Coaching Tip #57

Tagged – Tip of the Week, Coaching Practice, Player Development, Team Development, Season Management

Although this is self-evident, sometimes the self-evident things are the ones you most often need reminding of.

Provided the practice is appropriate (not always self-evident), practicing one element, be it technical or tactical or conceptual, improves performance in that element.  There are two components to this.  Firstly, the extra instructions and repetitions improve performance.  Secondly, the act of practicing one element reorders the mental priorities of the team and places that element higher on the list.  As extra attention is paid to elements with higher priorities, performance in those elements improves.  This extra attention is often at least as important as the repetitions themselves.

The slightly less self-evident part is that there is a cost to practicing one element more.  As training time is finite, more of one thing means less of something else, and performance in that / those elements that are practiced less will more than likely decrease.

Practice planning is a balancing act.  You can’t do everything and choosing what to do and what not to do is sometimes the most important part of the planning process.

Don’t forget you get worse at what you don’t practice, but remember you get better at what you practice.

The initial collection of 50 Coaching Tips can be found here.