Hello and welcome to On the Grass with me, Dan Wright. In this conversation we discussed competition, working with teenagers and helping our young players develop those psychological skills. We surveyed all, everyone in the club from under 10s up to under 19s across four different cities to this different exercise and they had to take everyone in the 50s that applied to them and then once they'd done that they had to just narrow it down to their top three and all they gave us was their top three and so we took that in and just kind of I suppose like crunch the numbers on it and maybe this isn't a surprise to anybody that the teenagers would find it remarkable that with such a wide breadth of things to choose from, the top three was the same in every age group in every city. Now maybe in a different order but that's what was coming out in the three where like the number one by a mile was comparing yourself to others, number two was fear of failure and number three was self-doubt.
That's Alan Goode. Alan Goode is a coaching director for Focusfield Hockey, a hockey club in Virginia that aims to grow the game, develop players and people and have those who wish to play at the collegiate level in America to get recruited. He also works for USA Field Hockey, a sports governing body in America as a coach educator and high performance coach. As always if you enjoy this conversation with Alan please leave a like or share with your colleagues, let's get started.
Welcome to the On the Grass Podcast with me Dan Wright. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Alan Goode. Alan how are you? I'm flying a man thanks, how are you doing yourself?
I'm very well thank you. So we're going to talk quite a few different things on this podcast hopefully but first challenge 60 seconds tell us who you are and what you do. Okay I am the coaching director for Focusfield Hockey which is a hockey club in Virginia in the US. I got here I guess by accident I was working in sports journalism, they needed somebody to write about hockey so I started doing that, started playing the sport as a result as an adult and loved it and you know playing became refereeing which became managing which became coaching and I ended up I suppose you know packing in sports journalism to go and try and coach professionally in Ireland in about 2013 and that involved coaching pretty much 12 teams at the same time for about four years and then got this opportunity to come and move to the US I've already done some summer camps here and so I moved here in 2017 so I'm into year three of my job here now.
Fantastic well done that's a lot to fit into 60 seconds you did well there. So the we connected maybe last year of initially through email and a bit of you Skyton and one of the things that I found really interesting that I think would be useful for other coaches is kind of your approach or the clubs approach to competition and tournaments so it might be worth you just giving us a little bit of flavour about what the clubs about and then we could dive into how you guys use competition or use tournaments to have the players. Of course yeah so focus I suppose kind of has a bit of a dual mandate I mean you know like most sports clubs we obviously want to try and grow the game and give children an opportunity to learn and develop and with I guess field hockey being a very predominantly female sport in the States a lot of it is about giving opportunities for to to girls to play sport and that's certainly kind of what happens at the younger end but at the older end of our club and when I mean older U19 is our eldest we don't have adult teams and from U16 and U19 up it's a lot of it is about trying to see if we can get them to play in college so that's a big deal in America is playing sport in college I mean I suppose most people who may not be from the country would see that in you know they'd have seen college basketball maybe you know as like a stepping stone to the NBA but the vast majority of our girls it's not really that they're going to college to play on somewhere else although the best ones might end up on the US team but they're going there because it's the next level of sport for them it's kind of the highest adult level of competition in the US and also they can they can get into I suppose a bit different range or a better institution than their academics might might otherwise get them into and you know a small percentage get a scholarship too so as a result as they kind of get older and come through our club some are just there because you know they're trying to get better at the game or they love playing or they want to do more than playing high school because the high school season is only about four months of the year here and they just want to play a bit more in the other months but the ones that say to the end tend to be you know ambitious and they tend to want to play in college so our job is to get them ready to try and play at that level and get recruited and so with that being our end in mind I guess the end comes a lot earlier than it might in a lot of other environments where you might be trying to develop I guess like a lifelong player so because of that we when we go to tournaments and compete it looks a little different to how you might imagine a regular season in a regular league structure firstly geographically in this country is you know huge challenges in terms of clubs are spread out over a huge area so you're not going to be traveling six seven hours just to play one game so it's more like a tournament every kind of five or six weeks or so and we tend to split those tournaments into three types so that would be learning recruiting and performance so you go to a learning tournament they're usually short they're usually just one day tournaments and everybody's going to get the same amount of playing time or pretty much and it's just about you know trying to see can we apply certain concepts that we've done in practice or maybe we might be playing girls in different positions to give them that sort of I suppose differentiation when we go to a recruiting tournament those tend to be a bit longer maybe two three days long and and we the playing cliente goes from say like a 50 percent one down to 30 percent we still usually get close to 50 but at these tournaments that they you will have a whole like you know host of college coaches will be there watching trying to see okay well who do I want to try and you know pick from my team in this particular year and the girls have to do a lot of homework around that in terms of writing to the coaches and kind of letting them know when they'll be playing and they'll have already gone to clinics at their universities and try to build those relationships and then this is where they come when they watch them play and see how they're doing I guess and so for those ones results that still aren't really the priority it's just the case of trying to get everybody onto the the pitch and you know hopefully they make each other look good but you're not going to just maybe sub as freely as you can because those tournaments say you still want to try and keep like keep a good structure so you're probably going to leave your center back in your center mid in for a bit more of the game because in hockey we have rolling subs we can take people out and off whenever we want but you would probably keep a little bit more of your spine together for those and then finally you have performance tournaments and there's only probably one or two of those a year and at these ones it's very much we're here to win we're here to achieve and this is a high pressure environment where no playing time is guaranteed and you know and when the girls come to those that gives them a lot of stress I guess and definitely a lot of challenge but prior that is we're trying to prepare them for again once they're in mind if they get selected for those teams they're usually the top players in the club but if they have ambitions to go and play in college when they go into college they might be on a roster of 25 players and only 11 are going to play at a given time so they may have to get used to the fact that they're not always going to play so it gives them a different level of challenge and obviously there's the pressure to win comes in in those tournaments to one players and coaches so there's lots of different ways we could take this conversation I think one of the things I'd be interested to actually first is like how do you communicate or how does that relationship work with parents because my understanding would be that parents in the States are quite driven by winning and quite driven by success and obviously there's a financial commitment to play the sport and probably also a financial reward if that's right we're to get that scholarship and to get that pathway that they might not be able to get without the sport so how does that kind of relationship work with parents and maybe what's the challenges that it may be some should have with those parents? I guess everybody's going to go about this differently I mean if I think about other clubs in the States I've seen them all do it in different ways some are very much everybody's included all the time and so they wouldn't necessarily go for any sort of win-a-dall-class tournaments and I've also seen the other extreme where it is very much okay we're gonna grade our teams all the time and if you're not on the 18 then it's kind of just tough you know go off and get better with the attitude