The Teesra

Author: Andrew Beaven

  • Team building – numbers and culture

    Your pre-season planning will be well in hand, now, I’m sure. Winter nets in full swing, working parties planned to spruce up the pavilion and repair the sight screens, grant applications in place.

    It will soon be time to think about selecting the team for the first fixtures. How many players do you need? The obvious answer is 11, of course. But how many of them do you need to be in form and making a contribution each week?

    In a typically insightful article last year, Ed Smith quoted Sir Alex Ferguson as saying that he needed only eight players performing well to win a game.

    Just eight. And Smith gives examples of teams that have been successful with contributions from an even smaller proportion of their players.

    Which is not to say that Sir Alex would ever have sent a team onto the pitch with only eight players, nor that the other three simply stood around for 90 minutes and did nothing.

    We do definitely need 11 players. But what should we expect from the three or four who won’t be scoring runs or taking wickets, and how do we prepare them to play that role? (more…)

  • 2014 – nearly over (3): Sports psychology – making it work in 2015

    One of the challenges on the CPD courses was to design sessions and interventions to support and development mental strengths.  We covered the “4 Cs” (Concentration, Control, Commitment and Confidence) on the level 2 course, but at a very superficial level, without really thinking about how to coach them.

    And this might prove to be the key to this difficult topic – rather than trying to “teach” Concentration, or Commitment, the development of mental skills needs to be consciously included into a holistic training programme.

    Easy to write, less easy to put into action.  So my challenge for 2015 is to integrate mental skills alongside technical, tactical and physical, for players of all ages and abilities.

    (more…)

  • 2014 – nearly over (2): CPD – coaching “children” and “young people & adults”

    Over the last few months, I have been working my way through the new ECB CPD courses for level 2 coaches.

    The new courses are presented in two distinct streams – Coaching children and Coaching Young People & Adults (YPA).

    Interesting, though, in the light of my experiences this year coaching players aged 3 and 63, that the “Coaching children” workshops all look to be just as important for the YPA environment (13 and older) as for children.

    (more…)