05.19.1610 Seconds with an Elite Soccer/Football Coach
I’ve been writing a lot of “10 seconds in…” posts lately. The idea is to watch just ten seconds of a teacher in action (like here and here). Close study of just a few seconds in a top classroom can yield a bunch of useful takeaways. I kind of stumbled on to the idea, but it’s quite powerful. You really can learn a lot from watching that little of an elite teacher at work.
So I decided to apply the idea to coaching and I am going to start with ten seconds of footage from a session by the legendary FA and Cardiff City coach Dick Bate.
DickBateGetOutGetDown from TLAC Blog on Vimeo.
The session is on closing space as a defender and like every Bate session I’ve ever watched it’s impeccably planned. But in this case he hasn’t just planned the activities the lads will be doing. He has clearly planned his own words. And that is very important in a variety of ways. The phrase he uses to describe what you do when closing space as a defender is “Get out and get down,” and you will notice he uses that phrase over and over. He pretty much only uses that phrase. Why, you might ask does that matter?
Well, first, the phrase is pithy: short, descriptive and memorable. You can’t keep much in your head while you are playing but a phrase like is short enough to stick and remind you of the most important things in clear accurate language and nothing else. As he teaches he can embellish. “When I say I want you to ‘get out and get down’ I means that i want you to do X and Y and Z as well.’ But all those details are subheadings in his players minds under the main idea: “Get out and get down.” It tells you what to do and it tells you fast.
And the speed of the phrase is critical. It means Bate can use it over and over to remind players what to focus on- after they execute but more importantly before they execute. You can hear him doing this in the video. He is preventing poor practice by reminding players as they begin executing what to do. This helps them to encode the correct actions.
This is also critical because he can use the phrase later for similar purposes. “Let’s remember to get out and get down.” In fact one of the biggest challenges of coaching is coaching during the game. Basically, brain science tells us pretty emphatically that you cannot teach new things during a game. Even though coaches for time immemorial have tried, the result is usually that you degrade performance by confusing players and distracting their focus from what they know how to do to what they don’t. So what you can do as a coach during the game is remind players about what you’ve already taught them. But of course to do that efficiently you need a fast efficient term for it. Like “get out and get down.” In other words, by planning a crisp efficient phrase like this Dick has created a mnemonic device he can use to remind them quickly and simply during performance.. ideally before an incident has unfolded… of how to close space. “Get out and get down” is a phrase he could actually use in the game to activate their knowledge from training and increase rather than decrease performance during competition.
One other small thing. Dick is really smart about something I call “aligned feedback.” Aligned feedback means that after you make a coaching point and players begin training again, you give a large portion of your feedback about g the thing you just taught- are they doing it? how well? THis is in contrast to making a coaching point and then giving feedback about an array of 10 things during the next round of practice. This suggests that you have already forgotten the importance of what you spoke about. Why should your players be any different?
So giving aligned feedback is important for two reasons. It helps players learn concepts faster and it emphasizes a culture of accountability more broadly. It says, “I’m not just standing here talking because it makes me happy. When I describe to you how to close space I expect you to then go do it and do it well.” Here Dick’s players hear him say, “Get out and get down; Good. Get out and get down. Get down, lad, get down,” and they know the number one thing to do after he teaches them something is to go out and concentrate on doing that something because that is what he is concentrating on. And of course the phrase “Get out and get down” or parts of it–“Get out. Get out quicker.” Yes, that’s how to get out”–allows him to do that efficiently and make that even clearer to his players.
So…to maximize learning it’s immensely valuable to plan your language when you plan a session not just the activities your players will do and then use that language consistently.
You can also imagine how valuable this might be across a club. If every coach in the club used that phrase, once someone had taught it they could all activate players knowledge for years to come with that phrase.
"Get out and get down", 10 seconds in..., Dick Bate, Plan your language
Great post! Ensures more perfect reps, encoding the habit – rather than waiting through an imperfect rep and then correcting. This was a really helpful way to think about this – thanks!
In coaching teachers, we refer to this as Whisper Coaching and Mirror Modeling. Whisper Coaching is preemptive, milliseconds before the next move; the coach names the next step OR names the specific nuances of the current step. Mirror Modeling is the physical actions of the coach – modeling the body language, eye contact, non-verbals, etc. that they want to see during each rep. Both have the advantage of getting teachers used to that kind of coaching out of class so that they respond naturally to it in real-time during class. It saves transaction costs, too, just like you referenced with having common language to activate knowledge: instead of needing to set up a “signaling” system for real-time coaching, leaders just “Mirror Model” the exact actions and body language they want to see in the back of the class, like they did during their coaching meetings or PDs.
Thanks Paul… super useful.