and it can be very very hard lines I guess so that's why we try and be somewhere in the middle where you know we have those different levels of said learning recruiting and performance and therefore because we have that structure the next bit becomes managing expectations both for players and parents so ensuring that before we go to a given tournament that they know where we're going to be coming so I'm not saying that that definitely solves all the complaints but it definitely helps like particularly when it comes to that performance tournament environment we would you know when we say hold the trials for that team you know we would you might have say 40 players might try out for a team and you're only going to maybe select 16 or 18 of them so you'll say to the players look around there's 40 of you we're only going to take 16 some more than half we were going to be disappointed and that's understandable it's okay to feel that way and we'll give you feedback you know as to why you did or didn't make it but you know this this is the potential situation for you and if you if that's something you're comfortable with and it's okay to walk away now and we would kind of do the same thing with the parents as well in terms of outlining what our process is and when and how we're going to make those selections and how we're going to let the players know and then excuse me even if they make the team they may not they've no guarantee you're actually playing at the tournament either now I mean again of course we'll try to select a team that has the right amount of players on it so that they all can get in and all that value to the team rather than bringing somebody just to sit and sit in the bench and plinch it out of their backside for the whole weekend but because those expectations are managed and we'll give them you know we're leaving under no illusions if they do want to come and complain that oh my kids didn't get to play you can kind of say well we did warn you that that was the case for this particular tournament it won't be the case for every tournament and plus it's one weekend you know I mean that's what that weekend will come and go in the next one will come in five or six weeks it's not like that kid is sitting on the bench every single week for a whole season the tournament structure means that that's the case and so if they do want to come and complain it's usually just a difference of opinion but the key thing for me is that we've managed expectations and we've kind of had some integrity around saying what we're going to do and then stick into that and if we do that then rarely do we have too many problems around it and I think talking from a football point of view the football season would be however many weeks it is long should be nine months but it's turning into a 12-month season and a lot of that competition will challenge looks very similar so players will play in a team that they've been selected for or not selected for but they'll be in a team for a set period of time and then they will play in that team for whatever it is 30 weeks 45 weeks whatever for a period of time then that season will end I think what's interesting with your model is that those players are in a selection pool and they might make one tournament but they might not make the other tournament so it isn't like those players are set in one selection group I think it's always the opportunity to kind of prove yourself and get the opportunity again so how's that being kind of received I think from a player point of view so you've obviously had players that have had difficult messages and haven't been selected and you've had players that I'm guessing haven't been selected and then get selected later on and kind of preview wrong I guess um it's that's a particularly timely question for me right now because we've just come back from the National Club Championships which is the top I guess for us performance event in the nation there's 10 or 11 different regions and only the top two possibly top three qualify out of each region and so this National Club Championships or NCCs it's called brings together the top 16 teams in the country and so our U16 group was just at that tournament and for all of them it was their first time competing at that level and so again we had to manage the expectations in advance around playing time and this was particularly tough one because you're traveling from Virginia to Pennsylvania that's a five six hour drive for most parents and it's going to involve two or three nights in a hotel and and so there's expense involved and so therefore we would have to tell the girls look you know you might come to this and you might not participate as much as you'd like you know I mean they all played a bit but some more than others and so we'd have to give them that warning in advance but the reason that we suppose brought such a broad squad is we wanted those girls to see and feel what that level of play looks like because they don't always get to really see that in their region and as I said it was their first time going so we went and you know we were very competitive but we weren't quite good enough to you know finish as high as we might want to and but you know we didn't get blown out in any game or anything like that but when we asked for the reflections from the players afterwards like what their main takeaways were for the tournament and what's coming back or a theme that's coming back from all of them is a lot of them are saying wow I did not realize that that's how good 14 and 15 I need to kind of step it up if I want to play at that level again and you know not just be there to compete but be there to try and succeed and you know there seems to have been a sort of realization that okay I think I'm good down here in my town or my area but actually there's a whole big bad world of amazing players out there and I didn't know about it and that's even coming back from the ones that maybe didn't weren't you know always the actors and the team and didn't play as much they've all kind of gone wow all right I need if I want to play more I need to step it up and so I've been really I guess pleasantly surprised by the reaction so far that it's been very mature out of these girls were 13 14 15 there's been nobody saying I didn't play so screw you guys I learned nothing you know and I do believe that like they have to obviously step on the field and experience it to get that and I you do you know look back and kind of go well could we have gotten this girl in for a bit longer in this game and all that but as I said because we've outlined it from the start that just this one tournament which is one item maybe 10 they might play that year it's going to be the one we're playing time is going to be restricted then it helps I think it helps the girls understand as well that you know it's not just about you getting on the on the field and this one there's something bigger at play and that seems to have been has come through in the feedback so far and I think one of the reasons I wanted to kind of have this conversation is because competition is quite a sticky subject like on social media or coaching forums or podcasts wherever people share these ideas that in the UK there's been a move towards non-competitive football whatever that means because kids will always be competitive but there's a lot of scary stories around competition the competition can be bad in competition is adult led and can cause you know a lot of friction between parents and players and sons and daughters and stuff like that and I think a lot of those stories are really valid but when we had this conversation of the podcast I thought this was a successful story around competition the fact that the players are getting different exposures to different levels of competition and that little story you've just shown it tells us that a player might think they're you know quite good but when you expose them to the national level of competition they're not as good as they thought they were so there's work to do so it's suppose the angle that we're talking about is using competition to help develop players it's not necessarily coaches standing on the sideline screaming shouting and you know wanting to lift the trophy every single week it's about how do we put those players in those different environments to challenge and support them at different times that hopefully they need and you'll never tell that perfectly for every single girl but is that the objective that we're trying to see what every kid needs in that journey exposing them to that different sort of challenge point with the end in mind and the end in mind for you is that they can try and get that scholarship and say how you'd see it very much so and I think it's well for me it's worth saying that end in mind with like you know them being 18 and having sorry then getting offers to play in college and probably figuring that out and making that decision at 16 years old maybe 17 if they're a little bit later in the process and then having to get them ready so that when they're 18 or 19 they arrive in college in August for preseason and 35 degree he's physically mentally and technically ready to go you know this so because they leave us at that age it's not like when I was working in clubs in Ireland where if you had say a very precocious under 16 player who was stepping up to adult for the first time you know you're hoping that her playing an adult league for the first time of 15 you're hoping that she's still