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Not every player can be the focus of your session - sometimes they must act as support for your objectives. GEMMA DUNN explains how to keep their attention.
As a coach, you are not just trying to improve individual players - often, you work with units on game-realistic scenarios.
But if you want to drill your defence in covering an overlap, or make your attackers better at retaining possession at the ruck, you will need some of your team to act as the opposition, or as supplementary players.
How do you hold the attention of those who are not the main focus of your session? Gemma Dunn recommends the easy-to-remember E.N.G.A.G.E.D. method...
Enthusiasm
Express the importance of their jobs and provide praise when they do it well.
If you are not enthusiastic and engaged with their role in the session, you can’t expect them to be. Provide the energy for your players to bounce off.
Nurturing
These sessions can allow the opportunity to nurture the skills your players already possess.
If you want to promote the confidence of your wingers to take players on, and your defensive players are excelling in these situations, then it becomes a great challenge for your wingers and can allow your defensive players to refine their skills and focus on their technical ability in more detail.
This can also provide an opportunity for players to coach themselves. A full-back should have a good understanding on what is difficult to defend against 1v1 and can encourage a winger to attack in those ways, thus improving the full-back’s defensive skills without focusing on them.
Guidance
The most important players in a session can be those you aren’t focusing on, as they need to ensure they are executing their roles effectively to achieve your outcome.
Spend the first moments of the practice providing these players with the attention and detail required. During the session, leave the whole group interventions for the players you are focusing on and perform individual fly-bys for those supporting your outcomes.
Accountability
Sessions where you are only focusing on specific players or outcomes provide the perfect opportunity for the others to hold themselves, and each other, accountable.
You don’t want to be stopping the session every time they make a slight mistake, if the players you are focusing on are doing what you have asked.
Therefore, these sessions can be great for players to emerge as leaders and be critical of their own performance.
This will usually separate the good players from the great, based on their performance mindset.
Game-related
Your session should still fit your style of play - if you want your phase-play attack to improve in confidence and decision-making when close to the opposition line, you will want your defence to shut down their options to go forward.
If they perform their defence well, they should be difficult to break down and it will encourage the attacking group to be creative. This can then link nicely to a session of working with the defenders to identify the trigger that starts the go forward.
Having multiple sessions around the same concepts, just switching who you focus on, can allow for more fluid and creative practices.
Enjoyable
This should be a given, right? It’s the love of the game that keeps players coming back, so we need to promote enjoyment.
Allow a couple of minutes between drills for them to have a chat or some fun with a rondo, I can almost guarantee it will improve their focus in the drills.
Directed
Players need a target to work towards. With the focus on the attacking play, can you also give a focus for the defence (or vice versa).
A focus should be placed upon what outcomes they want to achieve. Perhaps it is creating a turnover or forcing the attack into making a mistake? And if they do win possession, what would they do next?
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