The Teesra

Category: player development

technical, tactical, physical

  • Performance development is not just for “performance” athletes – podcast with Mark Bennett & Stuart Armstrong

    Fascinating podcast from Stuart Armstrong with Mark Bennett MBE, founder of PDS (Performance Development Systems) .

    https://twitter.com/stu_arm/status/915441409053904896

    Lots of take-aways for coaches from this, and their earlier podcast, not least the definition of “performance” as a behaviour or “state of being”, rather than a standard. For a coach working mostly with “participation” or “community” players, that means I could help them to develop appropriate performance behaviours to carry them onwards through their future careers, sporting or otherwise.

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  • It’s too easy..

    Interesting conversation with a parent after one of my sessions last week.

    We had been working on hitting front foot drives, and had finished with a game, with bobble feeds from the coach – making it “too easy” for the players to hit the ball.

    As I explained to the parent, just about the only way for a batter to strike a low bouncing (almost rolling) delivery back towards the feeder is with a vertical bat – the feed forced the batsmen to approximate the front foot drive, rather than just hitting the ball anyhow.

    A perfectly reasonable question…I probably should make a point of explaining some of the “madness” to the parents, in future.

  • Coachability – is it a thing?

    Should we seek, or create, cricketers who are “coachable”? Can we even agree what we mean by “coachable”?

    I came across a fascinating article quoting  Brittney Reese, multiple World and Olympic Champion in the long jump, on the process of becoming a champion.

    A story from the 2013 World Championships was especially interesting.  Reese, at that time the reigning World Champion, had only just managed to qualify for the final.

    “…my coach told me to ‘stop acting like a girl, and just jump’.

    That night I went back, looked at the film and tried to figure out where I was going wrong.”

    This was presented as evidence of Reese’s “coachability”, but I’m not sure this really demonstrates “coachability”, not as I understand the term, at least. (more…)