going to be playing adult hockey when she's 35 or even 45 or 55 depending on you know when she might start a family if that's something she chooses but with us they're not going to be with us once they move to college they're gone and so that is something I struggle with because in general as a coach I you know would want to be participation based and would want everybody to get playing and get all those opportunities to learn by playing and so when we do have to then I guess stream it or select it and that's something that doesn't very well with me I mean you mentioned how the the way competition has become almost like I'm not you know almost a dirty word in some ways in other sporting circles and you see things like you know in New Zealand one of the the regions there is ditched it's under 14 representative team because they feel it's too early to be streaming kids and telling them you know you're good enough and you're not in England I see that all club rugby now up to under 18 everybody's got to play a half and it's the leanest towards participation particularly in rugby I guess which is a sport that tends to lose numbers at certain different ages and there's there is a risk of that for us here but as I said because you're because your end or sorry our end in mind that comes much quicker and so if we wanted to be all singing all dancing sweetness and light everybody plays all the time yes fine there's we're offering a lot of support to the players but I don't know if we're offering them the requisite challenge because when they go and play in college here I alluded to this earlier but depending on the college they end up at they could be carrying a roster for just one team so no second team or anything like that in college they could have 22 23 outfield players plus four goal keepers in that team so unless you are like an exceptional you know has played for the US under 17s under 19s player most girls when they go to college don't play at the beginning or if they do they play for five minutes here or five minutes there of the game and so if all they've been used to is being the star of their high school team and their club team always giving everybody times that they never get that stretch and that challenge we would argue that we're not preparing them to succeed in the environment that they've put all the time and effort money into which is to go and play in college so that's that's where it's taught because you get torn between you know well do you really want to have to be so cutthroat and stream and so competitive especially at such an early age because I mean the first age group that happens in it is under 14 it doesn't happen at 12 and 10s but at a national level it happens under 14 where you know they can go and try out and represent their region and then potentially go and represent the US from there and so it's the same for the club championships again when we enter that we can only enter one team our top team so we have to pick the best 16 girls under 14 or however many we want to bring and then you have to tell some 12 and 13 year olds I'm sorry you didn't make it this time and like that's that's really tough and I could do see sometimes that when that happens some girls say all right well you know they might go off the sport or they might say all right well screw you guys I'm going to join a different club and you hate saying that you never want that to happen but the I guess the system kind of forces us into it a little bit but the other side of that like I said it's one weekend that that's for maybe one you know black of a tournament and so it's not like when they don't make the cut there they're stuck on the B team or stuck on the fringes for the next nine months it's literally just for one weekend and then for the next tournament it's back to that as you said it's they could be selected for that one if they've gone off and made some changes to their game and I think the takeaway for football coaches again purely selfishly is that is that piece around kind of variety and volume of challenge so football can be guilty of like I said playing a 38 week season or 45 week season and games looking looking pretty similar so maybe all on grass all the same format against local teams and you're either you know in the top third the middle third of the bottom third and every week looks pretty similar and what I liked about kind of your approach was that there is loads of different variety in that games program and there's times where it'll be quite pressurized maybe because people are watching us from a recruitment point of view and there'll be times where it's just about play and there'll be times where you don't get selected at all because you're not quite ready and I think coming back to I said before I think that is a positive outcome of competition it means you have to have some difficult conversations with 12 year old sometimes but then the piece that I think is worth talking about is you are with your end in mind which is developing players to go and get a scholarship you're also developing mental skills because you can't have a really perfectly smooth beautiful journey through your club say and then when they go to college expecting to be top boy or top girl and they haven't they haven't ever been dropped they haven't ever played out position they haven't ever had 20 percent game time and so I think there's probably a piece around developing that kind of side social side where players are experiencing stuff that's tough and adversity and then when they go to the college it's not we're not asking them to build that skill there that they've already used some of that skill at 14 15 16 so I can recall it and use it again would that be a piece you're kind of thinking about with that program absolutely I mean I suppose you you made reference to something there which I believe is you know kind of called a four corners model where you know you have what is it technical tactical physical social or psychosocial I'm sure there's you know little tweaks on that but that's the one I've seen over here for me I don't look at it as four corners I kind of look at it if you can kind of imagine you know technical tactical and physical are all inside one big bubble it's called psychosocial I think that that governs everything and so especially with our end of mind that that's true but within that then I feel that it's our duty to provide players with high challenge and high support so yes we're going to obviously give them the resources to try and succeed in terms of trying to you know you know hopefully create like games based environments loads of decisions to make or you know stress and pressure there in practice but also that then we give them the support to help them out and like that for us means you know our recruiting director would sit down and kind of walk them through how to write to college coaches or how to you know your how to get your list down from 20 colleges down to 10 and you know and kind of all that part of it comes in and we helped hold their hands through that process but also and yes as you said that we were going to have to focus on making them mentally strong because the fact that they're going to go into such a cutthroat environment very early I mean I think it's a pleasure and a privilege for me to be able to largely coach for development rather than for winning because like I said one tournament out of 10 a year I have to worry about whether we win and the others yeah it's great if you do you get a medal round your neck at the end but it wasn't the end but if you coach in college in the US not just in in hockey but in any sport like your livelihood is on the line if you have a couple of bad seasons in a row I mean thankfully it's not quite you know premier league levels of you know three bad games as a crisis but two bad seasons in a row and you're probably going to be out of a job because all these colleges the athletic directors in them they like the optics of winning and then they want their university to be competitive in all different sports and so if you're not then your job is on the line so as a result there's many who work in college coaching who might like to be more developmentally minded coach wise but when it comes to their season if they're different animals because it is kind of almost win it all costs for them because coaching is a profession here you know and so the players are the ones that often are the victims of that in terms of you know like a small example I give you is an alum of our club she went to play in college last year and I remember that I bumped into her coach socially like a month or two before she went there and I said she's gonna play much and he said she might get five minutes a game when she's lucky as a freshman she's gonna have to play her way in there and in the first four or five games of their season she actually ended up playing kind of 35 at 40 minutes out of the 70 which is a lot for a freshman to get that much game time but then they were playing a big rival and they were the game was tied to two and she's playing in centimet and she makes a bad reception mistake turns the ball over they can't attack and score and she doesn't react very well she kind of like loses it a little bit in their sinteriors and they take her off the pitch and for the rest of the season she played for two or three minutes a game because they said oh we can't trust you mentally you're not strong enough so that's how cut out it can be girl makes one mistake in a