novice players aren't mini- professionals and neither are novice coaches

 Novice players aren't mini experts

I had the opportunity to visit with my nephew recently and he brought his 4 year old son so we could play a little soccer. We went to a local park where it was full of recreational level teams from U8 to U14. I did several of my go-to activities and his initially reluctant son never seemed to run out of energy or enthusiasm for playing everything I threw at him. It was a fun time. 

What I observed around me was not fun. Every single practice I observed was straight out of something you would have seen 30-50 years ago. There was lots of kids standing around, dribbling through cones, static passing and running laps. I was honestly surprised that not one of the coaches used anything from the USYS Grassroots program or even the National Youth License program that predated it. The experience did inspire me to write again about how these activities still do not work. This time, I come armed with some additional understanding of why it doesn't work. 

When I first started teaching, to say I lacked a specific pedagogy would be an understatement. I never planned on being a teacher and when I got a job, I had no real idea what I was up against. The same can be said for my coaching career as well. Here, I did get some help. I took a series of coaching courses and learned about concepts like differentiation where we make the practice activities fit the kids and try as hard as possible to make them fit every kid to their best of their ability. 

It is a bit easier to tailor a practice to a diverse group of kids, than it is to get them all through the same Biology curriculum, but I learned that much of the success of differentiation was how you worked with each individual student. 

There were other similarities as well. In Biology, students prepared for summative tests after practicing with the material for several weeks and trying to learn new concepts. In soccer, players prepared for the games which were very much like summative tests except that the environment and the other team might be different, but you still wanted the players to use what they had learned in practice during the games. 

Recently, I read a book by Paul Kirschner and Carl Hendrick called "How Learning Happens." In this book they examined important research that had been conducted over the years that had implications for how learning actually occurs and how it might inform our teaching practices as well as our student's study practices. Quick summary, students use ineffective study techniques and teachers are generally now aware of how a student learns new material in their classes. 

One of my key takeaways is a quote from Kirschner "novice learners are not mini-experts." This means that when given the same task or challenge, experts utilize a consistent procedure and use a step-wise process to solve the challenge or complete the task. By contrast, novices may also complete the task, but their approach is random and at the end of it they may not remember the steps they took to get there in the first place, so when given a similar (or even the same) task, they won't be much better at completing it. 

Let's look at an example. An expert soccer player upon having the ball passed to her will have already evaluated the situation before the ball is received, know what options are available and make decisions about what to do next based on those options. She will also do that much faster than the non-expert and be able to exhibit the technical skills necessary once she has made her choice. 

 Now, lets consider a 6 year old in the same situation. In the transition from U6 to U8, we move from player and ball to solving problems in pairs. So where we encourage our 5 year old's to find the ball and go to the ball, we teach our 6-7 year old's to not steal the ball from a teammate, move away from a teammate who has the ball and encourage them to pass the ball. 

Parents and coaches will observe a child kicking the ball back and forth with their parent and may assume that they understand that they are passing the ball. When put on a field and told to pass the ball, the child will not have any idea what they are talking about. 

The reason why passing is important is that the ball moves faster than the players and that you may have a player in a better position to score than you are, so giving that other player the ball makes sense. In the child's mind, it makes no sense at all because it is MY ball and I don't want to give it to someone else. The child may be obedient and give the ball to another player, but that is not the same thing as an intentional pass that improves the chances of our team to score. Even when the child does make the pass that the coaches are asking her to make, she may not have the technical skill to do it well and it may end up not reaching the intended target. 

In summary, there is the technical skill of making the pass, the concept of the pass as a way to improve our chances of scoring and the decision-making process of when to make the pass and to whom. Conveying all of that to the novice player is literally impossible and yet we have coaches and parents demanding during practices and games that players make that decision by shouting at them to "pass it" or "pass the ball." 

Over the past 25 years, we have made enormous strides in making the game better fit the players, from reducing the size of the field and the number of players on each team to modifying the rules so that there are fewer elements present and we add more elements in as the players get older. But we still haven't been able to address the problem of novice coaches. 

I used to believe that if I could get all my coaches in to a coaching education program, then I could effect change in how they approach practices and games. For 25 years, I taught courses to novice coaches. Many of them took multiple courses with me. However, I never saw much long term effect of my instruction on the coaches. Just as we see with our players, transitioning from being a novice coach to an expert takes time which a 4 hour course (or even a 2 day course) just can't really achieve. 

In my position, I deal exclusively with parent volunteers. Over time, the percentage of these volunteers who have soccer playing experience has increased dramatically, but I still get a lot of parents who are neither experienced as players or as coaches. Even if I can get them in to a coaching course, as noted above, it has limited effectiveness. 

I've tried multiple models over time to help these novices. The model that has had the greatest success is one where the practice session is scaffolded with greater support and direction from me at the start of the season, gradually trailing off as the coaches gain confidence. The most effective change happens when I work with the same coach over multiple seasons and multiple age groups. 

To make this work, we offer group training sessions for each age group. At these sessions, I provide the coaches context before the practice through email as to what we are doing and why we are doing it. Coaches are provided a practice plan before the session so that they have some familiarity with the session. At the session, we run through a large group skills session with all the players where we focus on the core skills for the club and the specific age group. Then we model the activity(ies) we will be doing in the team part of the practice. As the coaches run the activities, we circulate, assist or sometimes run it if needed. Once they transition to the scrimmage, we step back and let the coaches run the scrimmage and observe the players and coaches. We may provide tips like what to look for and how to manage a situation. 

It's not perfect, if you think working with elementary aged children or high schoolers is hard, I think adults are even harder to manage. When a child doesn't know what they don't know, they often substitute effort for thinking or they just stop trying. With adults, they reflect back on their skill sets from other parts of their life and try to use those even when they are not appropriate. Most commonly, they fill the air with constant talking or continuously interrupt the flow of play to make it look like they are doing something when the best course of action is to observe a player or situation and see how the player handles it. If you want more on how to do this, please read the post "taking a snapshot." 

To sum up, both novice players and coaches need scaffolding, practice and structure in order to acquire more skills and be able to solve new and different problems. If we can do a better job with both groups, we can keep players in our programs longer and increase the chance that they reach their highest potential or at least fall in love with the game.