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Laying the foundations – part three

Peter Sturgess
Laying the foundations – part three

The FA’s Pete Sturgess adds to his first blog series which is designed to help people who are taking their first steps as a coach with players aged 5-11. Here he looks at the importance of play.

Starting out on your coaching journey can be a daunting experience and although I would consider myself an experienced coach now, I can still remember, with lots of trepidation, those first encounters with groups of young children and the prying eyes of the parents as they watched the sessions.

My biggest fear was running out of activities during the hour-long session. I was also very conscious of what the parents thought (surely, they all knew so much more than I did) but most worrying of all; the children were at different ability levels and all had their own special characteristics, needs and wants. How was I ever going to survive?

The thing that got me through was making sure the sessions were fun, engaging and appropriate for the young children in front of me.

When working with young children your football knowledge and experience must take a back seat. You have to create a safe, secure and caring environment before any kind of effective learning can take place. Building a good relationship with each child is necessary before they can benefit from anything that you know about football.

One thing to remember is that children have a very strong in-built driver called the seeking system. The seeking system is engaged best when children play and it’s a system that promotes curiosity, exploration and experimentation.

We’re so fortunate to be working with the children during this special time in their development because we can help them become more self-directed, goal orientated and motivated to discover new things.

Relating this to our role as a football coach, we want the children to be motivated to improve their skills and to eventually become those independent decision-makers and problem solvers that shine out in a game. It’s a long journey but one that starts with a basic understanding of the importance of play and the empowerment of children.

“Can we have a game now?”, is a cry we have all heard. The coach of young children should celebrate when they hear this as it comes from children who are eager to play and motivated to be involved – don’t we all need this reaction from our teams?

Insisting that you take them through the latest session you have downloaded from the internet or using the chance of a game as the way to get your group to behave better is not what this situation calls for.

The coach should have already planned for this question, and, if possible, have the small-number games already set up so that the players can start playing straight away.

It’s important to realise that this is not poor coaching! It’s a perfectly acceptable introduction to football for young children.

So instead of parents seeing this as the coach being lazy, not having time to prepare the session or not having a clue, they should be celebrating the fact that their most prized possessions are working with someone who understands children and someone that will be challenging them to get better and improve in an age appropriate way.

Next time: using small-number games during your sessions.

To help anyone who wants to get involved in supporting opportunities for young children, The FA Playmaker course is the perfect start and I would highly recommend this to aspiring coaches, volunteers and helpers.

The course is free, online, user friendly and is designed to give the participants greater confidence and a deeper understanding of children and their development through sport.

Parents

  • Hi Pete, great advice as ever.  We've also taken to giving individuals personal challenges in the small format games, such as "can you try" or little adaptations like "you get 2 goals if you can get the ball through a gate/ all touch the ball/ create a goal for a teammate" etc. etc.  We've found it a useful way of running one activity but with multiple variants that help challenege ot develop individual players.

  • in reply to James O'Keefe

    James, thanks for the feedback. I know how difficult it is to work full time, do all you have to do to keep the team going and on top of this plan try to plan enjoyable practices and games - it's a big ask. Small number games are a rich environment for learning the building blocks of the game: how do I resist pressure, how might I disguise my intentions, how do I find space and open up a passing line - the possibilities are endless and children know how to play games so they are straight into the learning instead of having to fathom out lots of different rules for a new activity or the latest downloaded practice. We have a superb development tool available now - its called the game of football so let's immerse the children in the game we want them to love and they want to play. Cheers. Pete

Comment
  • in reply to James O'Keefe

    James, thanks for the feedback. I know how difficult it is to work full time, do all you have to do to keep the team going and on top of this plan try to plan enjoyable practices and games - it's a big ask. Small number games are a rich environment for learning the building blocks of the game: how do I resist pressure, how might I disguise my intentions, how do I find space and open up a passing line - the possibilities are endless and children know how to play games so they are straight into the learning instead of having to fathom out lots of different rules for a new activity or the latest downloaded practice. We have a superb development tool available now - its called the game of football so let's immerse the children in the game we want them to love and they want to play. Cheers. Pete

Children
  • in reply to Peter Sturgess

    James, I have just been doing some reading and one researcher/academic who is very prominent regarding creativity and football is Daniel Memmert. Here are some of his answers in relation to questions from coaches. Very interesting and so in line with our Foundation Phase DNA messaging:

    Question:  Playfulness correlates with a particular way of thinking in young children. A way of thinking that encourages creativity. Yet many adult coaches are uncomfortable with the word play. They assume that it just means throw in a ball in and let them at it. Of course it can, but within the training environment “playfulness and this particular way of thinking” can provide the coach with great possibilities to set tasks that can challenge the child. I believe that this child-centred approach places greater demands on the coach especially with coaching interventions and task integration. Would you agree?

    Daniel Memmert: Yes, we say that it is not only throwing in a ball, and therefore we speak of deliberate play, but we have to precisely keep an eye on the constraints, the environment and the rules of the game. If you establish good rules, field measurements on how big the field is and how many players there are with how many balls, the environmental conditions result in the children being able to solve tactical problems in a better way and receiving feedback from the environment rather than from the coach in a specific way on what they can improve. This is very important.l: Cognitive effort is an important condition for skill learning (Gabbett, Jenkins &Abernathy, 2009). What is it that makes many coaches reluctant to explore and encourage the cognitive potential of young children in sport when in the long term it may lead to more positive outcomes?

    Daniel Memmert: Actually, cognitive factors have been underestimated so far. We are very much concerned with different cognitive factors including working memory, breadth of attention, perceptual load, anticipation, perception, and motivation. We believe that the last percentage points are especially inherent there. It is important to always challenge the players with the tasks – to cognitively challenge them. They have to always think about new things including the variation of rules and the environment within the game forms, as well as the fact that there is always variability in order to learn the development of various tactical ideas over and over again and how to transfer them into different contexts.

    Footblogball: For me Isolated technique training in young children is conditioning, it is linear and it decreases the width of the focus/attention leading to many young players being friendly with the ball but strangers to the game. The ability of the player to adapt their movements to the dynamics of the game through the organisation of information and action through perception and decision making is how expert performance is expressed. Comment?

    Daniel Memmert: An isolated technical training only results in the problem that techniques cannot be related to situations and therefore a tactic cannot be trained. We know from studies that technical training is not as effective as combined technical-perception training and cannot be applied as variable. It is important that children experience in which situations or constraints they have to use which technique. Only then they will be able to apply those techniques in real complex game forms or the real match