Top 5 Mistakes Coaches Make in Their Practice Plans
After being involved as a coach and trainer for many years at the Pee Wee to Professional level, I am always intrigued by the habits of successful coaches and programs and try to study the habits and elements that make them great. One of the biggest common components of winning teams that I have found is their approach to practice and training. In Daniel Coyle’s book the Talent Code, he investigated this notion and researched what he termed talent “hot beds” and studied what coaches were doing in areas that seemed to continually produce high-level performers. They all implemented something he termed as “deep practice”, where all of their practice sessions were efficient, effective and purposeful.
On the flipside, I always try to note common flaws amongst struggling teams and organizations and what it is they may be doing wrong so I can avoid those same pitfalls in my coaching and training. Here are the mistakes that I have found to be most prevalent and destructive:
Unless you are coaching the Cross Country team, stop with all of the running!
I have coined a saying that “making players run is for coaches who have run out of things to teach”. That is not to say we don’t need to condition our athletes, but it can be done in far more productive ways than long distance runs that are more often just busy work that wears out the athletes and diminishes their focus and interest.
Teach pieces before plays
Whether it is running a pass play in football or hitting a baseball, an intense orchestration of many smaller elements must all be executed with the right timing and force in order to achieve success. Our minds cannot digest learning these things in whole form so learning is best done in smaller chunks. Create a list of all of the elements needed to accomplish a larger whole task and then develop drills to acquire each minor component so that when the complete task is required, it can be done reflexively and naturally
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail
Every coach would probably lobby to try and get more practice time with their team. The problem however is often not the volume of practice, but rather the efficiency. By creating a detailed agenda for each practice, coaches can insure that they can cover all of the goal criteria for that day. Schedules should be broken down with as much detail as possible, down to the water breaks, and the schedule should be strictly adhered to.
Get everyone involved
Coaches have a bad habit on focusing on their key players and what their responsibilities are and ignoring the players at the bottom of their roster. This becomes a cyclical disaster because there will inevitably come a time due to injury or mere chance that these players will be counted on at a pivotal time in competition that they will by no means be prepared for because they were standing around on the sideline while the starters were getting all of the practice reps. The irony is that when these players don’t perform in key spots, the coaches get angry with them when it is really their own fault for not preparing them for that situation.
Just because it’s “the way it’s always been done” doesn’t make it right
There is a fine line between tradition and dogma in athletics and we often miss out on information and technology that could vastly improve our performance because it doesn’t fall in line with the way our coaches taught us and their coaches taught them. This mentality would still have us believing the world was flat and that smoking was safe. Stick to your core values and system, but keep an open mind to methods that may be unorthodox but just what your program needs.