high-pitched game and that's it she's pretty much done for the season in terms of playing time so that's what we're trying to prepare the girls for unfortunately it is pretty cut out and I've heard a coach I know likes to tell players that when when they go to college for the first time that they should invest in buying a plastic chair and they always look at her a little bit sideways going on what you mean a plastic chair and she says well you're gonna want to leave it in the shower so that you can sit there and cry during preseason because you're going to be pushed so high physically and mentally because they're going to try and test you and see are you are you ready for that sort of white hot competition environment so therefore that means that we have to offer our girls a lot of help in terms of both challenging them but also supporting them during their journey to get there so there's multiple ways we would do that but every simple example is when we group them for training so when we decide what our training groups are going to be we don't quite ban them on age it's more age and stage combined and sometimes we will move players around with a certain purpose and we'll tell them so for example a girl who you know might be talented for her age but is you know is quite young you might stick her up for three months into a higher level practice group where she's going to have a lot of failure and she's going to have to try and see kind of talents that you're through or can she figure out how to work through that but then similarly another player who's struggling at an age or in a group will be obviously pushed down or asked to play down for three months with maybe younger or less talented players or less experienced players to get that sort of experience of success and maybe build her confidence and so that's part of the the puzzle for us is trying to figure out who needs while at a given moment but we will generally tell the player why we're moving them and what we're kind of getting them to do and and so they again so they know what our expectations of them are and it's never a permanent move it might only be for a couple of weeks at a time sometimes we've asked some girls could they take part in two training groups where they might again have one where they're going to get a lot of success on a Saturday but then have to go and train one a Sunday where they're going to see a lot of failure because they might not quite be ready for that but again it's all a part of stretching them in different ways because when they're in that lower group we want them to show leadership and set an example and we don't want them to you know we're hoping they won't throw their toys out of the pram because they're like mmm why am I in with these girls and there's a teacher and woman there and then similarly when they go up and we want to see can they handle the adversity when it comes and maybe not being as successful as they're used to.
So there's a lot in that like that that story around the chair is horrible and it's harsh but that is the reality of the next environment so when we talk to her about the competition and tournaments if you don't drip feed that in throughout the pathway that's going to be a hell of a shock if it comes to it 1719 that will be horrible. You've referenced a couple of times that the challenge and support and I can't remember the exact model but some will have to google it there's a lovely matrix around challenge and support and if there's not enough support the environment is this and if there's too much challenge but not enough support and I suppose the skill of the coach is kind of moving up and down where that player needs loads of challenge and loads of support and when he's less challenged and that's quite a skill. I think another good piece for you to kind of share some advice with coaches would be you're obviously working with teenagers and you're working with working with female teenagers so there's lots going on there. What would be kind of some of the challenges that these people have at these kind of age groups or what are kind of the challenges they are having maybe on the pitch or off the pitch that you see kind of week to week or year to year?
I mean I think regardless of you know gender or anything like that it's just a challenge for all of us but especially teenagers it's just being consistent and so you know that could be everything from just in terms of trying to manage everything that's going on in their lives and be consistent to attend these at training so you know there a lot of these girls are multi-sport athletes which is something that we really encourage because obviously the way the cross training kind of develops them there and hopefully prevents those that overuse but they get challenged in terms of you know what happens when they're playing a basketball tournament but they haven't been to Hatfield Hockey practice in three weeks and they're on the same day and they're like which one am I going to choose and then even just within our sport alone you know even though the high school season is only meant to be August through November and often their high school coaches want them for indoor league in the winter or they want them for spring training or summer conditioning and it's become it becomes that kind of you know heavy year and thing so just trying to combine what they're trying to do with everything in their lives together can be crazy I mean like talking to just last night I was talking to a new player in our club who she's always played field hockey with her school but she's just decided to do club stuff and the only reason she now has space to do club stuff is because she quit being a gymnast which she told me during her school year it was 24 hours a week of training and then in the summer it was 35 hours a week of training like her was living a full-time job at age like 10, 11, 12 training to be a gymnast so training got them to be consistent it's really hard because they've got a lot of different things going on in their lives in terms of just in terms of physically showing up and then when they show up are they ready and in the right mindset to be pushed as hard as we might need to push them in an academic day because they might not have you know they might have already had two trainings another sports that day and because if they are good enough to play field hockey around and to chase that playing college the odds are they're strong in other sports too so that's not unique to America but that's definitely a balance that a lot of teenagers probably struggle with and then you know there's the emotional piece I mean like again I don't think this is necessarily age-specific but you know how many of us even as adults would come to training and you're you know you're driving up in the car and you're kind of going jeez I had a really rough day at work there now or you've had you know maybe you've had a big blowout with your other half or whatever things just going on it's hard for you to get your head in the game like that's exaggerated times however many you know you want with teenagers because they might have had a you know they might have had a route with their best friend or their or their significant other earlier in the day and so it's really easy to be like jeez you know Dan is absolutely all over the place today his first touch is terrible he doesn't seem to have his head in the game and so I get the skill of the coach in that moment to try and come out with a bit of compassion and not judgment and instead of just going why is he so terrible today just maybe go over and be like you know everything all right what's going on you know did something happen today and sometimes they might not want to tell you but even if you just kind of go over and acknowledge that you've noticed that they're not okay and you might just say you know look whatever it is you know we're here to chat if you want to help but no worries if not okay and even just kind of letting them know that you've noticed that something is off can sometimes get a better solution in terms of them feeling a little bit more relaxed and so those are I guess the challenges I think you get the teenagers are similar to the challenges you get coaching adults they just might be more magnified due to you know potentially due to just I guess like I don't want to say hormones but it probably is to do with that just all the stuff that's going on and swimming around with them and so yeah trying to get them to be consistent is probably the biggest thing yeah and those informal conversations are really powerful like they're like just talking to them like they're humans not just like robots or athletes that have turned up to perform a you know a training session or a game just talking to them like they're normal people you often get this that get this information out of them and let you say a bit more compassion or understanding of okay they're not a very good day or you know they're having some problems at home or you know they're really tired and you can probably give them a training session grace with the understanding that maybe next week will be better or maybe next session will be better I've heard you speak before and I'm going to try and tease this out of you about you run a workshop where it was something around the 50-50 things that might stop you getting success so that might be an interesting thing to share with listeners I think like what the things that are going to stop you being great or something to