The Coaches Toolbox

The Coaches Toolbox

A regularly used term that many coaches may not understand, yet is always present. It provides you with the confidence to take on any coaching task, with any ability and any age.

In short, your coaching toolbox consists of the skills and tools you have learnt, collected and stored for future use. These tools have been honed and collected by observing others in action, attending courses, attending CPD sessions, reading, listening and just experiential knowledge through your own practice.

What could be in your coaching toolbox?

• The process skills - instruction, demonstration, observation and analysis, feedback, key factors.
• Coaching style - autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire.
• Communication style - do you listen?
• Use of questioning (part of process skills - but a tool in its own right).
• Coaching methodology:
  • Effective planning
  • Use of whole-part-whole (read on)
  • Use of technical areas
  • Constraint led coaching
  • Small sided games
  • 1:1 coaching
  • Using drills
  • Varying type of practice - block / segmental /un-opposed /semi-opposed /full opposition

Interested in developing your own personal coaching style? Check out the video below.

It's important to remember that your Coaching Tool Box grows all the time. The most important tool you have is the knowledge you have gained from trying different things, getting them wrong and right. Essential to this is your ability to REVIEW and REFLECT - without doing this regularly you miss out on really embedding the knowledge gained from your coaching practice.

Time!

The bane of all coaching is time - especially the coaches of mini and youth teams based in clubs. At a recent CPD I delivered we discussed time, especially in terms of achieving mastery and competence of technical and tactical Skills. On the whole most coaches in mini and youth sections get about 2 hours a week, most rugby based schools get about 7-10 hours per week including fixtures.

Short for time? Get your players switched on with this quick fire passing grid.

Based on the maxim of 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in an activity (sports through to music), you may realise that this seems fairly out of reach given 2 hours per week. So the challenge for the Club Coach is not to give up but to be smart! As discussed above the coaches toolbox has to be used more effectively, the school coach is spoilt for time and sometimes wastes it by in effective planning and preparation. The club coach CANNOT afford to be wasteful or NOT plan and prepare properly. All sessions require outcomes, all sessions require something to be learnt or improved upon and all sessions must give players of all ability the sense that they have been coached.

I'll touch briefly on something I mentioned earlier the Whole - Part - Whole tool. I'll use coaching the lineout as an example.

• Whole - semi opposed lineout practice: Recognise a specific aspect/part that needs to be worked on (ask your players for suggestion)
• Part - unopposed: focus on the PART that needs attention, for example you may focus on lifter movement to create space.
• Whole - semi opposed: Head back into the original drill, hopefully you'll see significant improvement.

You can keep on repeating this process to develop any area of the game, just ensure that you don't run a full lineout practice with 8 players, for example, thinking it's the only way to develop.

If you are looking to set up a school or club account with RCD then please get in touch with info@rugbycoachingdrills.com