Creating a Coaching & Playing Philosophy

Why is it important to be able to create a Coaching & Playing Philosophy? Well how will anyone know what you stand for as a coach, if you don't? As an FA tutor a question I liked to ask was, "what does a you session look like?" By that I mean if you watch a coach closely over a period of time, you will notice similar traits in their delivery. Practices that they prefer, ways that they will usually intervene in the session. Sometimes these can change and evolve, as you become more experienced, with influence from other coaches, courses and learning through trial and error.

So where do you start? For me you need to know what you stand for as a person, let alone as a coach. For this you need to think honestly about what your values & beliefs are? what sort of environment that you look to create as a practitioner and how does this transpire to a short sentence to convey your coaching philosophy.

If you have been lucky enough like I have to have leadership roles within coaching and work with groups of coaches, then it's important to know what a culture of Excellence is and how you could go about to creating one in your setting.

Below I have stated some of my ideas to what this culture might look like. I believe at the centre should be a Growth Mindset, of how we approach our work and see failure as opportunities to learn and grow. It is important to develop feedback loops and have good communications with staff players and parents. To have blackbox thinking is similar to what happens when a plane crashes, you find out what went wrong and try and correct that aspect for future safety. This approach can also be applied to other aspect of life, creating a reflective and progressive approach. Cognitive Equality & Diversity means that everyone is allowed to express their opinions regardless of their status within the organisation, two heads are better than one. Having cognitive diversity means that you have people with different backgrounds as opposed to everybody having exactly the same life experiences and very similar in their thoughts and beliefs. That way any brainstorming will provide different solutions to problem solving. Sometimes when you come into a role things will be in place that you don't always agree with. This is life, but to change everything there and then can throw things into chaos. Looking for marginal gains in keystone areas can tip the balance and lead to other incremental changes that brings about a change that may not have been possible otherwise.

I think the question you need to ask yourself, is how do you see your teams playing and how do you go about building a game model that supports this? In the example below I have started with Playing Advance, as you will need to know what it looks like with the end in mind! I have broken this down to how it will apply to the Foundation Phase. These follow a short philosophy in, out of possession and transition. Once I know this and how I envisage my sides playing now I can create a game model. The Advanced version (aimed at the 11v11 game) has 6 principles in possession and 5 out of possession. In the Foundation version these are reduced to 3 in and 3 out to reflect the age of the players it's aimed at.

Having a playing philosophy is all well and good, but to bring this alive you will need more than being able to tell you players how to play, they will need to be coached and for this I use something I've termed the Coaching Cycle. Using the FA's Learning Cycle as a way of connecting the players to the learning and eventually consolidating that learning before the process starts again and encompassed a Plan, Do, Review approach that is holistic and involves the learners.

I then split the session into four areas Organisation, what happens prior to the session, how do you set up your area, how will you communicate this to the players, is there an arrival activity? The Management section refers to how you manage the session in terms of progressions, using appropriate work rest ratios, are the players on task, working with similar abilities etc? Interventions are how we communicate within the session, is this stopping the group/unit, or individuals involved? What methodology will you use command, guide & Discovery and do you plan the interventions? The last section is Observations, what do we see within the session, are the players achieving, struggling with the intended outcome, do they need support, or left alone to work it out? This is vital to sometimes step back and see what's actually happening.

Going back to the plan do review model and focusing in on the planning part. Below is an example that might provoke some thought, in the ingredients needed when planning our sessions.

For me to get the best out of the players and to lead them to your playing philosophy then you need to have a focus, intended outcomes and a success criteria. What is it you intend for the players to do achieve? Once this is established then you can think about how you might go about structuring the session, where would this occur within the game ie midfield rotation? Where better to situate this than exactly where it would happen and using the lines as reference points. What does a you session look like and how do you design your practice? I like to make everything directional as much as possible, this is the game after all and by giving direction means having a purpose getting the ball from one place to another, rather then just keeping for the sake of keeping it! Other people will have different ideas, but that is why you should have a philosophy that is unique to you!

Hopefully this article may go someway to helping you develop a playing and coaching philosophy if you don't have anything concrete down, or possibly adapt an existing one? Whichever way you need to be prepared, because at some point someone is going to ask you what you philosophy is and what it is that you stand for.