Here’s a slide I showed recently to coaches at a workshop: The slide is an attempt to describe a common challenge I see in the teaching/coaching of athletes. Here’s the scene. Athletes are playing. We are observing them as coaches. We notice something that needs to be improved. So we stop and make a teaching point. …
Coaches love to ask questions to help their athletes understand the decisions they must make during performance. This is especially true in group invasion games like soccer (football), rugby, basketball and hockey–games that require an especially high degree of coordination and shared decision-making. One potential problem with asking questions of athletes is making sure that the…
I was down in Florida earlier this week talking to coaches in U.S. Soccer’s Academy Director’s course… a high-level training for men and women who run–and design instruction at–top tier clubs. We talked a lot about asking questions of players- how important it is to build their attention and focus and cause them to think about…
Few things are more important to learning than vocabulary. To have a word for something allows you to conceive of it, to perceive it, and to grow your knowledge of it in discussion with others. An example: Let’s assume that a story about the Inuit–that they have fifty words for snow–is true. This means they don’t…