The Teesra

Category: Coach Development

  • Coaching: a fabulous crisis.

    Here is another reblog, this time from Rick Walton’s cricketmanwales blog, on the challenges facing batting coaches in an era when describing a batsman’s technique as “textbook” can almost be seen as a criticism.

    Includes links to a couple of fascinating batting masterclasses.

    For those of you who already know Rick’s writing, you will know what to expect. For anyone who has not yet experienced the passion, the honesty of CricketManWales, you are in for a treat.

    @cricketmanwales is asking the important question – what now for batting coaches? Have a read & have your say! 🏏❓❓❓

    bowlingatvincent's avatarsportslaureate

    We can’t pretend nothing’s changed; everything’s changed. McCullum plays baseball cum tennis, with hands eight feet apart, off a wide, elasticated base. Pietersen says ‘kiss the ball’ – it’s all about head – and forget (or trust?) your feet. Nye Donald (a fair symbol for the next, irresistible generation?) has high, twitchy hands, intent on pulls and slaps – and he’s opening. The old certainties are buried.

    Or are they?

    All of us coaches at all of our levels are scrambling across the fallen masonry. It’s the age of the positive, the pre-emptive counter-attack, the bomb squad. Levels of change, development or challenge have become become so-o tectonically shifted it’s become unthinkable to deal in classical batting… or has it?

    A series of Sky Sports Masterclasses have felt central to the annihilation of all we knew; or maybe they’ve simply enacted the moment of kerrplunk. Hussein and Key and Vaughan…

    View original post 1,276 more words

  • The future of cricket coaching – what next for coaches working in schools and clubs? (from December 2013)

    What game will the players be playing in 10-20 years’ time?

    And what should we be coaching now, to prepare players for the future?

    This post originally appeared in Grassroot Magazine, December 2013.

    (more…)

  • A Constraint-Led Approach – a new addition to the coaching toolkit?

    I am (I call myself) a cricket coach – I work with people who want to play “better” cricket, however “better” might be defined.

    In that role, I try to help players to develop their playing techniques, and, along the way, to build individual motivation and resilience.  Occasionally, I will talk with them about (appropriate) physical development – play other sports to develop all-round physicality; don’t build so much muscle in the gym that you lose flexibility.

    But I am also interested in how to become a better coach, which has led me to follow a range of conversations and blogs on coaching pedagogy.

    I am not going to pretend that I understand the concept of nonlinear pedagogy (yet), and my exploration of socio cultural constraints within coaching probably missed any number of (academic) points.

    But a series of posts (including this, and this, both from ConnectedCoaches.org) on applying the Constraint-Led Approach (CLA) in coaching has piqued my interest.  Coaches are encouraged to modify the drill or game to force the player(s) to develop enhanced responses.

    (more…)