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We are always trying to create a positive learning environment. I believe the environment you create is far more important than your tactics and complicated game plans.
I will show you how we set up and extended Rondos as a game, plus the feedback the players told me afterwards.
Above is the mini version of the game of Rondos, made popular by the Fijian team coached by Ben Ryan. The video is from Nick Hill, who hosted a session from Ben. For more from Nick, visit www.nickhillcoaching.com.
Usually, the first few mistakes will be linked to running the ball into contact and not having the confidence to attack the space. If this happens, I always allow the players to learn from this experience themselves.
Then, if no peer-to-peer coaching happens, I will intervene. I will ask the question: “Tell me what it looks like out there” and then guide my players using other questions to get to the solution. The solution for this would be “Use the space and be creative”. It’s important to guide the players to an answer on this one.
For me, coaching is not just about what is right and wrong, it’s exploring decisions made by players. For, example, why did they pick the long pass over attacking space?
If we find out the "why" (psychological) we can analyse the players’ decision making and help change it.
The "what" (technical) is the easy part to change. That’s developing better passing and catching skills for example.
Sometimes, it can take a couple of goes for the players to start to display their inner Fijian skills, but once they see success with this activity they are usually flying high on a wave of support and off-loading.
On the short sides of the rectangle, I always set out a 5m extension. This is an additional level.
If the players hit their scoring target this extra opens up and they have a pre-agreed extension target.
At this point, we did not add additional defenders in. The reason for this is to see if the players use the additional space. In my experience, this isn’t always the case and this is a great conversation to have in regards to space and utilising what you have.
Of course, if you want to add more defenders in you can, but that wasn’t our focus.
Over the two months we worked on Rondos, we had started to see players really challenging themselves to exploit space and also making the most of the space available to them.
We usually undertake this is in three five-minute segments (15 minutes in total).
This is what the players fed back to me after the sessions:
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