Creativity of Coaching

One of the hardest part of coaching is dealing with an injury amongst the team. When it happens as a coach you need to make sure they are safe and then taken care of right away. Then you need get back to the practice or the match. I feel very callous as the attention goes back to the business at hand. As a coach we need to model what we need the players to do. If an injury happens in a match then we ask the trainer to take the athlete to the team room. We explain to the players at the start of the season that this will happen. We have found that when the players stays on the bench that everyone feels bad for her. As she hops from bench to bench as we switch sides it is a reminder of her injury and elevates the fears it could be contagious.

When I played hockey and a player was injured we used to hang the players sweater on the back of a bench as a symbol that he was there with us.

On the coaching side when an injury occurs it is a challenge. The question is now How can we get the best combination of athletes on the floor? Of course we have players that have trained in that position, but we also look at other options. If a different combination will help keep the same levels we might have to ask a player change positions. Some times the team may be deeper in a position making it easier to move them.

One year at Grande Prairie College we had a tough season losing players to injury and sickness. We went to Grant Macewan (top team in league) we had to move our libero to left side, our right sIde and our healthy left side to become middles. The next best player and athlete was our second setter, so we chose to run a 4-2. That is a system that most of the u-13 teams use. We had to convince our team that this would be successful for us. We knew both setters could play defence and with 2 libero on the floor we thought we would have great ball control. We should be able to force middle and play in some really extended rallies.

We battled but in the end we lost in 5. Even though we lost it was a huge step in our development and help set the tone for our ACAC title.

We lost Chloe earlier this week to a foot injury. Chloe went up to block and came down on the toes of the attacker. Instantly she had pain. Off to the hospital for X-rays. We then started to look at our options. We played. U of Alberta this weekend the nationally third ranked team. They have 3 national team players and a left side who is in running for rookie of the year. We knew we needed to have a decent block over there. We have four legit middles, the discussion eventually came around to moving Tori from right side to left side and trying the mids at right side. After we worked the mids through attacking drills from the outside we decided Meaghan looked the most comfortable over there. We always wanted to get her more swings and this could be away to do it.

We asked Meagh to run a more inside out approach. More of a slide right side than a straight up right side ball. We also knew we would need some back row help. She is a decent defender but our other left sides defend better. The second adjustment was to move our libs to the mid back. We felt this would help Meaghan on free balls. Kendra could take more space. We only use the six sub rule in theCIS so it limits our moves defensively. We also decided to try some subs. The second time Meagh would come around to serve we would use a defensive sub for her. The third time she came back to serve we would use a defensive sub for the middle and lib out Meagh after her serve. This would limit the information overload and let her concentrate on the front row changes.

The danger in this is the confusion in serve reception. During the match we actually had 7players on the floor for serve reception. When we returned serve and switched to our home position Kendra quickly recognized the situation and during the coverage quickly slid to the bench. Mo one seemed to notice. UA won the point anyway.

We knew before hand that there would be something crazy ahead of time. I. Our preface we talked about dealing with it. Here is the discussion.

Adversity happens in all parts of life . How you deal with adversity determines how successful you will be.

We know today that some weird things are going to happen. We know that Alberta is going to score and there is a good chance we will think it is directly our personal fault.

There is a great difference between failing to achieve a result and then drawing a conclusion from that. Those who stay down make a judgment that they have failed, not just their attempt. Moreover, they often generalize from their “failures” to illogical conclusions such as, “I am a loser,” and “I will probably always fail. My life will always suck!”

Therefore, they assume, there is no point in getting up. So they quit taking risks and quasi give up, they seek a comfortable niche.

But then there is the other person.
Everyone talks about 10000 hours to become an expert. It is expected that people who become experts in there craft will put in over 10000 hours thinking and playing their sport before the reach expert level.

But there is also Old wisdom says that the sooner we make our first 5000 mistakes, the sooner we will learn to do anything well.

They realize the biggest danger is our internal chatter. This is the part that builds us up or drags us down. We have to be aware of the chatter.
So catch negative chatter and change it. After an error Say something like," Okay, that didn’t go the way I wanted. Next time, I will do it different. Besides, it’s just one call. On to the next one.” I still have 4000 tries left.

Lets take risk today and celebrate those risks. An error then is just one of our learning mistakes. Lets have fun learning together. Lets overcome this Adversity together.

We win 31-29 in the fourth to win in 4.