Old Habits Die Hard

I'm down to the last two units of Coaching Principles course. To say it's been a great learning experience would be an understatement.

After going through one of the latest lessons, Principles of Teaching, I can see plenty of room for improvement in my methods.

This course stresses the use of the Games Approach to teaching a sport. The Games Approach simply says that you teach your technical skills and your tactical skills in the context of a game situation.

Within that approach, you modify the game by splitting the squad into pairs or trios and have them bowl Baker matches. This keeps your athletes engaged in the practice, instead of spending a large amount of time waiting to bowl.

Now, you can teach the skill you want to work on for that practice, within the context of a game situation. Drills are good for initial teaching, but getting them into the game mode to work on their skills is going to make the practice session more enjoyable for everyone.

I've leaned on drills more in the last few years. I thought that was the best course of action to take. We still bowled games, but that was not where we spent the majority of our practice time. This is an area I would approach differently in the future.

This lesson also spends a good amount of time going over the merits of planning. I can attest to the need for this. Like most of you, I balanced coaching with a full-time job. This forced me to layout a practice plan for the year, so I knew what we needed to work on with each practice. The plan would get adjusted as needed, but without a road map to follow, practices would've been a disaster.

Teaching the tactical skills is another area of importance. Here again, I wish I had spent more time on this than I did.

The tactical skills of bowling are centered around lane play and ball selection. We're trained to teach lane play once our athletes have the technical skill down pat. While there's some merit to that approach, I can see now where we're doing the athlete a disservice by not introducing lane play sooner.

These are some thoughts that I came to as I was reading the material and going through the on-line segment for this unit. This would be a great time for you to be reflecting on these ideas as you go through this course. The time you spend on this unit will pay real dividends for your program in the upcoming season.