There will be coaches who are maestros in the art of planning and those who are absolute wizards when it comes to preparation. Many will be highly accomplished at both and have all the techniques listed in the first two chapters down to a fine art.
Yes, there’s a ‘but’ coming.
But if you haven’t taken the time to understand and connect with the people you coach, all that hard work is liable to come unstuck. Scratch that… it will come unstuck, as surely as night follows day.
Because the more you get to know your athletes – their wildest dreams and deepest desires, their wants and needs, their innermost thoughts and feelings – the more you will be able to help them thrive physically, cognitively, emotionally, psychologically and socially.
Frank compliments UK Coaching for being “far ahead of the game on coach learning and development”, and particularly in the area of coaching the person in front of you, but says he is concerned that the sector as a whole has still not fully grasped the positive implications for holistic development and maximising athletic achievement that is the common outcome of working with coaches who possess strong people skills.
Assessing the full magnitude of the value of soft skills, Frank says: “I’ve become acutely aware of how many gaps there are in coach education on this; for example, on observation skills and people orientation. I’m obsessive about getting these fundamentals into coaching programmes much earlier than we do.
All the quality coaches I’ve come across recently are well on top of this: knowing your people. The coaches who are making the biggest advances are those who make the effort to really get to know their players.”
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