My theme going from teenagers to adults

It’s 2009 and I have developed a lot as a coach after having had three years’ experience of coaching the Wellington U19 team to go along with the three years of coaching the Wellington U15 and U17 teams. My question at this point, what is next?

I knew that to take my coaching to the next level I needed to prove that I could not only coach teenagers, but I could also could coach adults.
I approached an old team-mate, Simon Baker from Karori Cricket Club in Wellington. Simon had captained the Premier team for the past couple of seasons and was very keen to see the club succeed. He was open to discussions about how I could work with the club and compliment what was already being done. However he did have reservations due to never having played under a coach during his playing career. It was my job to change his view of what coaching was.

My question was what could I bring to the table that was different to an already well performed team?

I could provide structure, support and accountability to what they wanted to achieve as a group and as individuals. This in turn would assist them to achieve more success, win competitions and produce players capable of performing at the next level.

I had a simple plan of attack of how I wanted to tackle things. The first step was to find out what this group wanted to be known for, how they wanted to be perceived, what behaviours they wanted to possess, what they expected from each other and how did they see my role as a coach. The outcome from this process was a clear vision of where the team wanted to head and what the expectations were.

This also made them accountable and gave me a great foundation that I could refer to if individuals or the team stepped outside what they had agreed.
The other advantage was I had a clear idea of where they wanted to get to so could structure my planning and communication around this foundation that had been set. These two points were the important parts of my philosophy with coaching this team.

Planning – by being exceptionally well planned it gave both players and I the clarity in our heads that is needed to be successful. Individual goals were set, weekly individual plans, weekly team plans, game formats plans, individual player roles and overall season plan.

Communication – following on from planning, was communication and facilitation of the plans. No point having all these great things written down if you cannot articulate messages through communication to your players.

Once the plans had all been finalised, it came down to ensuring everyone was aware, happy and comfortable with where we were headed as a group.

My final focus was to continually monitor, evaluate, and review these plans on a regular basis.

It helps having a good leader or leaders within your team so they can assist driving this direction and some of the tasks can be delegated to get more player buy in. The most important part is having good communication skills to facilitate the review process. You need to be well planned as to what you are reviewing and you need to have an outcome at the end of the session to give the players a clear focus of what’s next.

I focused on the sound fundamentals of planning and communication when moving into men’s coaching. The cricket speak would take care of itself as I had demonstrated this through my education and experience as a coach. I also had experience in the group I was coaching so it was just a case of concentrating on those fundamentals as I knew they would make a difference.