that message yeah it was I mean so again I've mentioned on this during this chat that we know we have to try provide that that challenge and support and that like everything is within the psychosocial ideas so particularly during during the autumn or the fall as the Americans like to call it we because the girls are in their high school season at that stage they're they're either training or playing games five days a week with schools so they still have a club session on the weekend but it tends to be very low in terms of physical load and quite often we'll spend a portion of that two hours kind of workshapping something mental rather than just playing like you know I'm providing the I suppose providing the stress and the squeeze in the game we kind of might actually take them out and workshop some of it so one of the things we did was we just made a list of 50 potential things that could hold you back from being you know from being the player you want to be or even the person you want to be so yeah with that then and kind of like all right this could be anything from you know having really kind of controlling parents to you know to being afraid of being judged by others to you know being afraid of not performing in front of coaches at recruiting events like we just put down 50 different things and we surveyed all everyone in the club from under 10s up to under 19s across four different cities to this different exercise and they had to take everyone in the 50s that applied to them and then once they'd done that they had to just narrow it down to their top three and all they gave us was their top three and so we took that in and just kind of I suppose like crunch the numbers on it and maybe this isn't a surprise anybody's that with teenagers but I found it remarkable that with such a wide breadth of things to choose from the top three was the same in every age group in every city now maybe in a different order but that's what was coming out in the three where like the number one by a mile was comparing yourself to others number two was fear of failure and number three was self-deaf so they're all in the same wheelhouse but the fact that comparing yourself to others kind of came out so strongly I mean you know again is that a surprise that teenagers compare themselves to others it's not but I do kind of feel that like especially in my environment anyway I feel a lot of sympathy for these girls because they're growing up at a time where obviously everybody's lives are projected or at least the best part of them are projected into their their faces every day on Instagram and the not only that but there does seem to be a trend among young American athletes at the moment to just to try and be perfect or to be excellent at everything so there's this you know they kind of talk about this big pressure to be very strong academically and get great grades to be really good at a sport and good enough to play in college and on top of that you still have to find time to spend time with your family and be a really good person and somehow be really pretty as well on top of all that and so they feel this desire to be perfect and they're spreading themselves very thin across a broad range of different activities because they're all trying to you know I guess puff up their their CV to make it as look as good as possible so that they can go on to college and then you know go on and have the the job and the successful life and so that comparison is massive and it's also again the reason it's not a surprise for girls playing hockey America is that I won't mention it by name but there's a certain website and company that kind of trades off letting people know who got recruited where so you know they might have it that you might be a sophomore which is your third last year of school and you'll see if you follow this particular account you'll see every day you'll be bombarded with images of players saying you know you know Dan Wright commits to play at this college and you know with a feature about like where they thank their parents and they thank God and they thank their coaches for everything they've done for them and if you're that age and you see all these people your age on the internet kind of being committed by schools and you're good at going nobody's even offered me a place yet or then it's even worse if it happens locally where somebody they know gets recruited and then they all of a sudden they feel it's just this constant pressure like they're on a hamster wheel so it's that the comparison piece is absolutely huge and it's a really tough thing for them to deal with so doing that exercise with the 50 things helped give us I suppose a roadmap for when we are going to talk about these things about how to try and get them to think about it more healthily and that rather having their their competition be you know the other people around them just their competitions themselves and I know it's kind of cheesy sounding but to try and kind of be better than you were yesterday rather than try and be better than that girl over there is a key message for us yeah and there's there's like a mental health conversation there isn't there when you're talking about players comparing themselves and the pressures of school versus sport parents instagram to look brilliant to be bright all those things and then you know there's a coach on the go you because you didn't receive the ball in a certain way like there's going to be there's going to be flare ups and there's going to be times where as coaches we get that wrong and I think if you like you have some empathy and compassion of what a teenage life looks like you'd probably coach in a different way like if you understood what their world looked like and you had to you know to to lift that maybe with less um life skills and less knowledge because you know you're only wherever age you are 1514 that's really difficult so there's a nice piece there I think for people working in any sport and like I said working with any ages but teenagers especially if you get to understand maybe what their world looks like you would probably coach in a slightly different way or maybe have a little bit more patience when you know they're not always perfect every single minute of your training session yeah and there's something that's like I have a you know long way to go with figuring that out but something that's definitely accelerated that learning for me has been working with a high school team here because what I would have been used to in Ireland in hockey was you know your school team might train once maybe twice a week so you see them for an hour and a half to you know twice a week and that was kind of it and then a game you know every so often whereas because the season in the state said like they divide sports seasons into like there's fall winter and spring and so a lot of girls will play a different sport in each one or they'll play two out of three seasons or whatever so it's intense but it's packed in so and so instead of being an eight or a nine-month season for school hockey like it would have been at home it's only three three months really September or November within August three seasons so because you're training or playing games Monday to Friday for three months you're seeing them every day and so you start to get a little bit of a handle on that like so for example you know when I first jumped into that if training was a 3 45 the girls finished school at 3 30 and sometimes somebody would be you know legging it out onto the pitch at 350 or 355 but I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm late and I used to be like you know kind of not as but not that talent that con con you know why are the two at where the three of you like come on you know we're already 10 minutes into session you're wasting time here but then you kind of talk to them a bit more but also kind of get used to the environment and you realize they're late because a teacher held them back you know and wants to talk to them about this terrible grade they got or this assignment they're struggling with or they're late because they were on their way and they ran into a friend in the corridor who was bawling her eyes out because she's something has happened and they're not going to say sorry screw you see you later because they want to just help that person in the moment and you start to again get a little bit more of a handle on all the things they're trying to juggle so again it's back to coming out of compassion rather than judgment and I don't always succeed in that by the way I wish I would be perfect every time but asking questions first is usually a good a good way to start before coming out of judgment and there's definitely some sort of link between where we started the conversation with competition and maybe the win it all costs and the stress and the challenge of getting to that scholarship and then what that actually looks like every day maybe that that teenage world. Player Development Project is a community designed to help you coach with confidence by sharing ideas and informal learning on-demand if you're enjoying this podcast why not head over to playerdevelopmentproject.com and check out our library of coaching content click on the about membership page and find out more about what we offer for members and select the best option to help you in your coaching. I'm conscious of your time so we're going to jump into the now famous question cube so five random questions. Let's try and put you on the spot.
