Bruce Glendinning – Sports Coaching Blog

Welcome to my coaching blog, this will follow me through my second year of University at Leeds Beckett , mainly on my journey through the Ceylon Cricket Academy placement and my movements as a coach in genral. My aim is to critically reflect on both my own coaching behaviours through out sessions and also to observe and reflect on the coaches around me.

My placement is with the Ceylon Cricket academy based in Wakefield. This takes places at the QEGS indoor facility and also the Silcoates school. I am working with both the Young Lions Academy side, ages 12-14 and also the junior side which consist of participants from the ages of 8-12.

The teams I work with, train once a week over the winter in the indoor facility (off season) for two hours each time. The Ceylon Cricket Academy also holds a tour each year to South Africa, which is where some of the Ceylon academy players visited this year.

I am quite comfortable working within this environment as I have got previous experience working with groups of a similar age, as a lead coach with the H28 Cricket Coaching Academy in Cumbria. This has enabled me to transfer my knowledge of coaching and use it in this environment. As the majority of the participants are within their early adolescence and some within their middle childhood (Lloyd & Oliver, 2012) I know it is important that mobility, agility and speed are incorporated into sessions.

At the minute I am restricted to what I am allowed to do, as I am still completing my level 2 coaching badge. As this is a paid coaching course for the participants, it is important that standards are high and progression is measurable.

Roles and responsibilities within placement

• Assisting with skill based, technique based and game based practices
• Providing high levels of in action reflection and questioning to see if participants understand
• Creating game based scenarios to assist participants in different situations
• providing high levels of instruction, in the forms of con current instruction, pre instruction and post instruction
• Giving feedback throughout the session
• keeping player engagement high

Reference List:

Lloyd, S. Oliver, J. Faigenbaum, D. Howard, R. Mark, A. Williams, A. Best, M. Alvar, A. Micheli, J. Thomas, D. Hatfield, L. Cronin, B. Myer, D. (2015) Long-Term Athletic Development – Part 1: A Pathway For All Youth. Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 29(5), pp. 1439

At the beginning of the season the coaches had set targets and goals for the participants individually and the team as a whole, that will aim to improve technical, tactical, physical and mental development of the participants. These are set by the coaches in relation to the players they have, the outcome of the season before hand and areas they believed need to be developed. they players in this group range from idle childhood to early adolescence, because of this they should be focusing on mobility, speed, agility, power and strength. (Lloyd & Oliver, 2012).

Due to the mixed age range I have within this group the majority of the participants are within there ‘recreation/specialising years’ there are some that are still within three sampling years, however due to there talent and willingness to the sport they are more advanced. They are at a point in their psycho-social development where self-worth and self-confidence is extremely important to them also things like peer relations. Within the session you can see the highly confident players and also they less confident ones, with the training sessions the confident ones seem to dominate within there own performance but also act as leaders with in the group. during the sessions, each week you could see that some of the less confident participants were coming out go there shell and opening uo more to experimentation and becoming more vocal with the group.

The developmental model of sports participation (Cote & Wall, 2007) suggests the players are entering investment years where they commit to achieving high levels of performance and tactical/technical elements are vital to success. As this is an academy where they have to pay to attend, you an see the majority of participants are extremely keen as all they want to do is play and practice cricket, however in some instances I believe it to be down to the parents, this could cause some participants to be less engaged or enthusiastic.

Meso and Micro planning

Due to the fact that that I am an assistant coach within a set up where the participants are paying to be there, It was seemed to me that I was under qualified to lead sessions initially or chose the targets and goals of the upcoming weeks. this was also down to the factor where I didn’t know my participants or how there previous season went. However, conversations with the Head Coach has enabled me to discuss Meso and Micro plans from his beliefs. Furthermore this training was an off season academy to which they would be setting there goals for the following season.

Macro – Over the course of the winter training a key highlighted area to build and improve was mobility and how we could get the participants moving better fundamentally. This would assist there movements and ultimately there athleticism. Another main goal was to improve practice within game scenario situations, To improve how player will react once in a game. rand finally the last aim was to increase skills and techniques and develop knowledge of when they should be used and how to do so effectively. (Enjoyable sessions)

Meso – Training broken up into A) Skill related B) Technique related C) Game related

Session plans drawn up around these themes.

Basic Exemplar Meso plan

https://docs.google.com/document/d/122i-dfCp3pvsaJQbK3L1CoEzNJnsh3ogE899VFlfXjs/edit

Reference List:

Lloyd, S. Oliver, J. Faigenbaum, D. Howard, R. Mark, A. Williams, A. Best, M. Alvar, A. Micheli, J. Thomas, D. Hatfield, L. Cronin, B. Myer, D. (2015) Long-Term Athletic Development – Part 1: A Pathway For All Youth. Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 29(5), pp. 1439

Wall, M. Cote, J. (2007) Developmental Activities That Lead to Dropout and Investment in Sport. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 12 (1) February, pp. 77-87