The game is the test

As both a coach and an educator, I see lots of parallels between my two jobs. For over 30 years, I have been promoting a set of coaching behaviors that include having the coach take a reduced role during the game. While I have been saying for years that "the game is the test," I have never articulated how a coach's behavior can affect the players performance on that test. So let me give you an example.

Imagine you are a teacher and you have completed a unit of instruction. You prepare a summative test for your students. You know the level of your students and the difficulty of the material. As a teacher, you will be validated if you give them a challenging test and they are successful. On the day of the test, you hand it out. Once they start taking the test, you immediately begin yelling at them, giving advice to one student about choosing letter C on question 2. You tell another student to read all of question 10 before answering it. Then you tell a third student that she should go back and change her answer to question 5 because she made a bad decision. At the end of the test, you collect their work. How well do you think that class performed on the test?

If you think your behavior as a teacher would be distracting to the students performance, you would be right. It's hard to concentrate when you have information coming in that might help you, but not in that situation. Teachers, like coaches, want students to be successful. If the measure of success is the test, then the teacher needs to know that the students can do it on their own without help during the test.

For discussion sake, lets imagine that the students were successful with the teacher giving advice throughout the test. Even if you have a positive impact, you have to wonder, could the students have done as well if you didn't yell at them? Was their performance really due to your ability to teach them before the test or your help on the test? Are they showing their ability or yours?

Tangent- I have taught between 110-150 students each year over the past 30 years, so literally thousands of students. I know that the performance of an individual student on one test does not define me as a successful (or not) teacher, it is the outcomes of these students that will not be known for possibly years into the future. I know that my high school science teachers would never have pegged me to become either a scientist or a teacher (or even a soccer coach) based on my performance in their classes. I do know, based on feedback from alumni, that I did have a positive effect on either their choice of career or future performance (or both). By that measure, I know that the approaches I use are effective....

I teach several students this year who play on the school's softball team. They have been very successful, finishing second in the state this season. I was able to watch a couple of games and it was clear they had a lot of talent. They also had a lot of coaching. There are at least 5 coaches who work with the team. The head coach uses a sophisticated system to call out every pitch and other coaches call out subtle shifts in the positions of the infield and outfield players depending on the hitter. When they bat, there are coaches at 1st and 3rd base telling them what to do while at bat and on the basepaths. There are frequent timeouts when the coach pulls the team in to talk strategy.

While there are a lot of player decisions still to be made, the environment is very much coach centered. That kind of approach simply can't work in soccer. The game is too fluid. A good player transitions from attack to defense and back again so rapidly that it may seem that she never stops moving. When a player has the ball, she may have it for a moment or a long period of time depending on her skill and the situation. Players may start in a formation, but they may interchange based on the situation. The coach cannot control the playing environment no matter how much she tries.

Regardless of sport, there are characteristics of good coaching that are universal such as:

• Setting clear standards of behavior
• Having high, but realistic, expectations
• Treating players as human, capable of both success and failure
• Showing empathy when needed
• Knowing the progression of skills necessary to improve the quality of play
• Being able to figure out where a player skills currently are and improving them over the course of a season. 

Each sport also has its unique qualities that make it different from other sports. I am not going to teach baseball skills to a basketball team. For the same reason, each sport requires a different kind of coaching. Some, like softball, require a high level of coach input during the game situation. Other sports, like soccer, require the coach to have a different role. You can read in some other posts about how you should approach the game situation, so I will give you just a few highlights here:

• Set goals for the team before the game
• for a recreational team, it should be a skill goal, something tied to what you have been doing in practice. 
• e.g. how many times can you execute a dribbling move that we have worked on in practice; how many passes can you complete (to a teammate...)
• Evaluate player performance
• watch each player for an extended period of time (2-5 minutes) and note successes and things to work on. 
• write down something positive about their play so you can remember it and tell them in front of the whole team either after the game or at the next practice. 
• Coach the players who are on the sideline
• players who are not playing are often not engaged in the game. 
• Talk to them about what they should do when they get in the game. 
• Discuss what they did well when they were in the game. 
• Cheer
• When you see a player doing something good, like dribbling past an opponent or making a good pass or showing composure under pressure. 
• When a player tries hard to win the ball after making a mistake. 

As coaches, we all want our players to do well. We want them to be successful, especially in the game situation. As a result, we may resort to techniques which can have the exact opposite effect. Remember that you are a teacher and the game is the test. In soccer, it is a player-centric test. You can help them during the game, but only by recognizing how soccer is different from other sports and using techniques that are appropriate for the sport and let kids show you what they can do when given the freedom to do it.

Want more ideas to help you be a better coach? read "Calming your inner voice."