The Teesra

Category: Games based learning

cricket games-based learning

  • One hand, one bounce – what’s that got to do with coaching?

    When I started out at my local Club as a volunteer, level 1 Coaching Assistant, sessions were taken by an exuberant 1st XI player – lots of enthusiasm, diving catches and (attempted) big hitting, and always a fiercely contested session of one hand – one bounce, usually with said 1st XI player dominating the game.

    The players seemed to love this activity, but to me, as a newly qualified “proper” coach, it looked as if one hand-one bounce existed only so the star player could show off.  Not coaching, at all.

    It’s fair to say that I never liked one hand – one bounce, but I have recently started to include it my own sessions with our Club U9s.  And I think it has a place in the games-based learning panoply.

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  • 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

  • Jail-break cricket v1.1 – dynamic zones

    Quick update on jail-break cricket – try moving the JBZ during the game.

    • To challenge shot selection
    • To differentiate a session (hit a more or less accessible target).

    This can be done manually (pick up the markers designating the JBZ and quickly move them somewhere else…get the youngest, fittest coach to do this, not the oldest…), or by setting out multiple zones and calling out “straight hit” or “mid-wicket”, as appropriate, before the next ball is delivered.

    This could probably work with YPA, as well as the original, coach-fed version of jail-break.

    Thanks to Simon Stevens for this idea.