Book Review - Successful Coaching - Part IV of the Story

In the next section of Successful Coaching; America's Best Selling Coaching Book, the focus is on sport pedagogy - the science and art of teaching sport skills to your athletes.

Pictured Above: A really nice shot from this weekends scrimmage (photo courtesy of Jaleel). Mark Agius is throwing past Steve Tam in the background and Tim Chapman-Smith (in black) is covering Kyle unknown in the foreground.

Chapter 7 talks about planning out your season including upcoming competition, practices, and non-sport related events. The reason for making this plan is to come across as organized and to be organized alleviating stresses during the season. The book provides steps on how to plan out your season. Also in this chapter there is a sample practice for a general team. I'm not sure if the sample practice plan applies to Ultimate, but at least it provides a framework to build from, and it's similar to what I currently run.

Chapter 8 looks into how athletes learn. The first part of the chapter teaches you the way people learn motor skills based on current research models of what the mind. The second part shows the progression of an athlete learning a skill and what role a coach should take as they progress.

With a season plan in place and an understanding of how athletes learn, chapter 9 finally describes how to teach a new skill. The book breaks teaching a skill into 4 steps with lots of tips for each step, and an example of juggling as a skill to teach.

Overall, section III provides a lot of valuable information for teaching your players new skills. For those of us who aren't teachers by trade there is a huge amount of information in this section. Even for the teachers, there is a good perspective on how to teach physically learned skills.

PJ