The Teesra

Category: cricket

  • 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.

  • Making sense of games with Principles of Play

    I have posted previously on my conversion to games-based learning, and on the challenges of designing games that are both “representative” (of the real game, and that therefore require the players to develop transferable cricket skills) but at the same time not so constrained and artificial as to no longer be fun to play (the “game” element is important, because we want the players to come back to it again and again). (more…)