The Teesra

Month: January 2019

  • Not many answers…but learning to ask better questions

    When I first started posting to this blog, the strapline I chose was “in search of innovation in cricket”. I believed (hoped) that it should be possible to find novel solutions to coaching and technical issues.

    Over the years, it has become apparent that there are probably very few absolute answers. “It depends” seems to be the standing response from researchers and experienced coaches. Even when an answer is correct today, new research, new knowledge, might mean that by tomorrow that answer might no longer be true.

    So perhaps the best I can hope to do is to learn how to ask better questions.

  • Make the sport fit the child, not the child fit the sport — thoughts on iCoachKids

    Really interesting video from the iCoachKids project, on “making the sport fit the child, not the child fit the sport”

    Some of the concepts discussed might appear obvious, but I thought it was very helpful to see how the video (and the associated activities on the MOOC) provides a framework to think about why and how to adapt and differentiate activities in children’s sport.

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  • What is fun, anyway?

    I think there is growing agreement that sports coaching for children needs to be “fun” if coaches are to engage and retain players in their programmes.

    Fun has been identified as a key component driving engagement in kids sport in numerous studies (see Bailey et al., cited in the iCK MOOC Developing Effective Environments for Children in Sport).

    The word “fun” appears in 46 posts on this blog — that is nearly 25% of posts published since I started The Teesra in 2009.

    But what actually is “fun”?

    And is it always a good thing?

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