Coaching Tip Of The Week #32

“Competition makes practice worse”

The reasons for having competition in practice are many and obvious.

Competition focuses attention.

Competition motivates players.

While it undoubtedly achieves those goals, competitive training focuses attention on competition and motivates players to compete.  When players compete in practice they tend to play more conservatively.  They don’t use the techniques and solutions that they have most recently learnt because they are not yet confident in those techniques and solutions.  The imperative is to win.

To facilitate learning, sometimes it is necessary to program unscored drills and scrimmages in your practice.  Sometimes players need to be able to explore their boundaries without the fear of failure that is inherent in competition.

Sometimes, competition makes practice worse.

The collection of Coaching Tips can be found here.

For more great coaching tips, check out the Vyacheslav Platonov coaching book here.