The Teesra

Category: session planning

  • Holiday camps — turning long days into learning opportunities

    Over the Easter holidays I coached on a couple of holiday camps. Good fun, but quite hard work.

    For coaches and players.

    Six hour days are long, not only for the younger groups. How often does a 16 year old get to play cricket all day? With the proliferation of short-form (not a bad thing, of itself) even a 40-over game is the exception. Yet the coaches are charged with engaging the players for a similar length of time, or longer.

    I wonder if we could develop a narrative to run through the day? Perhaps by linking to a day’s match play. And putting the skills we coach into context.

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  • Session plans — front-foot defensive, how and why (no, really!)

    This week’s theme was “batting (coach’s choice)”. We do lots of hitting and running activities, so, half in jest, I suggested I could run a session on the front-foot defensive.

    But from that jest arose an actual session, presented here as delivered to a group of yr2s (under 7s) (minus references to sharks & islands).

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  • Golden Runner — a modified bowling game

    This week’s ECB Coaches Association “Practice Time” email highlighted a bowling game with a twist — bowlers have to compete against a team of runners, to restrict their scoring by hitting the stumps when they bowl.

    I do like bowling “drills” with a bit of added jeopardy — see “knock ‘em down”, for example — but I also like to spend as much time as possible on cricket-like activities. What follows are a couple of variations on the ECB CA game.

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