I’ve written a lot here about perception and it’s critical role in elite performance. Almost any decision starts with what an athlete perceives and, crucially, how soon he or she perceives it. Should we design training to develop players’ eyes? Absolutely. The flip side though is that we should also train for deception. It’s not just…
As coaching goes, my daughter is lucky. She plays for a great club: serious about teaching and hires top quality coaches. Her coach this year is just what you’d want as a parent and a student of the game: builds positive culture; values teamwork and integrity; knows the game, respects it, teaches it right. He’s also…
Been talking a lot to coaches lately about building cultures of mental engagement and collaboration on their teams. Some recent posts here and here. If that’s of interest to you, here’s a new clip that will be really useful. It’s of Steve Freeman, Director at Black Watch Premier. His 2001 boys have been working on…
Here’s a slide I showed recently to coaches at a workshop: The slide is an attempt to describe a common challenge I see in the teaching/coaching of athletes. Here’s the scene. Athletes are playing. We are observing them as coaches. We notice something that needs to be improved. So we stop and make a teaching point. …
A quote from Jacob Steinberg’s excellent piece on Pep Guardiola in this morning’s Guardian: [Claudio] Bravo completed 84% of his passes last season. [Joe] Hart completed 53%. Hart gave possession to the opposition 352 times, Bravo 142. This is the first time I’ve seen goalkeeper possession and pass completion statistics quoted in the newspaper and the…
