An entrée to the academic knowledge out there
How did your coaching journey begin?
For me, it started with screaming 10-year-olds and plastic stumps used as lightsabers or jousting sticks. You see, at this ripe old age, the world is one big adventure so standing in two lines and throwing a ball to each other, even when you throw in counting and a race, doesn’t have that much appeal. I was a very mature 14-year-old myself, and I spent more time swearing to myself that I was never that much of a brat, surely…
Other common origin stories include being the only parent willing to put their hand up for their son/daughter’s team or a player transitioning out of the game. Both scenarios end up asking the same fundamental question: what do I need to know as a coach?
A lot of research exists on the many complex things that contribute to coaching as a profession or art. For the sake of simplicity, instead of delving into this side of the job, I want to instead focus on development, which is ultimately the goal of coaching.
Don’t underestimate the power of play. It’s quite common to hear that ‘kids just aren’t playing anymore’. While this may be for a variety of reasons, the importance of creative, unstructured play cannot be overlooked. It features as a key experience in social and physical development, fostering unique problem-solving skills like avoiding orange trees or windows, using the slope of a driveway to send the ball even further and the strategic six-and-out rule. With the changing landscape of suburbia and different daily behaviours (looking at you screen time), formal entry-level programs now exist in cricket to encourage play once again. Training junior athletes can also harness free play to promote exploration and creativity by using games-based activities to practice specific skills. There will be some examples further below, but it’s amazing what kids can come up with when you let them set the rules!
Development doesn’t happen in a linear fashion. This notion isn’t just relevant in sport, even education is becoming acutely aware that while certain developmental milestones are believed to exist around walking and talking and thinking, other elements may not happen in a typical fashion. Instead, each individual actually develops at a unique rate on social, emotional, cognitive and physical levels. As amateur and junior sport often attract a variety of people, it’s important to establish a connection with each player to understand where they sit and how/when they can be challenged. Personally, I’m a big physics nerd, so with my senior schoolboys, I like to relate the mechanics of our complex game of cricket to the forces, vectors, levers etc that they are experiencing in the classroom. It also means that it may take different amounts of time to learn a similar skill, depending on what clicks for each player. Keep an eye out for the smaller kids or late bloomers in youth sporting teams, they’re usually the tactical problem solvers who learn to exploit the game instead of just using their physical strength.
Learning comes through exploring. Failure, and how adverse we have become to it, is a fascinating phenomenon. But when teams create an environment where exploring (and failing) is expected, players have the opportunity to develop the adaptive behaviours that define our elite cricketers. That’s right, instead of being able to recreate the exact same movement in a high-pressure situation, expert performers in cricket batting and bowling, among many other sports, have been shown to use a variety of movements to achieve their desired outcome. Given the complexity of cricket, the ability to adapt what you’re doing to what you’re seeing unfold in front of you is the pinnacle of batting and bowling skill. This can be seen in the seemingly unconventional approach to batting that the likes of Steve Smith employs, or the hidden wrong’uns of expert spin bowlers.
What we see informs how we act, and vice versa. So when we train, we need all of the pieces of the puzzle. While most cricket teams rarely have the opportunity to use a centre-wicket (and they feel super boring most times), we can find other ways to learn how to understand space. If we can sample the information we have in a game, such as the position of fielders, live bowlers, direction of a shot, whether it’s a run/wicket, scenarios, pressure etc., then we can still achieve skill development in an enclosed environment.
Get creative. Sometimes it takes more than a whiteboard with a field setting to encourage a batting behaviour. The strategic placement of markers, or (my personal favourite) pegs can also provide the visual information that a fielder occupies that space. I prefer pegs because you can adjust the height, making catches easier to judge and providing a consequence for the dismissal (you broke them, pick them up!). If it happens in a game, see if you can make it look, feel and act in the same way at training. Pressure scenarios provide the perfect battleground for skill execution, especially when it’s between one bowler and one batter with the rest of the team huddled around to watch. The more it looks like what we really see in a game, the more attuned we become. The way we bat against a live bowler vs a machine changes drastically, and the information a real bowler gives is crucial to informing a batter’s next move. Even bowlers need to know where their last ball was and what happened to update their plans.
In summary, we know a lot. But it’s all hidden in academic papers, scattered around the world under a variety of fancy names. When we put it all together, it comes down to playing, learning at different rates, exploring our unique solutions and making sure we link what we can see and do in a game to how we train.
So go on, give it a try! And if you get stuck, let me know. 👇🏻