Blog Post 5 – Adapting to a uncontrollable circumstance in a session

When I started out at the placement at Richmond House School, Our first ever session was the day we first arrived. I got thrown straight into the deep end by doing a session we hadn’t planned for prior, I went straight out to the field with all of our equipment and waited for the participants to come to us.

I set out for the goal of the session to be very engaging and effective for the participants, I expected the session to not to be our best one yet as I obviously arrived not knowing I was going to be doing a session that afternoon. This is because I had only just arrived and had no prior planning for this particular day, so I didn’t feel like it was going to go very well. I’m basing these assumptions on the Coaching, Planning and Reflective Framework. (Muir et el., 2011) and engaging in planning is crucial in the development of a coach since it encourages deep thinking, raises expectations of both coach and player and provides a template from which thoughtful reflection can occur post delivery (Abraham & Collins, 2011).

This model suggests that planning must be done as it is a key aspect to being a successful coach, alongside the physical coaching and the reflections. It’s all about Player engagement, Coach Behaviours, Practice Structure and Session Objectives. These are the key aspects to successfully plan for a session. We didn’t have this planning so we had to go on the basis of prior knowledge to come up with an adapted session for the new participants straight away as we was coaching.

We had one only option to go forward with, which was to coach the session on the knowledge of what we had already learnt and done beforehand. So that’s hat we did, we put together a simple warm up that involved footballs to get the participants warmed up which gave us more time to micro-plan for the next section of the session. We then moved forward onto some passing accuracy drills to then develop that and extend them and finally to reach a small sided games at the end of the session. It worked really well, all the participants were engaged highly and seemed to really enjoy the session. We also got feedback from the teacher that was observing us and quoted “that was a breathe of fresh air to watch a session so creative”. This proved that our background knowledge was strong as we managed to put together a successful session.

There wasn’t much I could’ve done at the moment I got told as I had to get straight out and coach, however in the future I will start planning way before I enter schools such as Richmond house just in case I have to do a session straight away.