NZ CoachApproach DVD – Supporting notes
The NZ CoachApproach is still an evolving concept. SPARC would welcome your feedback on the DVD and these notes. Please email feedback to coachapproach@sparc.org.nz
The support notes for the NZ CoachApproach DVD are available as PDF for printing (PDF, 755 KB).
DVD Background
Overview
The DVD was produced by filming real New Zealand coaches in their own environment in real coaching situations. It shows a variety of coaching approaches being used with different types of athletes. It includes comments from interviews with the coaches following their sessions and comments from an expert coaching panel who were invited to review the footage of the individual sessions.
Those involved in the DVD were not given prompts or guidance, but relevant concepts from the sessions and discussions were packaged and edited to convey some of the key concepts of the NZ CoachApproach.
The video is a resource to promote reflection and discussion, and provide ideas for coaches to try in their own coaching practice, rather than providing instructional information on coaching.
Purpose of the DVD
The DVD is designed to be used by NSOs and others involved in the development and support of coaches to:
- Support the implementation of the NZ Coaching Strategy and Coach Development Framework
- Illustrate key principles of effective coaching
- Promote the understanding that there are a wide range of coaching styles and that effective coaches will use a variety of approaches to suit the circumstances and the needs of the athletes being coached
- Encourage exploration of different coaching approaches
- Help coaches develop their own coaching philosophy.
It can be used as a resource at coach development workshops and in educational institutions, or it can potentially be used as a self learning resource for individual coaches. Coach development facilitators could prepare questions or exercises, based on these notes, for coaches to complete as they view the DVD.
Availability
Currently the NZ CoachApproach DVD has been distributed to coaching personnel in the NZ Academy of Sport, National Sports Organisations, Regional Sports Trusts and a selection of tertiary institutions. Coaches are encouraged to attend a NZ CoachApproach (or effective coaching) workshop, seminar or course conducted by one of these organisations to view the DVD and discuss the implications of the DVD in relation to their own coaching.
SPARC currently has some additional copies of the DVD and will supply small numbers to interested groups or individuals on request. (Please email coachapproach@sparc.org.nz). Depending on demand, decisions on wider availability and distribution of the DVD will be made after it has been trialled by SPARC’s coaching partners.
Format of the DVD:
The DVD has been produced in sections and chapters. The major section of the DVD introduces the NZ CoachApproach and the key concepts involved. This is supported by two bonus sections on individual coaches delivering coaching sessions and an interview with Rich Masters, a New Zealand born international expert on implicit motor learning.
It can be used as an integrated package to raise general awareness of the coaching process, or individual clips can be used to illustrate particular aspects of coaching. Because the DVD shows real coaching situations, ‘clips’ from the video that focus on specific aspects of the NZCoachApproach will also contain valuable ideas that relate to and reinforce concepts from other DVD chapters.
About the Coach Approach
The coach approach is a philosophical approach to coaching that promotes athlete learning and ownership of that learning through creating awareness, responsibility and self belief. It is not new but simply a reinforcement of best practice in coaching and how people can learn effectively. The NZ CoachApproach aims to create independent, confident and motivated athletes able to coach themselves.
Why have the NZ CoachApproach?
At a sports venue, how many times have you seen or heard?
- A coach saying ‘I’ve told you that 100 times. Will you never learn?’
- Athletes trying harder and harder but performance actually getting worse
- Athletes who can do it in practice, losing it under pressure
- Two very different athletes with different needs being treated the same way.
A coach-centred approach to coaching is limited to the imagination/knowledge of the coach. The NZ CoachApproach encourages increasing use of an athlete-centred approach. Some key reasons for promoting the NZ Coach Approach are:
- Different groups and different individuals have different needs
- Simply telling is not effective. Research shows that both the short term and long term retention of learning increases with a combination of telling, showing and experiencing
- People learn best when they help set the learning objectives and have ownership of the learning process.
Where do the Ideas come from?
The NZ CoachApproach encompasses principles of leadership, empowerment, emotional intelligence, athlete learning preferences, Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU), Inner Game, implicit motor learning and experiential/ discovery learning.
The NZ Coachapproach: Major section of the DVD:
Please refer to the effective coaching module resources on the SPARC website (http://www.sparc.org.nz/sport/coach-development-education/framework-programme-materials) for more detail on concepts introduced in this section.
Coaching Styles: The Coaching Continuum
There is no single right or wrong way to coach. The DVD shows effective coaches demonstrating a variety of coaching styles involving both coach centred and athlete centred components.
A pure coach-centred approach encourages athlete compliance and tends to be instructional, directive, autocratic and based on the coach’s knowledge. An athlete-centred approach is based on the athletes’ knowledge and needs and is empowering, creates athlete awareness and tends to use a questioning approach. The NZ CoachApproach encourages coaches to use a broader range of coaching approaches, appropriate to the particular situation, that increasingly raise athletes’ self awareness, gives them greater responsibility for their own learning and leads to an outcome of increased athlete self belief.
The DVD shows the coaches demonstrating behaviours at different parts of a continuum of coaching styles in many different circumstances, with different types of athletes and different sized groups. In observing coaches on the DVD, viewers should ask themselves questions like:
- Where does this coaching style fit on the continuum?
- What factors do you think affected the coach’s choice of approach?
- Do you think the approach is appropriate for the circumstances – why?
- What techniques/strategies do you think the coach has used to help their athletes understand, learn and/or perform?
The scale shown on some of the DVD clips is intended as a broad indicator only, to illustrate that in this situation the coach is using an approach that tends towards a particular area of the continuum.
