The Teesra

Category: coaching

  • 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

  • All Stars Summer – the good, the bad and the ugly

    We finished our first All Stars Cricket programme at the Club last week.  A lot of fun, and a lot of learning, for All Stars, Activator and Centre Manager.

    https://twitter.com/oakfieldparkscc/status/890145143478784000

    Did we get everything right, first time?

    No…but there was more than enough that went well to make us want to run All Stars Cricket again in 2018.

    (more…)

  • Game Sense: Cricket

    Now this, from the Drowning in the Shallows blog by @imsporticus, just might be the model for future coaching programmes. Strongly in the “game sense” mould, with the players taking a lot of responsibility for their own learning.

    Not that the coach gets to sit down and do nothing for an hour – there will be a lot of obseqrvation and analysis, followed by questioning and appropriate feedback; there will be an increased need for imaginative game design, with appropriate progressions planned.

    But the potential upside, of developing thinking cricketers, must surely be worth the effort.

    @ImSporticus's avatardrowningintheshallow


    As a department we have over timed moved away from ‘sport as sports technique’ method of teaching sports within our curriculum to ‘sport as tactical concepts’. This is in the belief that:

    • The game sets the context of learning and gives that learning some meaning.
    • Play is the true environment within PE and results in improved and sustained motivation.
    • Technique cannot be separated from decision making if we want to help create confident and competent movers within sport.

    This process started over 6 years ago and whilst buy in for rugby and football was immediate and has been slowly refined, cricket was resistant to any change. All of us had been taught and have taught cricket in the traditional way and found it difficult to conceptualise a very technical game taught through mainly through games. We were addicted to ‘Grip, Stance, Backlift’ and giving up seemed impossible. This year though…

    View original post 1,107 more words