What is coaching? Education for kids and parents? All aboard!

We have had some positive feedback on one of our Saturday courses this term. Whilst it is gratifying to be told that we are doing something right, it is also slightly worrying as to what might have been going on previously.

As far as I can tell, we have been doing nothing exceptional with the group — some skills, plenty of games, not too much standing around — but we are being told that this is a huge improvement on earlier in the year.

What has been going on?

The father has, diplomatically, refrained from identifying the coaches involved previously, but I can quite picture the coaching behaviours he described — coaches disengaged and spending more time talking to each other than to the kids (we have the luxury of having a low child:coach ratio, 4 or 5:1 in many sessions), session plans either too formal & drills-based or, conversely, almost entirely games.

Just drills, or drills and a game at the end, seems very old-fashioned, in a coaching world that knows better, in the shape of games-based learning and the constraints-led approach.

I am a great believer in games-based learning, but maybe there does need to be some obvious coaching, too.

Partly for those players who really don’t understand how to learn through play. A disturbing number expect to be told everything — a consequence of the modern education system with its emphasis on facts over understanding, but also, perhaps, a reflection of today’s digitally connected society? Who needs to really know anything when you can always google the answer?

As an information scientist by training, this used to be my proud boast…but all I really had was access to knowledge, not actionable experience. Little better than AI, in fact.

Well, the ball is approaching at 45mph, and you know the bowler has tried to put some spin on it, and the pitch is pretty rough and unreliable. Google that!

But the other party who possibly needs to see some actual (traditional) coaching are the parents. Partly so they feel that they are getting some value for their money, partly as evidence of the coaches’ credentials, but also to take them along the learning journey with their child.

Whitehead’s Passion -> Precision -> Generalisation is a great model — from wanting to play the game (to succeed), to learning a new skill, to applying it in context.

But it has been driven out of modern learning by the exam-factory mentality.

So perhaps coaches working with children have the responsibility to re-educate both the kids they are coaching and their parents’ expectations. But maybe we need to give the parents that ticket to ride (something they recognise — the “drill”) to encourage them to get on the bus.

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Aside — as a former information scientist and online publisher, I know that effective online retrieval actually requires a lot of understanding, not of the answers but of how to formulate questions and evaluate the responses and information sources. And you can’t readily google that. (So LLM AI will struggle to replicate truly intelligent information retrieval, let alone original content creation.)