Why You Aren't Getting Better As A Coach Pt.1
The major factors holding you back and how to beat them
There has already been some discussion on this in my discord and I’ll be spoiling pt.2 there before I get around to writing it - so join in by using this invite
A few weeks ago I wrote a post for players stuck in the intermediate plataeu. I wanted to write something similar for coaches going through the same thing. I think it’s even more complicated for coaches so I’m going to split this across two parts.
1) Feedback Lag
By feedback I mean anything that gives you an indication that you are making progress, or that you need to make a change. This can be direct feedback from a player, or it can be through observation of the team.
The biggest issue in my experience is the large gap in time between taking an action and seeing the output of it. This is further complicated when you start to understand that activities or strategies that DO produce clear, short term success might be worse for players and teams in the long term.
Ultimate's competitive structure makes this even more difficult than in other sports. There is a very long preparation period followed by a very short and intensive competitive period. You really don't get time to adjust if you got the approach wrong early in the season. Compared with a sport that follows a league model: in those you get a short preparation period followed by a very long mixed period with competitive games and preparation balanced i.e. you play a game a week and train once or twice in that week. This gives more opportunity for receiving immediate feedback and allows for course corrections.
How to counteract Feedback Lag:
The conceptual answer is obvious - seek out more feedback. Here’s some ways you can do that.
a) Player feedback
Checking in with the team - formally or informally - to get their views on how everything is going is a really important step. Having a check-in of player’s views early in the season is a great way to evaluate. More importantly, working to develop a culture where players are encouraged to speak their minds is crucial.
Opening yourself up to potentially negative feedback is painful. But it’s much better to know of problems early than find out after the season is ended.
It’s important, however, to treat player feedback as data points to help you make a decision and not a directive to change. Players are naturally going to have a narrow view centered on themselves.
b) Competitive Feedback
There are, of course, more tournaments than the end of season one that you can gather feedback from. Before telling you my recommendation there are a couple of traps that I see lots of teams fall into:
i) Playing too open
It’s difficult to learn lessons from randomness, so I think teams that play early season tournaments with completely open lines where everyone on the team and the way they play are changed almost every point are making a mistake.
ii) Playing to win
I’m terrified if my team wins warmups tournaments*. This isn’t because I’m superstitious or fear complacency, it’s a combination of a couple of factors. Firstly you need to fight the urge to not change anything after a win - it’s easy to let the lines/tactics/approach to those games become a safety blanket for the team. Secondly, a win early in the season usually happens because you maximised what you already knew about the team. If you do that you are robbing yourself of the chance to learn something new.
My approach is usually something like this: I want to simulate the processes of how I want the team to play late in the season. This particularly means the level of focus, the level of intensity and the way we call lines are the same. What changes is that we narrow our focus in terms of the way we play, take more risks with what that focus is and stick with it even if it’s painful.
For example, we would choose an O and D line for the game, making sure to try out a couple of new players in each (but not too many) and give each line a single focus on offence and defence for each half. That gives players or the way we play a sustained opportunity to show what is working and what isn’t. It’s also a lot easier to make notes on or to refer back to later if we filmed the games - if I want to see what went wrong with our 2-3-2 zone I know we played it in the first half of our first game and the second half of our fourth so I don’t have to spend a lot of time finding examples.
I’m writing all this and it looks nice and simple but it’s hard. Players often do not like this process, particularly your better players that want to win now. I’m in a lucky position that I’m coming into teams as a coach that has a proven record of winning so it’s easier to sell the short term pain to a team - you might need to work harder or compromise e.g. I used to compromise and say if we reached the quarter/semi finals of a tournament we would actually try our hardest to win those games.
c) Change your season structure
Returning to where this section started - one of the primary difficulties with Ultimate is the long preparation period followed by the short competitive window. What I try to do is shorten the preparation period and extend that competitive window. Naturally, we can’t travel to compete every week so that means adding in a more competitive structure to our internal training sessions - it’s obviously not the same as a real performance situation but if you approach it like it is you can get a lot of the same feedback as you would during a game.
The below screenshot is a (redacted) overview of my first season coaching Ranelagh which outlines that internal season split.
Lack of Role Models
OK, this heading may be a slight misnomer because there are definitely more coaches these days that anyone can look up to and be inspired by. But a coaches work is quite hidden compared to a player. I can look at Europe’s best players like Anna Gerner and Daan De Maree and actually see what they are doing that makes them so good.
It’s easy to pick out coaches that have improved a team, but it’s a lot harder to tell how. You might be able to see that they’ve implemented certain structures that have improved the team but how did they do that - that’s what is important. You can’t tell from the outside looking in. So what can we do instead?
a) Seek out coaches telling stories
I have learned so, so much from reading coaches’ autobiographies or from listening to them on podcasts. Really, because it’s the process that matter and not what they actually do I think you can learn equally from non-Ultimate coaches as you can from Ultimate coaches. Here’s a very short list of ones that I have liked**.
Coach Speak podcast
Win the Fields blog - Lou Burruss
Wooden on Leadership (John Wooden)
Quiet Leadership (Carlo Ancelotti)
The Education of a Coach (Bill Belichick)
The Score Takes Care of Itself (Bill Walsh)
b) Coaching Workshops/Seminars
Another way of getting a glimpse into a coaches mind is to attend workshops or seminars where they explain them. There are a couple of major ones coming up over the next month which are worth checking out.
c) Shadowing/Observation
You know, I’ve never had anyone ask me can they come to observe me, or ask me to observe them at their training sessions but it would probably the best way to learn. I do write a lot here about what I think I do well, but only by seeing me in action would you learn the truth!
I’ve definitely learned a lot - both ideas to steal and things NOT to do - from the coaches I have worked under. I think if you know there’s a coach in your area that’s good, shoot your shot and see if they’ll invite you along for a session or two or vice versa. I think most coaches would be delighted to be asked.
That concludes Pt.1. I’m still in the process of refining my list for Pt.2 so I would be happy to hear from you - what do you think are the biggest hurdles to improving as a coach, and what can you do about it?
* As an example of WHY - from this season - Belgium Open didn’t win either of their warmup tournaments but won EUC. Meanwhile Mooncatchers won all their early season tournaments and lost EUCF.
**Please share your favourites in my discord!