Sometimes you attend a training or have a conversation and the deepest knowledge dropped is actually overlooked until experience teaches you otherwise. This past summer Frans Hoek dropped this one in a coaches clinic, “coach based on reality and prepare in reality”. It seems like everyday my twitter feed is loaded with offers to “improve your teams play” or “thirty exercises to play like fill in the blank”. The reality is how can these people have any understanding of your problems? They do not coach your team and they do not deal with the day to day issues collectively or individually. There may be shared common traits between what they offer and what your team needs, but that is where coaching and the ability to correctly identify needs comes in right?
A coaches role in development is to identify the needs of his team and players relative to the vision and goals that have been established by the coach. The ability to identify and find the correct exercises and methods of conveying this information is what separates the good coach from the average coach. The inability to correctly identify their teams needs and consequently take proper corrective action or the inability to properly communicate the needs is what separates the poor coach from the average coach. In other words many coaches do not coach in reality, they coach in the world of FIFA16. They coach in a world where it works for Messi so why can’t it work for Johnny? American soccer player development history demonstrates that Johnny is not the next Messi and is likely not even the next Donovan or Dempsey. There is nothing wrong with having the goal of becoming the next great player, but there is a problem when coaches coach as though that is reality.
So some of the best advise I received this summer was to coach in reality: But what does that even mean? Simply stated take the real problems that your team faces, recreate them and rehearse them so they are no longer a problem. Are you having problems finishing in the final third? Then recreate the situations that are giving you problems. You may say, “we work finishing all the time!” But do you work finishing in reality or is it a fictional situation that a player rarely sees in the game? Is it the problem you identified or is it just a random finishing drill that works shooting? How many times were you in a 1 v 1 situation down the middle of the field with the opposing keeper off of a wall pass at midfield? Did the situation happen so often and was the finishing so poor that it is a pressing issue for your team? If not why are you practicing wall passes for shots as a finishing exercise?
Operating in reality means taking this same finishing issue and creating or finding exercises that recreate the problem so players learn how to play the situation. Is the issue that they cannot shoot straight or that they are not getting into the proper position to get a good shot? Or is the issue that they force a shot because their head is not up to see the field? These are significantly different problems that need to be addressed in different manners. Some of them are layered and require more layers than just a simple exercise, they require an entire practice designed around the concept of finishing.
Obviously these same concepts and questions should be asked all over the field and our job as coaches/teachers of the game is to identify the individual needs of our players and teams to aide in their development. As coaches we should be searching for the answers to our questions based on this “coaching in reality” approach and we will see our growth as coaches improve exponentially. In turn, the education we are able to offer our players will improve exponentially as well.
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