Question number one what is the biggest mistake you've learned when coaching young people so maybe similar to what you've just been talking about. I think so yeah it's it's probably been just I'll actually know I'll go to 10 a different route I think it's the biggest mistake that I've made that I like to think I've learned from is just being a little bit too tolerant of um I want to say like bad behavior sounds bad but I guess the incident I have in mind was it was a high performance team that I worked with in Ireland where you know we spent months and months and months preparing for this tournament it was a tournament where five provinces go into the tournament and they select the best players for the Irish under 16s and I was coaching one of those provinces and we went into this tournament where we were at home it was like being hosted in our region and the first game was supposed to be a gimme for us and threw a whole bunch of you know bad luck bad play and just you know a lot of things happening we lost the game four three that we probably should have won four or five nothing and so Big Shell Shock everybody's all over the place afterwards and one of the players comes up to me the next day and says you should have played me more and these three girls also need to play more as well and you made the wrong selections choices yesterday and I'm really annoyed and I'm really upset and and she was going around telling everybody in the team this as well and this was a girl who was you know this wasn't the first time she'd exhibited that behavior and I wish I kind of did it in the bud earlier and like the lesson I learned from it was that you know yes fine certain players might be talented or whatever but if they're not if their culture or their personality doesn't suit the environment or training or if they're not good people then it doesn't really matter how talented they are and I used to indulge diva like talent when I was younger and I've gotten better at kind of taking a firmer hand on that and even if it means doing something like dropping her best player for a game because she's throwing her toys out of the prom or is you know not just as a one-off but as you know it's become a trend then I suppose being a little bit harder in that moment and not for the sake of like proving you know proving myself right or anything like that but just to again that's providing a lot of challenge I guess in that moment but also some support because you're trying to hopefully teach that person that those sort of outbursts and those that behavior isn't necessarily going to get them very far in life so that's the biggest mistake I've made is indulging indulging bad behavior in the past and probably a challenge lots of coaches have in their environment and again staying with your end in mind that behavior is probably not going to work at a college so you have to try and prepare them to to go where they're going to go. Question number two what piece of equipment do you use regularly and why? It is a coaching board a coaching board that specifically has you know a pitch on it with hockey lines I mean that's not anything unusual right I mean most of us use one of those but I try and use it in a slightly different way to others and I would love to claim this idea as my own it's not sadly this is taken from Craig Parnum who is USA field hockey set a coach education I deliver some of their level ones and level twos over here so I'm lucky enough to get to work with Craig a lot he's a five-time Olympian as a coach he's from the UK originally but living over here now but Craig did a seminar on halftime team talks and he's one of the most practical things I've ever kind of you know witnessed in coach education he just talked about how during a game he will have his board in his hand but rather than just writing a list of the things that are going wrong I mean that's a good start in terms of just writing down the things you're seeing and you know not just trusting your brain to remember them all at halftime but he would write or draw little pictures that were geographically accurate on the pitch on his boards so you know if there was a problem with the right midfielder that she wasn't releasing the ball down the line early enough he might you know draw that in in the right spot and kind of just those couple of words and it just meant that by time half time came around he might have six or seven things written on his board and then he would go all right maybe the A's with the other coaches and go all right which which two or three of these are absolutely key for the group to hear or which ones do I just need to talk to that individual about and he would use that to shake his halftime team talk so it would just be two or three things it would be no new information all of it would just be related to things that they practiced or things that you know they said they were going to do and it just it really frames your halftime team talk quite well particularly when you know what's common here at tournaments is they're on a clock so you might have a situation where you know the game is 15 minutes long 225 minutes and you've just barely got five minutes in between and by the time the players get off the pitch and come in and get water you might have two and a half three minutes left to get your messages across so using the board as a geographic tool to kind of take your notes has been like life-changing from here as a coach in terms of improving halftime it's uh it's a genius idea i'm sure we can crop that out so i can turn into my idea when we share this but like you said then you can maybe get pictures that repeat themselves so if your example of a right side of playing down the line when they should if that happens two or three times and that's maybe a headline that needs to be shared at half time then like you said is whether that headlines for the group or whether you work in individuals with units or how it works and then there's probably a piece there if you're working in like coaching pairs if you've got an assistant you could say i'm going to talk about this big stuff can you talk to these three about these little messages that we've seen and that that is a yeah genius idea again something that everybody has but maybe is not um utilizing i know you're gonna want to move to the next question but this particular thing goes interesting which like you're absolutely right like i even the tournament i spoke about this national championship so i was just that the other thing i did was after doing all that stuff for the first half and then using it to go out half time i just take a picture of the board before i wipe anything off it so i have the six boards from the six half times and so it's really interesting looking back and comparing those and seeing what trends come up over and over again and so for example i ended up drawing a microphone or like a loud megaphone a couple of times because communication was a real issue for girls because they were playing on a pitch that was indoors in a pressurized dome where all those sounds were very round and you can't hear anything so that was a big challenge for them at that tournament so you could see that like going forward we need to you know not just get better communication but get better at being heard and being specific and getting across in two or three words players and coaches so that trend came out by using the board idea but also then comparing afterwards going oh well on six of these boards you've drawn three microphones there's most of a couple of times or megaphones i mean yeah and then there's a piece around what how does that inform training as well like do you take stuff from the boards to design Tuesday night training because this was a common theme there's probably an angle where you could give a board to the suspension say maybe not your game because it's super the subsequent quickly but in football if someone's going to sit there for 15 