In the spirit of National Volunteers Week, let’s take a look at our Community Coach Mentoring Pilot 3 months in! If you need a catch up, check out the mentoring page here.
Our 15 mentee coaches and 5 volunteer mentors have been hard at work in the community and then catching up to debrief, discuss, support and strategise.
All the pods have done 2 sessions so far;
Creating a vision and a philosophy
- Appreciate the big picture – understand your coaching context and implications for your coaching programs
- Develop and effectively communicate a personal coaching philosophy which articulates your purpose, principles and values
- Your philosophy
- The big picture for your coaching programs
- What is your why ?
- Purpose
Build relationships and guiding learning
- Build and maintain healthy connections with players, parents, officials, club coaching coordinator and committee members
- Prepare a safe and effective environment for maximising learning and improvement
- Understand and implement athlete wellbeing principles and practices.
- Dealing with people
- Coach/athlete relationship
- Feedback
- How people learn and being learner centred
- Managing expectations
- Showing you care / emotional intelligence.
Here are some of the comments from the sessions by Mentors and Mentees ;
“everyone went away and wrote down their philosophy and brought it back written down for todays meeting. We had a varying reasons of why and it was a great contrast amongst the group. One pod member is really keen and had a full page written philosophy where as another was more casual with a sentence. It sparked great discussion that at the core everyone had the person first and then the next 1-2 things were different.”
“We spoke about different personality types and it sparked a conversation about expectations. It was a great reminder that ultimately everyone cares in the situation but can only see it from their lens”
“The conversation moved onto learning styles and how learning can be masked by our competitive natures. That as coaches we must remind the players that winning is not the only goal we have. “
“Right now when you look at your team, what will matter 10 years from now ?”. I do this all the time with engineers I coach at work, as some of these young bucks are so quick to pick a hill to die on. Never thought to apply this simple strategy to coaching U14G. For me, 10 years from now community sport still lovingly represents a part of their every week. If it happens to still be basketball that’s amazing”
“Im a big fan of making everything as game like or even a game if possible. Still so many novice coaches, me included (untill I started properly nerding out) having kids wonder around the court and cones competing against imaginary competition only to show up in games and have few applicable skills and experiences in the bag, because they are confronted with chaos for 36 minutes, the opposite of a stationary cone ;). Part of our job IMHO should to be instil in our athletes v0 work is valuable and more valuable being done at home in your own time.”
“I will be making my notes less verbose. I write them so verbose because I still don’t back myself. But last night once I was flowing I was reacting to what I saw, augmenting games meaningfully to create constraint and challenge the athletes in the focus areas I was targeting. Therefore rather than writing complex setups like “3v3 only cutters in lane, no dribble in”. Just start playing 3v3 observe the congestion, trust that I have tools in my head to address the change I want, and go for it in real-time.”
We will keep touching base with the pods as they go and our next update we will grab one or two of the mentors to talk about their groups experiences but till then I will leave you with this quote from one of the mentees.
“We are seeing we have common issues so the ability to be able to share those problems and how we have and are dealing with those issues is empowering and confidence building. It is also allowing me to reflect, listen to the others, and form better strategies to resolve those issues in the future”
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