1st Post of the Year

I am a second year sports coaching student at the University of Central Lancashire. I am part of the university football team and play and coach for their 6^th team, as a coach I take all training sessions and organise the team for matches.

In my blogs you will read a reflection of most of my coaching sessions and university practical lessons I take part in. I will be reflecting on my performance as a coach and how I can improve week by week, if things go wrong within my coaching sessions then I will post about them and say why I and others thought they went wrong. For example: Drills being boring for participants as they are too easy and I have no progressions for the group to make things more difficult. 

In this post you will read a brief overview of myself, going over my strengths and weaknesses as a coach and my expectations of the year:

What are your coaching strengths (S)/weaknesses (W) and why?

S) Once I am with a group of people who I know I enter my comfort zone and have more belief in myself as a coach. This is because I get friendly with the participants and feel more comfortable to speak in front of them as I now know them.

S) I have coached most age groups from ages 4/5-40+ therefore I know how to treat different age groups. Coaching different age groups has allowed me to understand how to coach and speak to people depending on their age and understanding the ‘wants’ from participants so sessions are more fun for children and more serious for adults.

S) I understand the rules of most sports therefore if I was asked to coach hockey, football, rugby, cricket, tennis etc. I could find coaching points and get them across to participants. This is because I have been involved with sport all my life and at some point up to now I have played most sports either for college teams or weekend teams.

W) When I am coaching a new group of people I get nervous. This is because I don’t know anyone and therefore as first sessions are about making positive impressions to people taking part or watching a coach needs to do everything correctly.

W) The drills I do may become repetitive meaning I use them regularly and for participants this may become boring. This happens because I find it hard to discover new drills and games for sessions I coach weekly. I look over the google and youtube to find videos of drills but find it difficult to find ones I can use with the group I coach.

What are your main aims/objectives for the module (based on point 1)?

My main aims for this module are to reflect on every coaching session I coach. Every time I post a weakness on a coaching session, I hope to reflect on this weakness and see how I can improve on it and reduce the chance of it happening again. Such as being more prepared, more informative etc. Having spoken about my weaknesses above, I also want to look at these and once the module is over, hope that these are no longer weaknesses of mine.

How will you achieve/work towards them during the module?

I will work towards my aims for the module by reflecting on my performance as a coach. For example: If in a session I have come unprepared and not planned anything, this will be a weakness of the session and therefore I will write about this in the blog and how it affected the participants. While writing about this I will be writing reasons why this happened and following the post I can reflect on the weakness and question myself how I can improve and how I can prevent it from happening again.

What are you looking forward to on the module?

On this module I am looking forward to the new experience of blogging, reflecting on each coaching session I do which will allow me to pick out my main weaknesses as a coach and allow me to build on them and hopefully stop them being weaknesses for me. Also the module will allow me to point out errors I make within coaching, again allowing me to reflect on what went wrong within training sessions.