National Community Coaching Conference

Community Coach Development Manager Neil Gray attended the Sport Australia National Community Coaching Conference this week as you would have seen by following our twitter. Neil has compiled some brief discussion points from the various presentations to get you thinking about your coaching and some ideas you could introduce to continue to improve.

BeReal Coach Reflection

BeReal is a social media app that asks users to post unfiltered photos of themselves once a day. At a random time when they get a notification. It’s meant to encourage people to be more authentic, instead of trying to present their best selves.

How does that relate to Coach Development though ? Well often coaches will say things like;

“I struggle to reflect honestly after the game”

“I can’t separate performance from result”

“I like to put it behind me and move onto the next”

These are all understandable but good, honest reflection is invaluable to not only personal development but also team development.

At random times over the next month on our twitter channel we are just going to post #BEREALCOACH and when you see it just stop, open the notes app, or your diary or be really honest and reply to the tweet with a reflection on your coaching. Even this small act will drive your improvement.

Who is your Board of Directors ?

Who can you go to in a difficult time in your coaching journey for support ? We aren’t just talking on court either, if you look at a Board of Directors each one has their own portfolio, can you find that at your level ?

Some examples might be;

Your wife – Portfolio of Emotional issues and people management

Your Best Friend who works in a corporate environment – Planning and strategy

Your ex-coach – how do you solve a tactical or technical issue

Many people find a mentor but then worry about overloading them or use them for a really specific problem they have or oppositely really generic problems. Can you use your network to improve yourself and in many cases hear the honest feedback you need!

How many steps are you as a coach ?

What we mean by that is how many steps to you take from when you leave your car before you are into Coach mode.

1 step- I’m here, I know what I’m doing, who I’m doing it with and what my outcomes are

2 step – I’m here, I know what I want to achieve and who should be here and what my ideal result is.

3 step – I’m here, I know what I should be doing but I’m not sure who to do it with and what I want to get out of it.

At Basketball Australia we want to help you get down to one step! Let us know in the comments below or by email coaching@australia.basketball what you need to get there!

The Spectrum of Coaching Styles

Its been a staple of coach education across all sports to put coaches into a specific type but in reality, every coach is a chameleon, changing their style depending on the situation.

A coach is in every way apart from name a Teacher. They design a curriculum, they implement it and in most cases they continually reflect on it. Much like teaching styles, coaching styles are the same, none of them wrong they are just poorly or wrongly applied.

So, taking the learnings of Shane Pill, study below and see how many of these styles you move through during a coaching session. Like a piece of music, they can all flow into and out of each other in verses and choruses. Always ask yourself which style is going to be the most appropriate for reaching the objective of a given session.

• A – Do you Coach by command, making all the decisions about the environment for teaching and learning and the players follow as instructed ?
• B – Do you coach by task ? Essentially a practice model here the coach still sets the environment but the players are left to practice the skill within the coaches framework.
• C – Do you involve reciprocal coaching ? The coach creates an environment where instead of them providing feedback to the players in the first instance it is driven internally within the group.
• D – Do you empower player with Individual programming and a self check system where they check their performance against criteria prepared by yourself.
• E – Do you create smaller groups within the larger unit for Inclusion coaching where each member of the group takes on a specific role to maximise engagement.
• F – Do you enjoy the challenge of watching the players learn through development and Guided discovery? This is when you set a drill or session up with a framework and allow it to play out knowing at some point the players will turn to you and say “How do we do this or why is this happening or Can we do this” That is the learning point and when you would intervene.
• G – A similar style to that is convergent discovery where players through solving a series of problems or questions will end up at the coaches anticipated discovery.
• H – If sessions are feeling far too rigid or coaches want to empower the players event more then Coach for Creativity and Divergence. Have sessions with multiple learnings and create new possibilities. What are 5 things we could do but we never have!
• I – Coaches can fully let the reigns go and allow players to design with coach support where learners will think, plan and design a session representing an array of different styles.
• J – If the players are not of an age to be able to do a player designed session they can initiate a session by asking the coach to participate in response to their requests. The coach in this instance has to challenge and maintain the balance between their intent and their actions.
• K – And finally Player self coaching. The story of Craig Johnston explains this better than any words could. Craig Johnston: Liverpool Winger And Predator Inventor (historyofsoccer.info)

Now you know all the different models, would it be fair to say a normal training session looks like A , B, G, B , F , D ?

We would be interested to hear your thoughts.

Thanks to Cam Tradell (Sport Australia) and Dr Shane Pill for their assistance in the creation of this article and there will be further resources from the Conference over the next few weeks