minutes you could give them a board and say what the areas you think we're doing well or you know there is a nicer play a little angle there as well i'm going to move on yeah fair enough question number three which aspect of your coaching are you trying to improve right now um to summarize it it is more important than that's bush and what that means is uh this started at a coach education national coaches forum is a big coach at event in the states and i went to 2017 there was a guy who i believe is from british rowing's name is allen olive and he came and spoke at that but a smaller group of us to coach education training at these things and he was the leader in my group and these things are pretty daunting because you've got a coach other coaches and like in my case here i am as this you know like early 30s young male and sometimes i'm having to coach women who are in their 50s or 60s who are like legends of the game played for the national team in their prime and have now been coaching and winning national championships with 30 years and so it was one of those things and he just had this great ability when he would watch you coach a micro session just three four minutes of being able to get to that one thing that was going to try and change you as a coach so for instance i saw him do it with someone else who talked too much he said he was like four words are less than every to every interaction so that was a big challenge and for me he said too much pushing on enough but he said you're asking questions but you're giving them the answers you're giving them all the solutions so ever since then i've been trying to get better at not just asking questions but asking better questions so you know instead of saying what went well it might be what's the most important thing that went well but and you know having that question based approach rather than just you know the lintel approach it takes longer it can be more complex and you have to be quite skilled to still ask questions and get answers and not lose the players and have it turn into a 10-minute group intervention which is a nightmare so that's been um that's been a big part of it and i suppose related to that then was after getting that experience i started recording some of my sessions just a couple of times a year just to kind of see what trends i can find and it's something i do as a coach educator for the coaches in our club as well and it's a nightmare to watch back because you know i was there thinking that oh when i bring the group in and chat to them it probably takes three minutes maybe four and and then i went and i actually timed them the all the group intervention in the session and it was like five six seven minutes so it was taking way longer than i thought and so trying to rein that in has been has been a big thing and trying to change so you know as i said less less push more pull but can i also do it in an incorrect time frame so the thing i try and use for that now is i just stick a little time time or maybe three minutes on my watch if i am doing a group intervention or even like a one-on-one drive-by intervention and if it goes off after three minutes and i'm still talking i wrap it up when i aim is to get done and dust it before my arms start buzzing it's very good there's lots of um the the filming itself is really powerful there's times where i film myself and i watch it back and i'm like i don't even understand what i'm asking that learn what the answer is so it just raises that stuff and when i think both of those both those pieces question number four let me get in mix my can you describe your favorite small game we might learn something about hockey here oh um i mean obviously there's many but one i definitely got back to over and over again is um i end it's really simple i call it press to be possessed and all it is is your two teams are safe five and you'll start with one team has five players all on the pitch and it'll be a smaller pitch now maybe like 30 by 30 or something and the other team just has three on so they have two subs and we'll play for a certain length of time i usually play for about four minutes as usually the sweet spot and the team of five has to hold the ball and the team of three have to try and win it back and if they win it back they can score and either go so that one is good fun in terms of just teaching pressing concepts i guess and have to work as as a unit when in a number stand situation for the team with the ball it's obviously it's possession and angles and kind of you know that kind of thing but what i like about it is just the way it sets the target so we play it once and let's say the team of three scores three times now we flip the rolls for the second half and the other team now have to try and seek and they get four goals in four minutes so they've got targets to reach and now i quite like it because it's really simple it tends to be highly competitive but also you can you can really play around it to give different challenges so if you do it in a much bigger space obviously becomes more charter for the three uh smaller space becomes harder for the team in possession and you can also play around with the numbers a bit so we might do it that if um you know if a certain team is is winning quite easily we might go all right well this the other team gets a press for you guys can only use three that kind of thing so a lot of little changes and things you can tweak but i've definitely found it very useful because it hits a lot of different things and so on a given week you might do it with a possession emphasis the next time you do it it might be with a pressing emphasis it can also be done with counter-attacking or goal scoring emphasis loads of different things that can come into it so that's my faith i think and would you play that with goalkeeper because i'm imagining from a football point of view that'd be a really nice way to practice the goalkeeper plan out from the back so the team that's in possession might have to play from goalkeeper to goalkeeper and in the team that's pressing nikit and have to score pass the goalkeeper so some kind of real life goalkeeper stuff in there as well i think from a football perspective uh you sort of answer is yes i mean you play goalkeeper because for goalkeepers it's a bit of managing counter-attack i guess and because you're doing it in a small space and because the team that presses when they win the ball because they can score at either end they could attack one goalkeeper and go no it doesn't work and we're gonna turn around and go the other way and so i guess it's not like it's not game like in a sense it's not truly directional in that one in that sense and goalkeepers and field hockey don't tend to be used to play out quite as often it does happen um but it's uh but not as much but yeah you can from a goalkeeping perspective if we were playing back in and practice if we got our goalie coach there and she's generally going to be looking at how do the goalkeepers manage that transition how do they organize their defence quickly to get you know either to force them out wide or get pressure on the ball or you know even just in terms of their decision making if they're left exposed let's say if they're left in a 2-1 or something because there's no offside in hockey you know a girl could be coming in with the ball bearing down you can put someone in the back post waiting to tap it in and you can just you know um i guess that classic FIFA goal uh to the goalkeeper except you don't even have to be on side so so it creates a lot of uh i suppose stress for the goalkeepers as well Jessica Jessica good okay question number five which book would you recommend as a must read for coaches it's not a book about coaching um it's more i guess aimed at business was called switch um and it's wide chip and down heat i think um like the subtitle is something like the the art of making change and change is hired or something