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<aside> 🕛 Coach's Dozen is a collaboration with Mark Egner of Unique Sports on a series of ebooks, which aim to bridge the gap between ideas and practice and take a deep dive into one particular aspect of hockey training. You can buy the first one now for $10 or read on to find out more about why we made them!
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Some coaches guard their session plans as if they were nuclear codes or state secrets; others will give a little insight if asked. An experienced coach in our native Ireland used to have a mantra of "steal, innovate, share" that governed his approach to how he designed drills and games.
A desire to share underpinned our motivation for starting the Coach's Dozen series. We have tried out lots of different coaching resources like this ourselves - mostly from other sports - and found them to be a mixed bag. Some go big on quantity, but low on quality. Others have both, but the presentation is somewhat basic.
Therefore, our aim is to create a resource that gives coaches three C's - concepts, context, and confidence - to aid their session design. I'll outline these in more detail with some samples from the first book, which is about goalscoring, below!
Back in 2013, when we didn't really know each other, I succeeded Mark as head coach of a club in Ireland as he had moved to the USA. The players sang his praises and mentioned that he "had new drills for every practice". I was starting out on my coaching journey so assumed I needed to do this too. The result was a lot of inefficiencies; I spent more time explaining how to do each exercise rather than coaching it.
These days, we both believe more isn't always better - better is better. That influenced the choice of the number of exercises in these books. Too few doesn't add enough value or cover enough different strands of the topic; too many may be overwhelming and runs the risk of repeating the mistake made above.
We considered how many different exercises we might use to train one aspect of the game - goalscoring, in this case - over a single season, and 12 seemed like the upper limit. In practicality, both of us would likely rotate 4 or 5 that our particular playing groups enjoy and thrive in, and tweak the constraints or coaching points to suit the session topic.
Having decided to go narrow rather than broad in terms of scope, we wanted to ensure we gave as much clarity as possible for each exercise. There's no shortage of drills and games to be found online, but 'copying and pasting' them into your sessions has limited benefit without understanding their context or purpose. We have attempted to provide this via the preparation, pointers and personalization notes for each exercise:
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The video below demonstrates how the animation element works on a device. If you like to print out or laminate session plans to bring them to the pitch with you, scanning the QR code with your phone's camera will allow you to get the benefit of the animation where it matters most.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/3fdcbf28-c062-4b57-bd5b-33d71105ad68/Coachs_Dozen_Animation_Example.mov
It was important to us that context and clarity went beyond the individual exercise, so each book looks into the theories underpinning effective training and game design, summarizing the research in layman's terms.