When we return to play, there will be plenty of rustiness where skills have fallen away.
While our priority will be re-engaging players with games, we will still need to mix in “skill zones”. This is another name for a more intense focus on a particular skill or technique.
Have a bank of skill zones ready to drop into your sessions.
Let’s focus on passing. Here are a range of activities/drills that give plenty of chances for players to catch and pass under various different levels of pressure.
Develop your players’ ability to pass with their heads up to see what’s coming. Help them pass in corridors of traffic but with limited chances of collisions.
Avoiding collisions means looking ahead, but still looking to take a pass. Expect mistakes as players don’t focus on what’s in front of them enough. MORE
Improve your players’ handling awareness at the start of a session with this ten-minute warm-up activity. Expect lots of mistakes, but also plenty of laughs and development. MORE
Exploit the space on the outside for your wingers by using effective passing and fixing defenders. Give your speedsters enough room to run in that space.
If you have a quick winger, then you need to hold up the midfield defence and allow that player time and space to attack. MORE
Hone a better passing technique for your players with this coach-fed exercise which starts with a focus on one player at a time and their handling ability.
Develop good habits for your players by encouraging them to turn their shoulders and hips to deliver short passes to team mates running onto the ball. MORE
I recently polled coaches on Twitter on how long they spent planning. While over half suggested they spent up to 25 minutes on the process, two in every five coaches spent longer. Planning a session isn't easy and we all know the horrors of a poorly planned session. Here are two coaching ideas to make it easier.
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In all the excitement of the planning for the first full session back at training, I forgot three things that would have made a difference to training. Not perhaps the vital difference, but when you’ve coached for so long, it’s annoying when you make mistakes. I was lucky enough to work with three experienced co-coaches... MORE
With more and more sport opening up in the coming weeks, everyone will be excited about the prospect of training and even playing.
For some teams, the training sessions will almost run themselves as the players are keen to just be back together and play. For others, they might have lost a certain amount of confidence, fearing that their months of inactivity will make a training session an horrific aerobic disaster zone.
I think you have three tough decisions ahead of you. MORE
Back to training and there are five things you must do to ensure you make the most of your precious time with your players. Before we start, here are three things you shouldn’t do: 1. Do fitness testing. 2. Overload the players with too many skills. 3. Run extra sessions for catch up. Click here... MORE
With the contact rugby not far away, you will be planning some form of tackling practice to fit into your training sessions. In these unusual times, you might find yourself almost reteaching tackling for some players. Even for more experienced players, they will need time to rediscover the safe, efficient and effective techniques and skills.... MORE
In Jason Tee and Mike Ashford's e-learning course, Turn your game model into a training session, they set out how you can solve a performance problem. For example, how would you improve your double tacking or quick ruck ball or passing out of the tackle.
They suggest you break down coaching the problem into four stages. Depending on your current players' understanding, you can start your next training session at any one of those stages. MORE