The Teesra

Category: session planning

  • Making warm-ups more engaging, more fun, more relevant; introducing Zoom, Schwartz, Profigliano

    Fascinating thread from Philip O’Callaghan aka @Mr_Tennis_Coach on the importance of the warmup.

    If you use it right, the warm up is one of the most important parts of the session.

    But coaching courses do a terrible job showing you how to make the most of it.

    Philip O’Callaghan

    Philip’s thread provides some activities that go some way to achieving this aim, including a cricket example — the “batminton” game.

    I love the thinking behind this warm-up, but it might, perhaps, be a little too technical for a general warm-up, or to use with younger players.

    But the challenge, to achieve more in the warm-up than simply preparing the body to move, is valid.

    So what could we do?

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  • Pedagogy & philosophy — ECB National Programmes getting it right

    This post relates to the National Programmes prior to 2022. Changes to the training programmes for Activators in 2023 and 2024 have rather changed my opinion.

    In a recent post I mentioned how, in my opinion, the ECB’s National Programmes have more to say about learning to play (by playing “games” to learn; repetition without repetition) and player behaviours (the multi-ability model, developed in collaboration with Create Development) than the mainstream coaching programmes.

    I ran All Stars sessions for three years, pre-lockdown, and have delivered training for National Programmes Activators for a couple of years, now, and the more I see the more I am convinced by the underlying pedagogy and philosophy of the National Programmes.

    Pedagogy — the method and practice of teaching

    Philosophy — a theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for behaviour

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  • Whole-Part-Whole — time for another look?

    Back in 2014 I posted a simple page describing the “Whole-Part-Whole” session plan — play a game (“Whole”), coach a specific skill component relevant to that game (“Part”), then play the game, or a conditioned version of the game, again (“Whole”, again).

    Just a description, filed under “coaching resources” alongside some more traditional session plans (level 2, back then, was billed as “learning to write plans”), with no attempt to explain why it might be useful.

    Recently, the page has started to generate some more views — nothing spectacular, but as many visits in the last 12 months as in the previous 7 years.

    So I thought it might be interesting to take another look at Whole-Part-Whole (WPW), and why I still think it is a useful framework for session planning.

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