Awareness, Responsibility and Self Belief
The role of the coach is to help athletes learn and create change to improve athlete performance. The key to the CoachApproach is to create an environment that encourages this.
To do this the coach needs to communicate to their athletes. The process involves:
- The concept of sending/receiving. The coach has thoughts, feelings, or intentions he/she wishes to convey
- The coach transmits messages
- Messages are received and interpreted
- The athlete responds.
Messages are communicated verbally and non-verbally which involves use of both the eyes and ears. The way the message is conveyed (body language, emotion, etc) affects how the content of the message is received.
Some ways to help raise athlete awareness and increase understanding are:
- Modelling or demonstrations
- Asking questions
- Providing feedback
- Giving effective instruction
- Letting athletes just do it (athletes learn when the coach is not talking).
A number of specific techniques to support these approaches are demonstrated in the various sections of the DVD. These include:
- Use of a rating scale
- Encouraging a zero error situation (Rich Masters interview)
- Creating a picture in the athletes mind (verbally/pictorially – Rich Masters interview)
- Use of video
- Use of analysis
- Setting a goal or creating a challenge for self discovery
- Subliminal learning (raised net in Volleyball).
The DVD illustrates giving athletes responsibility and ownership of their learning by referring to leadership opportunities and showing situations where coaches empower athletes to help both themselves and other athletes to learn.
Increasing athletes self believe arises from the athletes experiencing a positive environment and success. As this is a concept that is addressed continuously by effective coaches, the DVD has not tried to target a specific example. Rather, viewers should look for examples of coaching that help athletes gain confidence and self belief as they occur throughout the DVD.
Goal Setting
A swimming clip illustrates a more formal discussion of goals. Other informal examples where coaches set up short term objectives or challenges and help athletes achieve these occur throughout the DVD.
Questioning
Many of the learning situations illustrated in the other sections and chapters of the DVD were prompted by questions.
Questions can:
- Raise athlete awareness
- Encourage problem solving
- Shift the athletes’ focus to promote learning
- Illicit biomechanical responses
- Encourage responses that supply addition information to the coach
Different types of questions include open, closed and directive questions and questions to raise awareness, promote thinking and promote comparing, rating, analysing and/or discovery. Viewers could try identifying some of these different types of questions in the DVD.
This chapter includes good examples of coaches asking a question, listening to the response and using the athlete’s response to follow up or probe deeper.
Feedback
Feedback refers to the information available to athletes during or after performance.
Feedback can be positive, negative or neutral, external (explicit) or internal (implicit), immediate or delayed. Non judgemental feedback is critical to learning.
Coaches can provide feedback at different levels from no feedback (just observing and saying nothing), zero feedback (a non committal comment), negative and positive feedback, to more subjective approaches that encourage athletes to do, think and explore by themselves. The DVD should prompt viewers to think about when to give feedback, the amount of feedback to give and the timing of feedback. It should raise awareness about coachable moments when the giving of feedback will best enhance learning.
Two obvious situations which demonstrate aspects of feedback are shown in this chapter of the DVD. However, feedback is another ongoing process and examples of coaches and athletes giving and receiving feedback occur throughout the DVD.
Effective Instruction
Passing on information and giving instructions are essential parts of the coaching process. Some situations where giving instructions is appropriate are:
- Where there are time constraints;
- Where there are safety issues;
- Where athletes want/need to be told;
- Setting up a new activity; and
- Where the instructions are part of a variable approach (For example to get a bigger group going to allow individual follow up).
Instructions can still encourages feel/flow and raise awareness. Directions can be used to prompt athlete thinking, reflection or self exploration. (For example, a coach can say, ‘try this and tell me how it feels’.)
Instructions should be clear, simple, have a single focus and there should be checks that athletes have understood.
Other Concepts
This chapter aims to illustrate the importance of athletes learning and practicing in a realistic context. Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) and the use of progressive activities are a good way of achieving this.
The DVD highlights advantages of a game or activity based approach to develop both technical and tactical skills. The first cricket example shows this occurring in a warm up and the other clips show these concepts in the body of a practice session.
Bonus sections
Coaches in Action
This section of the DVD shows more continuous footage of the coaches in the DVD, in action during their practice session. It has been included as a value added resource to allow viewers to follow an individual coach in a selected sport to get an increased feel for that particular coach’s’ style and how they vary their approach during a practice session. Most clips in the NZ CoachApproach section are taken from these coaching sequences.
Interview with Rich Masters
Rich Masters is a New Zealand born international expert on implicit motor learning, currently teaching at the Hong Kong National University. As implicit learning aligns closely with the philosophy of the NZ Coach Approach the opportunity was taken to interview and film Rich. Footage has been included on the DVD to include detail on some techniques that coaches may want to employ in their coaching.
Thank you
The development of this DVD would not have been possible without the commitment and help of a large number of people. SPARC wishes to acknowledge Sarah Ulmer and Steve Fleming for their role as presenters and for setting the tone for the DVD, the coaches that opened their coach session for filming and were available for interview, the expert panel (Leigh Gibbs, Mark Bone, Selwyn Maister, Wayne Smith and Mike McHugh) who reviewed the DVD materials and provided expert comment for the DVD, the NZ Academy of Sport Coaching Team who initiated the NZ CoachApproach concept and provided expertise and background information, the staff from SAUCE who were involved in the planning, filming and production of the DVD and the SPARC staff who contributed to planning, reviewing publishing and distributing this resource.
Updated | 18 Mar 2009.
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