along those lines but it's just one of those things where like you can apply it to coaching but you can also just apply it to life they they just look at the i suppose the fallacies and the issues that come up on people try to solve what seem to be really difficult problems or make positive change happen and um you know they kind of narrow it down into some some really kind of those easy to understand concepts so i don't have in front of me so apologies to the authors if i get it wrong but it's something along the lines of that they talk they give you the visual of an elephant and i happen to have a teacher with an elephant on it today which is pure chance uh but i think there's one over there like elephants in this house but they um they talk about imagining an elephant with i guess with the person sitting on top writing the elephant and so they talk about having to to direct the rider because the rider is the one who decides where they go but they need a little bit of direction if they're just kind of left overthinking all the time then they never go anywhere and then if the elephant takes over the elephants you know seeing this context to be very emotional and very like i want to do this and so it's the emotional part of your brain and that you must motivate the elephant because it doesn't matter how much the rider says we should do this if the elephant doesn't want to do it then doesn't matter what the rider thinks elephant going nowhere you know so and then lastly is to shake the path so to make it easy once you've kind of found your you know the thing you want to do and i think it needs to change you found the motivation to make that change now to make the path you know easy to go through and so they refer back to that a lot but just once it looks like it's really readable really accessible and it's just tons of really life examples of how people made made changes so like for example a small one that like jumps out at me was called the five minute room rescue and so this is when you know you've been really busy in your house is a complete tip because every room is messy or you know what your you know your kids run rampant whatever it is and you know you kind of he assumes we kind of go oh it's such a big job how am i going to clean up this entire house up and they'll say no you're not going to try and clean the whole house you're just going to say i'm just going to dedicate five minutes to this room and just get as much as you can done in five minutes because that seems a more manageable task so that motivates the elephant to give the rider some direction and it also you know shapes your path and what happens is most people do five minutes and they go that wasn't so bad i can finish this room and now suddenly you're getting the change you need it done so that was one that just jumps out to my mind nice it's similar to my stretch i tend to close the other rooms that are messy and just tidy the room that people go into and then you've got to tidy house anyway lots lots of lots of practice for people so if it's quickly so it's uh how's cleaning so that's the end of the question cube the next question what is the what the next 12 months looking like for you so what is the plan either with the club or with yourself what what are you going to be what projects are you going to work on in the next 12 months um this was the key question we're asking ourselves in the club now is how we can better prepare our i suppose our athletes that our players that do get picked for those kind of high performance tournaments just in terms of getting them better prepped because like there's big challenges in the u.s around the surface that we play on so i guess to give it a football equivalent like if you can imagine trying to play in a farmers field that's like you know cow crap everywhere and like grass that's like six inches long versus you know your normal average bog standard sunday league pitch versus you know your perfectly flat manicured law and i guess that you might see it a primarily grand like we face those challenges in field hockey in the states because most girls learn the game on grass which is a very old school version i guess and then the surface that most of them play on is kind of artificial turf or 3g kind of like it's called field turf over here you know stuff with the turf turf turds whatever they call them in it that's what they call them here and then you have the top level surface which is um a proper flat carpet which is much more expensive usually has to be watered before you play on it that kind of thing so when we go to these high level tournaments these national tournaments they're on that top surface and we don't get to play on that surface as often as we like and we can but it's more expensive and it's the tighter to get on so figuring out how we can get our better players together on that surface more often it is a big challenge for us in the coming year because what we definitely saw last weekend was that our girls aren't as used to it as some others who have better access and so how do we overcome that challenge that's probably the the big thing from the club along which is continuing to grow and get younger girls in playing and try and teach them the teaching the game a little bit earlier because most of them they tend to get their experience in a rec league with a mom or a dad coaching with good intentions but he doesn't know which hand goes on top of the stick that kind of stuff from a personal perspective so i mentioned that i do work with us if you're hockey as a coach educator and i'm also the coaching director for my clubs the coach ed is definitely a big part of what i do and i'm for like firmly of the belief that the way our club will improve is that if we invest the time in our people and that's obviously we're investing out in our players but just to make sure that we're trying to improve the level of our coaches by you know doing things like filming their sessions and turning a mirror on them and getting to kind of i guess reflect and evaluate themselves so just to try and get better as a coach educator would be a big priority for the coming year both in terms of doing it with the national governing body but also within the club because i think i do okay it but it's not something i have a huge amount of experience so you know like the really cheesy hashtag that we use in our clubs instagram post is busy getting better and that has to apply to the coaches as well as the players so that's that's my challenge so that's a good message and then finally where can people get hold of you so people have listened to the podcast and they've let's get in touch where's the best place to go so for a long time i wasn't really ever on social media as myself because i'm too many club and you know professional accounts to manage but if you want to have a look at what our club does it's instagram and it's at focus field hockey quite often we get the players themselves and we go to tournaments to take over the account and see what it's like behind the scenes if that's that can be a bit fun and for me personally and i did finally take the take the plunge and you know having been on twitter as my camp company in Ireland for years which is called southern fried hockey i'm now finally on it as myself so i'm at a good coach which is uh i suppose a play on my name that i promise he was meant to be around again it's a very good username um and i just want to say thank you very much for your time today i really enjoyed the conversation pleasure to be asked and thanks a million i hope it uh you know hope it's worthwhile for those listening thanks for joining us on the play of a relevant project podcast you can follow us on twitter and instagram at play at dp or find us on facebook don't forget to head over to play at avlondproject.com where you can sign up for our british coaching community and gain access to our wide variety of resources to help you in your coaching