Coaching teams

Coaching and sport psychology

Coaching can be a tough job. You are the team lead but you have to let them play. There is a prise balance between giving direction and letting a team play their game. You can but prepare a team to your best ability but on competition day, you must trust you team enough to let them perform.

The majority of coaches’ impact therefore is in practise. Athletes, performers, practise their skills in order to be able to perform well in competition. Now a coach guides the practise and teaches their athletes all they know in order to help them be best prepared and capable of giving their best performance.

When coaching a group there are three main things to remember:

Players must feel confident

Players must feel supported

Players must feel motivated.

So how does a coach help with all three?

Well coaches are very significant in manifesting confidence in athletes. For example a coach must realise the individual difference in players ‘emotional-switchboard’. By that I mean certain things gets an athlete going emotionally. Now although emotion may not be a readily welcome word in sport, (especially male sports) I mean emotion in this context as the internal set of reactions that can be ‘switched-on’. And a coach has access to that ‘switchboard’ if they pay attention to the signals that make known what works, what will ‘switch-on’ an athletes emotions.

An athlete must be in an optimal state to perform at his best. That is, they must have enough adrenaline to feel excited and ready but not too much they are nervous and anxious.

Coaches can see signs in players that will illustrate the best ways to get the best out of them. For instance some players work off negative feedback, no for a coach that means pointing out the areas an athlete may benefit from working on. Now you could do this in two ways, scream and shout or calmly point these out. I would always opt for the first as the latter elicits an emotional reaction that could sway towards nerves and anxiety when the player next tries to perform.

Another example may be players who take negative feedback badly. They need to know they are valued because if they hear that they are not performing as a coach wishes, they will be very hard on themselves, and you guessed it this can elicit an emotional reaction not beneficial to peak performance.

Now these two simple examples are not an exhaustive list of individual preferences and personality quirks that determine the ‘right’ way to coach a player to optimal performance. What they do illustrate however is that a coach must have an intimate knowledge of his players, who they are, and what makes their emotional switchboard light up.

If a coach achieves this they have their best team performing for them. Quite simply coaches must invest time into the players that mobilise their teachings and it is there that a coach’s real success lies.

For more info contact: ashleigh.drew@yahoo.co.uk