a specific football skill such as passing, dribbling or shooting and aim to improve the skill by the outcome of the session. This linked with Foxon’s (2001, cited in Robinson, 2010) approach of planning the sessions so that the coach can set targets for the performers to work towards, which should improve the effectiveness of the sessions and dedication of the performers as they have a clear outline to focus on. There is a lot of variation in the sessions with to avoid the athletes experiencing tedium which in turn would affect the quality of their performance as their intensity drops, however the cool down remains the same throughout the sessions in order to get the athletes in a rhythm where they become competent in performing the cool down without assistance. This would result in the athletes picking up positive habits as they reduce their chances of picking up injuries by not performing a cool down and it gives the athletes more responsibility which has the potential to reflect in their performances in matches. The sessions are planned with a warm up that uses a basic drill to get ball familiarity for the players early on in the session whilst preparing the muscles for the session to prevent any injuries being picked up. Following this there is three main drills which all focus on